by Randy Shilts
The police took to enforcing an archaic ordinance that forbade anyone from posing as a member of the opposite sex. Jose responded by simply getting the city’s drag queens to pin to their dresses little slips of paper saying, “I am a boy.” Once in court, police could hardly claim that a man with such a sign was seriously posing as a member of the opposite sex.
Court dockets, meanwhile, became clogged with gays who followed Jose’s advice, pleaded guilty, and demanded a trial by jury. Never eager for overtime, the city’s judges started insisting that before bringing a case to trial, the police and district attorney’s office have evidence against the accused—a troublesome detail that had long been avoided in gay prosecutions.
Even as Jose and his Black Cat battled on, the police and ABC carried out their vendetta against the newly emerging minority. Those were the days when the Catholic archbishop reportedly had veto power over the mayor’s selection of police and fire chiefs. The police department, where much of the power structure rested on which parish controlled key positions, acted accordingly.
Paddy wagons routinely rolled up to the doors of gay bars and police bused all the patrons to jail, generally for being “inmates of a disorderly house.” Charges were dismissed most times, but usually after the city’s newspapers printed not only the arrested person’s name, but his address and place of employment. Police also followed up these arrests with calls to the victim’s employer and family, even if charges were dropped within hours. This forced gay bars to observe the most circumspect standards. No touching or holding hands. Gays dancing together was itself an offense that could warrant a bar’s closure. The few daring bars that did allow dancing kept a bouncer keenly observing everyone nearing the bar. If a person looked slightly suspicious, the bar’s lights flicked on and off and couples raced to change partners, lesbians pairing up with gay men. Only through elaborate payoffs to police officers did the bars continue to operate.
One evening a year, like a chapter from a Cinderella story, the police would bestow a free night upon the homosexuals. Halloween had been staked out years before as the homosexual high holiday; gays did, after all, live most of their lives behind masks. The chief of police routinely escorted Jose to the center of North Beach that night, opening the car door politely for the elegantly gowned drag queen and giving the traditional send-off for the night’s activity. “This is your night—you run it.”
Jose then held court at The Black Cat. For that one night the police let homosexuals roam the city freely, even if they wore dresses. But when the hours shifted from October 31 to November 1, the iron fist of Lilly Law would fall again. Few had any hope that it would ever change.
“Sex Deviates Establish National Headquarters in San Francisco.”
The headline in the San Francisco Progress, a small neighborhood paper, shocked the 1959 mayor’s race as had few other charges. The city’s gays knew all too well that the administration of Republican Mayor George Christopher was not coddling perverts, but City Assessor Russ Woolden was having a tough time stoking up his own campaign for mayor. Woolden’s accusation that Christopher had permitted two gay groups to exist in San Francisco marked the first time that homosexuality had appeared as a local campaign issue since the post-earthquake clean up. It was also the first time many gays themselves learned that there were actually two local organizations serving their interests.
The first generation of American gay activists, born out of the traumas of World War II, had been trying to start various gay groups in the city since 1948. Only when police chased a Chicago advertising salesman, Hal Call, out of the Windy City in 1952, did San Francisco gets its first permanent gay activist. Call founded a local chapter of the Mattachine Society. The idea of even joining a homosexual group was so risky that the Mattachine chapters started as secret societies, becoming open organizations only as the 1950s wore on.
Police raids made going to gay bars so risky that four lesbian couples, led by lovers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, got together in 1955 to form the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the nation’s first lesbian organization. The secret organization had purely social goals. They wanted a place where they could hold hands and dance, so the DOB’s function was to organize parties at various members’ houses.
Only when Del and Phyllis kept getting unusual phone calls did it strike them that there was something political about lesbianism. They heard many stories from women, whose in-laws were plotting to take away their children because for one stark moment the mask had dropped, women in jail as “inmates of a disorderly house” with all their friends too fearful to bail them out, women driven from their jobs and near suicide. The DOB started “public discussion nights” in 1959 where they could invite the public to hear gay complaints. Of course, only gays attended, but the term “public” provided a cover of respectability, and they were among the first gatherings of gays outside bars.
The two groups were publishing their own newsletters by the mid-fifties. The publications approached the subject of homosexual rights with utmost caution, insisting they were neither communist nor out to recruit new deviates. They used terms like sex variant, invert, and homophile rather than such loaded words as homosexual. The Mattachine Review regularly ran such tentatively titled stories as “Handicap or a Talent?”, “Rehabilitation or Punishment?”, “Disease or a Way of Life?”
These groups’ memberships never soared beyond several hundred. Their impact was largely on gays themselves, not the heterosexual society they professed to educate. For the first time, gays could imagine that there might one day be a world where they could have meetings, discuss relevant issues, and petition their government, just like regular people. It took Assessor Russ Woolden to bring these groups into public debate by denouncing Mayor George Christopher’s alleged leniency to gays in a campaign flyer.
I am convinced that the true purpose of the Mattachine Society is to subvert public morals and change our entire social structure to the point that homosexual activities will be regarded as normal and harmless. Do not be misled. Organized homosexuality in San Francisco is a menace that must be faced today.
TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE.
A flyer hand-delivered to the city’s conservative neighborhoods also alerted citizens that their daughters were threatened too by the insidious activities of the Daughters of Bilitis.
Both the morning Chronicle and the Examiner ignored Woolden’s broadside. They were relieved to finally have a Republican in City Hall. After the Progress headline, however, the papers turned on Woolden with a vengeance. The Chronicle wrote that Woolden’s charges “degrade the good name of San Francisco.” The Examiner noted that homosexuality was a problem in most of the nation’s big cities and that “The San Francisco Police Department deals with it firmly, as it should be dealt with.”
Woolden went to a bitter defeat, but to ensure that city government would never again hear charges of embracing gays, the police came down even harder on gay bars. By 1961, the harassment proved too much for Jose Sarria. He abandoned his red gown and high heels, donned a suit and tie, and stomped into City Hall to file his petition to run for the board of supervisors, the eleven-member body that serves as both city council and county commission for San Francisco’s city-county consolidated government.
Jose had no problem raising money for a filing fee, but he faced a major obstacle in getting twenty-five signatures necessary to put his name on the ballot. In a city that already had the reputation as one of the freest gay centers in the world, it was still difficult to find twenty-five people who would sign their name to a paper endorsing an acknowledged gay. Jose got his signatures, however, and filed his candidacy. He did no campaigning; he simply spread the word among friends. Every vote would be a protest against police harassment of gays, he said.
On election night, political pundits were amazed when the drag queen entertainer polled an amazing seven thousand votes, not enough to win, but far more than many better-known political names. The fact that the first openly gay candidat
e for public office in American history could tally such a total stirred the imaginations of the handful of activists who then dared consider political action as a future option. Votes. Few had thought of themselves as equal human beings and citizens, so few had bothered to consider that no matter what police or judges could deprive them of, they could still vote.
The police and ABC were not impressed. Pressure continued on gay bars in general—and The Black Cat in particular. Cat employees frequently had to go without their paychecks, since every extra dollar went for lawyers’ fees. The bar owner was a heterosexual who fought the authorities as a matter of principle. Toward the end of 1963, he took Jose aside. “I’ve got a family to support,” he told Jose. “This has been going on fifteen years. They can afford to keep doing it fifteen more years. I can’t.”
Jose tried to get other gay bars to raise money for The Black Cat’s defense, fretting that the demise of The Cat would embolden authorities to push harder agianst other gay bars. No one offered any help. The bar hung on until Halloween, 1963, when after that one precious night of freedom The Black Cat closed its doors for good.
* * *
A week after The Black Cat’s last day, San Francisco voters elected a handsome Italian liberal, George Moscone, to the San Francisco board of supervisors. At thirty-three, he was the second youngest man to serve on the board in the city’s history. Of course, this electoral victory had nothing to do with queers’ problems in North Beach. It would be twelve years before such issues would help bring George Moscone to the forefront of city politics.
* * *
A wave of repression followed The Black Cat’s demise. Police and the ABC closed five bars within a week. Of the thirty gay bars open on Halloween, 1963, only eighteen survived a year later—and fifteen of them faced hearings for revocation of their liquor license. One dramatic raid on a Tenderloin bar, the Tay-Bush Inn, prodded gays into action. The police loaded seven paddy wagons full of gays to jail—103 in all—though authorities bitterly complained in newspapers the next day that amid the confusion, another 139 intended arrestees slipped away. Wrote a bemused reporter covering the raid, “It was vaguely reminiscent of loading sheep from a corral.”
“The majority of the males affected swishy-hipped walks, limp-wristed gestures, high-pitched voices and wore tight pants,” the prosecuting attorney later told the court. “The women,” he added meaningfully, “were mannish.” The bar lost its license because, of the 242 present, police claimed that at least five or six were dancing in same-sex couples.
The night after the raid, six men who had been marginally involved in gay organizing efforts met in a living room and formed the Society for Individual Rights (SIR). The group called “candidates’ nights” for the 1964 elections, but few politicians had the courage to attend, so activists took a chapter from the black civil rights movement and decided to mobilize liberal San Francisco church leaders for their cause. A new organization resulted from the alliance, the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH).
The CRH excited the handful of gay groups already in existence. In an unprecedented show of unanimity, all the city’s gay groups—Mattachine, DOB, SIR, and the few others—banded together to hold a New Year’s Eve benefit on the last night of 1964. A delegation of ministers went to police with the plans. “If you’re not going to enforce God’s laws, we will,” snapped a police inspector.
The night of the benefit Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were working the doors. They were startled to see that an inordinate number of the lesbians and gay men in attendance seemed dazed and shaken. A step outside showed them why. The police had bathed the hall’s entrance with floodlights and were busy taking both still photos and films of everyone who entered. Paddy wagons waited ominously nearby while nearly fifty uniformed and plainclothes officers filtered through the crowd. Over five hundred gays walked this gauntlet, upset at its proportions but not particularly surprised, given the years of similar police harassment.
The heterosexual ministers had come expecting an evening of dancing. They were stunned at the sight. They had heard the gays’ stories of police problems, but most had never seen such intense police presence in their lives, much less one aimed at harmless men and women in formal evening wear.
Police officials shocked the ministers even more when a number of officers demanded to go inside. A trio of lawyers was waiting for just such a request and they quickly explained that under California statutes, the event was a private party and unless the police bought tickets, they had to stay out. The police promptly threw the three lawyers in the paddy wagon and arrested a pregnant housewife who happened to be standing near them. This, of course, was business as usual for police who were only enforcing an unwritten department rule that dealt with any gathering of more than one hundred homosexuals as an armed insurrection.
For the first time, however, heterosexuals saw what it meant to be gay in San Francisco. The ministers held an angry press conference the next morning, likening the SFPD to the Gestapo and demanding an investigation. Even the Catholic archbishop was reportedly up in arms. For this, if no other reason, City Hall had to respond.
Two officers from the police community relations unit, including a young unorthodox cop named Richard Hongisto, were assigned to smooth relations with the city’s gays. Harassment decreased. By the end of the year Jack Morrison, the first incumbent supervisor ever to seek the gay vote, was at a SIR meeting flanked by ambitious aspirants. The dailies, of course, were shocked by the appearance, but the supervisor won reelection nevertheless. By 1966 two brash, liberal San Francisco assemblymen, Willie Brown and John Burton, were also wooing votes at SIR meetings. Their end of the deal: to introduce a bill repealing the 1872 statute proscribing felony punishments for any gays convicted of the “crime against nature.”
SIR ensured its role as the central institution of the gay community when it undertook a radical activity unimaginable in San Francisco a few years before—holding dances. Without an ABC liquor license to lose, the dances were immune to raids, and SIR membership swelled to over 1,200 by 1967, making it the largest gay group in the United States and lending even more credence to the notion that gays were a significant political constituency.
Proof of that claim came in 1969 in the form of a charming, attractive, thirty-five-year-old housewife from the city’s wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood, Dianne Feinstein’s appearance on a roster of what were otherwise familiar political faces excited city liberals more than the emergence of any politician since now-State Senator George Moscone’s debut six years earlier. Though the darling of environmental groups and limousine liberals, Feinstein’s stint on the state women’s parole board gave her law-and-order credentials that attracted conservatives. Moreover, Feinstein’s ties with segments of the downtown establishment assured her a hefty campaign chest. She became the first supervisorial candidate in city history to run television advertising.
That such a charismatic and promising candidate would come to the SIR center to court gay voters was almost beyond belief. Feinstein quickly garnered gay money, volunteers, and votes at a level unparalleled since Jose’s 1961 candidacy. When Feinstein ultimately beat out all other candidates in the citywide at-large elections—a status that gave her the powerful board presidency—she credited her substantial margin of victory to gay voters.
That same year, gays in New York City rioted at the Stonewall. A series of radical, gay liberation-style groups emerged in the Bay Area, but the brunt of San Francisco gay activism fell into methodical, work-within-the-system politics that put California’s gay movement years ahead of its New York counterpart.
SIR activists played a key role in encouraging Police Community Relations cop Richard Hongisto to run for sheriff in the 1971 municipal elections. The flamboyant Hongisto pulled together a previously unheard-of coalition of gays, blacks, and anti-war activists. His symbol was the anti-nuclear symbol blazened on a lavender background. Hongisto won an impressive city-wide victory. Conservatives were in a s
tate of shock—the sheriff’s office had long been a right-wing domain. With Hongisto, gays won a politician who not only publicly thanked them for his election, but one who became a forceful pro-gay spokesman, bringing gays into all levels of the sheriff’s department.
The story of gay political clout spiraled into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more politicians talked about it, the more others came to court gay favor, making gay claims to political power all the more credible. Power, of course, breeds power brokers. By the early 1970s, three dominant figures presented themselves as gay community power brokers, the people elected officials should deal with if they wanted to avoid the scruffy radicals who carried picket signs.
As political chairman for SIR, Jim Foster was often the first gay activist that many San Francisco politicians had ever met. He understood the need for reform intimately: Like so many others, he had come to San Francisco in 1959 after being dishonorably discharged from the army because of his homosexuality.
David Goodstein appeared in 1971 when he rallied gay lawyers together to start civil rights challenges of anti-gay statutes. An independently wealthy man, Goodstein had originally come to San Francisco to be vice-president of a major bank, but lost his job as soon as the bank learned of his homosexuality. Goodstein’s power came not only from his work among gay lawyers, but from his money. He could afford to give generous campaign contributions, which guaranteed access to politicians’ offices.
Rick Stokes came on the scene as a crusading gay rights lawyer. In his earlier years, he had been committed to an institution and subjected to electro shock therapy because of his homosexuality. He struggled through law school so he would have the weapons to mount a legal assault on anti-gay laws. A wise business investment in the city’s most popular bathhouse, meanwhile, assured him the income to take on the fights.