SF’s Gay Halloween – Part 2
Gay Halloween in North Beach
The old Barbary Coast area of San Francisco, which includes parts of the present-day Financial District, North Beach, and Tenderloin, was home to many of the City’s first gay bars. And one of the most famous was the Black Cat Café.
The Black Cat Café, which reopened at 710 Montgomery Street immediately following the repeal of Prohibition, was purchased by Sol Stouman in the 1940s. It quickly became a regular hangout for the Beats and bohemian crowds, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck. And some time in the 1940s, the gays discovered it.
Stouman, though straight, defended his gay patrons, and following a 1948 raid by the California Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC), he appealed to the California Supreme Court, winning the landmark case in 1951 that allowed gays to congregate in public.
One of the Black Cat’s waiters, Jose Sarria, performed in drag three or four nights a week along with a regular Sunday show. At the end of each show, he would lead the patrons outside to sing “God save us nelly queens,” serenading the gays locked up in the jail across the street, nabbed by the police in sting operations. It was Sarria, with the advice of famed attorney Melvin Belli who taught drag queens to protect themselves by wearing tags saying “I am a boy” so that the police couldn’t claim the drag queens were intending to deceive anyone.
Even the police recognized Halloween as a night for gays. It was the one night that the police would allow homosexuals to roam freely, even if they wore dresses.
According to Randy Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street, the Chief of Police himself would escort Sarria to the middle of North Beach, depositing the legendary drag queen with the traditional send-off: “This is your night – you run it.”
And for one night, the gays were safe. But the next day – sometimes just after midnight – the crackdowns would begin again.
Then in 1959, City Assessor Russ Woolden ran for Mayor against the incumbent, conservative Republican George Christopher. Woolden tried to make the City’s growing gay community into a campaign issue, blasting the mayor for coddling homosexuals (though the City’s gays hardly felt coddled). Local newspapers denounced Woolden – not for his attacks on gays, but for besmirching the City’s reputation.
Christopher trounced Woolden, but the accusations that he was somehow sympathetic to “perverts” rankled him. He ordered the police to escalate their crackdowns on gay bars. Christopher left office in 1964 and failed in his attempts to run for statewide office, losing races for Lieutenant Governor, U.S. Senate, and a gubernatorial primary. He was the last registered Republican to serve as Mayor of San Francisco.
In 1963, the San Francisco police and the ABC suspended the Black Cat’s liquor license on October 30th, the day before their annual Halloween party and their busiest night of the year. The Black Cat defiantly held their Halloween party anyway, serving nonalcoholic beverages.
Stouman, who had been fighting for 15 years, simply couldn’t afford to continue to fight the ABC. The Black Cat tried to make a go of selling food with soft drinks, but by February of 1964 it was forced to close for good.
The Black Cat was gone but not forgotten. For years, the City’s gay community held a Halloween memorial for the bar with a motorcade that started at Romeo’s in the Haight that wound its way to North Beach to lay a wreath at the site of the old Black Cat.
Though there continued to be gay Halloween celebrations in North Beach into the late 1960s along Grant Avenue, the party was moving to the Polk.
