We’ve written extensively about the Black Cat Café in North Beach, one of San Francisco’s early gay bars thanks to the efforts of Jose Sarria, later known as Empress Jose, the Widow Norton, with the indulgence of the owner, Sol Stoumen. Now Garry Kamiya has written a fascinating article in the San Francisco Chronicle that adds a little more.

The Black Cat wasn’t always a gay establishment. It originally existed in the Tenderloin but had to close with the ratification of Prohibition. When prohibition ended, the Black Cat was reborn on Montgomery Street under the same original management. Stoumen purchased it in 1945.

Kamiya reports that Stoumen was an Austrian survivor of the Holocaust. Perhaps his experiences with the atrocities of World War II led him to have a greater appreciation of other minority groups? He certainly was a fantastic straight ally; when the California Department of Alcohol Beverage Control attempted to shut down the bar for serving known homosexuals, Stoumen didn’t fire Sarria and kick out the homosexuals. Instead, he challenged the ABC in court, and in 1951 the California Supreme Court ruled in Stoumen v. Reilly that homosexuals have a right to congregate providing they aren’t violating any other ordinances.

Apparently not everyone was thrilled with the bar’s growing gay clientele. Kamiya writes:

Not all the bar’s patrons were happy with the change. In his little book “Bohemian San Francisco,” Harry Evans wrote, “The Black Cat (once) was by far the best place for a wild drunk that an adventurer could hope for. But the place changed hands and the new owner encouraged the fruit and the place went to hell.”

Eventually the Black Cat was forced to close in 1964 after the ABC yanked its liquor license again and Stoumen could no longer afford to fight.

(H/T: GLBT Historical Society)