Before the Great Depression, before Prohibition, San Francisco had gay bars. And they started in the Barbary Coast, one of the City’s oldest neighborhoods that spans North Beach and the Financial District.
The Black Cat Café – which would factor prominently in gay history not just for San Francisco but for all of California – opened in 1906 at Mason & Eddy, shortly after the earthquake, before closing in 1921 for Prohibition. When Prohibition ended, it reopened in 1933 at 710 Montgomery Street in North Beach in 1933. But it wasn’t until the 1940s that it became known as a hangout for bohemians, the Beats, and homosexuals.
In 1908, the City closed the Dash at 574 Pacific Street. The police report described customers performing oral sex under the dresses of cross-dressing male entertainers dancing on tabletops.
Finocchio’s, known for its gender illusionist drag performances, opened up surreptitiously 406 Stockton St as a speakeasy in 1929, and from the beginning it was known for its performances by gender illusionists, or female impersonators. Following the repeal of Prohibition, it moved to 506 Broadway in 1936 where the show became a more formalized cabaret show and a significant tourist attraction. It remained open until 1999.
Mona’s Club, the City’s first lesbian bar, opened on Union Street in 1934 before moving to 140 Columbus Street in 1946 and then to 440 Broadway in 1939. The bar featured “male impersonators,” and because the lesbians were considered to be part of the local color, it was one of the few gay bars where lesbians weren’t expected to wear skirts. The bar moved to 473 Broadway in 1948 and eventually closed nearly a decade later in 1957.
In 1951, Why Not opened at 518 Ellis, becoming the City’s first leather bar. Previously, leathermen patronized waterfront bars in North Beach like Jacks, the Sea Cow, and the Castaways. Only a year later, the leather scene jumped Market Street.
Eventually the California Board of Equalization suspended the Black Cat’s liquor license in 1948 on the grounds like they were serving “known homosexuals.” The owner, who was straight, appealed the ruling, and in 1951 the California State Supreme Court ruled that in favor of the bar, finding that homosexuals had a right to assemble for social reasons and that there wasn’t any evidence of other illegal or immoral activities on the premises.
In response, San Francisco and other cities began passing other statutes to provide them with pretexts for cracking down on gay bars. Local ordinances made it illegal for people of the same sex to dance together, or to hug or kiss, on the grounds that sodomy was illegal under state law. It was also illegal for people to impersonate the opposite sex. By the mid-1950s, the City was working hard to crack down on gay bars.
Perhaps the most sensation raid was the September 1954 raid of Tommy’s Place and 12 Adler, lesbian bars connected by a back staircase that were owned by openly-lesbian Tommy Vasu. When the raid discovered a few underage girls on the premises, three people were arrested and two — Jessie Joseph Winston, a patron, and Grace Miller, a bartender – ended up serving jail time. Both bars were shut down.
After having their liquor license suspended the night before Halloween 1963, their busiest night of the year, the Black Cat defiantly held their party anyway, serving nonalcoholic beverages. The bar tried to stay open as an alcohol-free café, but Sol Stouman could no longer afford to fight and he closed the bar for good in February of 1964. For years, gays and lesbians continued to hold memorials for the bar, with a motorcade every Halloween starting at Romeo’s in the Haight and the laying of a wreath at the Black Cat’s old site.
