The Mayor of Castro Street (11 page)

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.

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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.

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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 state 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.

Men like Jim Foster, David Goodstein, and Rick Stokes were deemed the young Turks of the San Francisco gay movement of the early seventies. Their peers constantly reminded them that they could make far more money if they dropped this troublesome homosexual cause and used their considerable talents in business. They, however, had confidence that they were the political wave of the future. Since they were often the first gay leaders politicians had ever heard of they developed connections that later activists like Harvey Milk could only envy.

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The great corporate and tourist center, that was to be San Francisco's future. The city had once been known as a blue-collar town, a typical ethnic big city with a bustling port and a heavy industrial base. But in the 1960s, it all started changing, almost imperceptibly. The port started withering. Manufacturing moved to the suburbs. The city government did little to stem the flow and instead insisted that San Francisco needed to strike a new path. It would be a headquarters for major corporations. The city could also put a greater emphasis on tourism.

The city's blacks, Latins, and working class began to feel the pinch. Blue-collar workers followed their union jobs out of San Francisco. Amid great promises of urban renewal, the city bulldozed giant tracts of the black Filmore neighborhood. The new housing that was to renew the decimated area was never built, so there were that many fewer blacks in the city. The office workers who would fill the new corporate skyscrapers certainly were not about to live in San Francisco, so 1.6 billion dollars was sunk into the ultramodern Bay Area Rapid Transit system, which daily sped the workers from the suburbs. By coincidence, a main line of the subway cut down Mission Street, the center of the Latin neighborhood. The years of digging there drove many businesses into bankruptcy.

The election of the charismatic Joe Alioto as mayor in 1967 only accelerated these changes. Real estate developers and unions both contributed heavily to his campaign. In return, he made sure the massive high-rises kept reaching above the once-quaint San Francisco skyline. Wealthy hotel owners were ecstatic about the new emphasis on tourism, so they supported Alioto and like-minded members of the board of supervisors.

The city's neighborhoods, meanwhile, were dying, as workers fled to suburbia and City Hall focused its attentions on downtown and tourism. Alioto adeptly kept minorities in line by handing out a minority training program here or a new public mall there. But the change to a white-collar city bred one result that even the wisest hotel owner or real estate developer could not have predicted. The growth in service-oriented corporate jobs came as the success of SIR and gay politicking were dramatically inflating San Francisco's already considerable reputation as a gay center. Gays began trekking westward in greater numbers, and since homosexuals reflect the overall make-up of society, this newly mobile group was largely white and middle-class, with at least a few years of college education. It would have been harder to find a segment of the population more suited to fill the thousands of new jobs in the skyscraper corporate headquarters and tourist industries.

The gay population soared. In any other plan, such white-collar workers could have been counted on to vote conservatively and not worry too much about what was happening to blacks, Latins, and inner city neighborhoods. But gays were a sorely disenfranchised group who could not afford the luxury of voting their pocketbook or ideology. They had to vote on survival issues, and survival was no small task for San Francisco gays. Though charming and affable, Alioto ruled the city with an iron hand. He even refused to appear on his City Hall balcony since critics were quick to note that in such poses he bore a striking resemblance to Benito Mussolini. The comparison certainly held true for gays. Alioto was, above all, an Italian Catholic politician with his sights set on higher office. To shore up his Catholic constituents in San Francisco, he dearly wanted to bring a cardinal's hat to the city. And you didn't get red hats by allowing perverts to run wild.

Police bore down heavily on gays who, afraid of bar raids, took to finding sex in public parks. By 1971, police were arresting an average of about 2,800 gay men a year on public sex charges; the same year, only sixty-three such arrests were made in all of New York City. The number of men harassed in the crackdown was many times this official arrest statistic, since it was common knowledge that a $30 payoff to the police usually let the transgressor escape with only a stern warning.

Many of the arrests were thrown out of court once information surfaced about the common police tactics of entrapment. But sentences meted out for gay offenses were sometimes higher than those given out for rape, armed robbery, and even manslaughter. According to one gay newspaper, 110 men were sentenced to fifteen years to life for the crime of “sodomy and oral copulation”—in 1971 alone.