San Francisco Public Library • Dec 31, 2024 Shawn, a designer and professor, shared his interest in local gay history and the depth of history in San Francisco, emphasizing the importance of understanding one’s place in history and the contributions of people of color and women to gay history. He discussed the significant events and cultural influences that shaped San Francisco’s early history, including the gold rush, diverse population, and the origins of the Hanky code. Shawn also highlighted the history of gay culture in San Francisco, focusing on the 1960s, the formation of organizations, and the ongoing issues within the community.
How one SF bar, a Holocaust survivor and his lawyer helped change the tides on gay rights in America in 1951
Herb Caen once dubbed it the “Temple of the True Bohemia.”
By Alyssa Pereira, Digital Editor
Sol Stoumen was angry.
It was 1949, and the San Francisco Police Department had just taken away the liquor license for his bar, the Black Cat Cafe. It was not on the grounds of any legally illicit activity but rather, because his bar in North Beach had become a hangout for gay men in the city.
At the time, bars were being regularly raided across the city for similar offenses, in large part to “protect” Army and Navy servicemen in the port city from social mixing with certain crowds. An organization, the Joint Army-Navy Disciplinary Control Board, was formed, which used arrest records to identify “problem spots,” or businesses and bars which had a history of attracting sex workers, records of gay men gathering, or tended to overserve men in uniform.
Seeking to keep a leash on its soldiers, the Armed Forces organization partnered with city police departments and the Board of Equalization — the state’s liquor licensing group — to patrol such establishments.
Over time, however, the agency developed an outsized concern over bars where “deviate” activity — a term ascribed to the presence of gay men — took place, according to Nan Alamilla Boyd’s “Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965.”
This group appealed to the state’s liquor administrators to essentially close bars (or otherwise mark them “off-limits” to servicemen) due to their serving a queer patronage.
(As Boyd reports, sometimes the Army-Navy would attempt to intimidate these customers by placing officers on guard outside the door of bars they deemed off-limits. That backfired when the soldiers’ presence outside essentially advertised the establishment as a gay bar to interested parties.)
In 1943, the Black Cat, one of the more prominent bars singled out by authorities, was raided by authorities. But as Chronicle columnist Gary Kamiya wrote, the “vendetta” against Stoumen’s bar didn’t ramp up until 1949, when the owner decided not to sign a closed-shop agreement with a local culinary union.
Rebuffed, the union appealed to George Reilly, who was at the time serving as the pro-union chairman of the Board of Equalization. Reilly seized the authority to direct the Board to build a case against the bar and take away its liquor license on the grounds that it was a “hangout for persons of homosexual tendencies.”
Stoumen, a heterosexual Holocaust survivor, didn’t take kindly to being unjustly targeted by the authorities. He jumped through some legal hoops to get the bar back in operation and then, “vastly irritated,” as the Chronicle reported at the time, he hired a young but resourceful and well-established lawyer named Morris Lowenthal. Lowenthal would go on to take Stoumen’s case all the way to the California Supreme Court.
Lowenthal’s legal approach was, by most accounts, a bit unusual. Rather than rely on legal precedent, the lawyer turned to psychology, and the research of Dr. Howard Kinsey to make his case. He argued to San Francisco Superior Judge Robert McWilliams that even if patrons were gay, “How could anyone tell?”
“Any intelligent law enforcement officer, sociologist or psychiatrist knows such terms are meaningless and impossible to define,” he continued. “In the absence of unusual dress or costume, make-up or appearance, even the most trained observer could not ascertain whether a person has homosexual tendencies, whatever that means.”
At that point, Lowenthal dropped “the mountain of books and documents” related to Kinsey’s studies in front of Judge McWilliams.
With a sigh, McWilliams replied, “I will need time to go through this appalling mass of papers.”
It was, at that point, all for naught — McWilliams ruled against Stoumen. So Stoumen and Lowenthal appealed to the State Supreme Court.
To the surprise of many, the State Supreme Court ruled in Stoumen’s favor, and against Reilly and the Board of Equalization. A ruling stated that as long as there was no “illegal or immoral conduct” underway, gay men and lesbians could congregate in public places like bars in California — a major win for LGBT rights in America.
The impact of the win was limited, however, writes Carlos A. Ball, Rutgers law professor and author of “The First Amendment and LGBT Equality.” Because the ruling did not ground its decision in constitutional protections, it didn’t exactly set precedent for future rulings. But it nevertheless accomplished two important things, as Ball outlines: It was the first landmark ruling by an American court to state that gay men and women could congregate in public without interference from the authorities, and it was the first legal decision to separate a person’s sexual orientation from his or her conduct.
That latter point became important in a 1986 Supreme Court ruling, Bowers vs. Hardwick, which decided that the government could constitutionally criminalize same-sex sexual conduct, but not status. Small as it was, it was an important step forward for LGBT rights — it formalized that a government could not punish or close a business just because gay men and lesbians gather there.
“When early courts, like the Stoumen court, were able to separate status from conduct, they were more likely to provide some limited recognition of the right of LGBT to congregate in public,” Ball notes. “The separation of status from conduct allowed some early courts to see past society’s disdain and contempt for gay people and permitted them to start recognizing the rights of sexual minorities as ‘human beings,’ which was the term used by the Stoumen court to refer to the Black Cat’s patrons. In contrast, when states equated status with conduct, their legal analysis quickly degenerated into little more than rank homophobia.”
Barney Peterson/The Chronicle
The Black Cat became famous in San Francisco in part aided by the “Nightingale of Montgomery Street,” drag queen José Sarria, who would sing opera librettos most nights of the week to a packed house. (Sarria, by then a local celebrity, would later go on to be the first openly gay man to run for public office in a 1961 bid for city supervisor.)
“When the opera was on and José was there the place was packed,” remembered San Francisco author Carlo Middione. “You had to hunch up your shoulders to get a spot. I didn’t realize for quite a while that most the people there were gay.”
There’s something to that point. While the Black Cat was — inarguably — a gay bar, it also attracted lots of different straight and gay locals, including “college students, business men, matrons with mink coats and jewelry.” It was, as Herb Caen once dubbed it, the “Temple of the True Bohemia.”
But for all its good attention, the Black Cat drew plenty of unwanted scrutiny too. The Alcoholic Beverage Control — which succeeded the Board of Equalization — and the SFPD continued to jab at the Black Cat, and eventually wound up winning the battle against the bar. Despite Stoumen’s earlier state court win, the authorities’ continued interference with business drove it out of business.
In 1956, as Kamiya reported, ABC agents testified that patrons at the Black Cat had solicited “lewd acts” from them and that the bar itself served “sexual perverts.” That was enough, the ABC argued, to rescind their liquor license. Lowenthal again wielded Kinsey’s studies in his arguement for the defense, declaring that gay men are not perverts and that such patrons were illegally entrapped by officers (a claim echoed by others in the following years).
San Francisco Public Library
This time, the Black Cat was not so resilient. It was forced to close on Halloween night in 1963, and to presumably add insult to injury, the authorities retrieved Stoumen’s license on the morning of October 31, meaning the party he had been intending to throw that evening would now have to be a dry event.
“They can’t possibly shut the Cat’s doors,” said one longtime patron identified as Chris in an issue of the Chronicle. “All they can do is march in like panzers and rip the license off the wall. That means Sol won’t be able to sell any more liquor. But there’s no law that says he can’t have a party in there, or give drinks away.”
He was right — the show went on anyway. Bartenders served orange and pineapple juice, apple cider and lemon tonic between rounds of singing Sarria’s beloved “God Save the Nellie Queen” rendition to ragtime piano clinking. The morning after, the Chronicle reported it was a success.
“The Black Cat gave the most successful Halloween party in its history — even though its history as a bar had ended.”
Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira
Joe Rosenthal/The Chronicle
June 26, 2020
DIGITAL EDITOR
Alyssa Pereira is a culture editor and contributing beer writer for SFGATE. She previously worked for CBS San Francisco and SPIN Magazine and has contributed to Good Beer Hunting, Paper, Vice’s i-D and Paste, among others. She is a Bay Area native and graduate of New York University and SFSU.