The Mayor of Castro Street (10 page)

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Aunt Maria threw the long sequined gown on the parlor couch.
“I've brought something for Jose to play with,” she told her sister, Delores. Jose raced into the sitting room, fingered the beads adorning the soft lame, and then ran to his mother's full-length mirror. Jose Sarria had always been an unpredictable child and his family humored his fondness for dressing up in his mother's and aunt's gowns and high heels, forsaking the pursuit of baseball for his fantasies of duchesses and royal balls.

Jose and his sister fell in with the bohemian crowd of North Beach in the late 1940s. They frequently wandered into The Black Cat bar where writers like Bill Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and, more recently, Allen Ginsberg were known to imbibe. One night the pair spotted a handsome waiter, Jimmy Moore, and promptly placed a bet over who could get him in bed first. Jose invited Jimmy to an Independence Day family picnic. Toward the end of the outing, Jose's mother decided she had at last found the perfect mate for her son. She asked Jimmy to move in with the family. Jose won the bet.

A dutiful husband, Jose would fill in for Jimmy when he got sick, adding his own colorful presence to The Black Cat as he traipsed through the bar in red high heels. Jose recognized the piano player's background music one afternoon as the theme from
Carmen
and in his strong tenor started belting out arias as he delivered cocktails among the tables. Within a few months, Jose was regularly drawing Sunday afternoon crowds as he put on camp productions of his one-man operas.

The sight of Jose's plump figure stuffed into a tight red dress campily singing
Tosca
proved irresistible to the growing number of San Francisco gays, and homosexuals soon crowded out the bar's North Beach patrons. They were, Jose thought, a dispirited bunch. Jose had spent his life bucking every norm. He'd be damned if he was going to see far more conventional men wallow in self-contempt while he was having a good time. That's when the preaching, as Sarria called it, began.

Jose saw hundreds of men getting arrested every month on specious charges, then meekly pleading guilty to whatever police alleged in the vain hope that they could somehow preserve their anonymity. In the course of his one-man version of
Carmen
he launched into a prayerful monologue. “When you are on your knees, praying to God in your own way, if you get tapped on the shoulder by a big blue star, remember, you swallow first.” Jose always got a big laugh when he affected a big swallow here. “And then you say—I'm not guilty and I want a trial by jury.”

The weekly operas provided the first gay news service. “A blue fungus has hit the parks,” he told his fans during a heavy crackdown on park sex. “It does not appear until about 2
A.M.
It twinkles like a star. Until this fungus dies, it's best to stay out of our parks at 2
A.M.
”

Jose pioneered two battle cries: “There's nothing wrong with being gay—the crime is getting caught,” and “United we stand, divided they catch us one by one.” At the end of every night at The Black Cat, he would order the patrons to stand in a circle, join hands, and sing “God Save the Queens,” sometimes flocking them outside to do a final stanza to friends across the street in jail. “For one moment,” Jose said, “be proud of who you are.”

Jose's activity made him an urban guerrilla to San Francisco's heavily Irish Catholic Police Department and especially to the two-man vice team of Murphy and Gallagher. The Alcohol Beverage Control Commission (ABC) took steps to close Jose's den of insurgency.

The first salvo came in 1948 when the ABC tried to close The Black Cat because they had evidence that the establishment actually served liquor to homosexuals, a criminal act in those days. The courtroom was packed with gays in neat suits and ties the day the case finally got to trial.

“Can you point out the homosexuals in this room?” the bar's lawyer asked the judge.

The judge allowed that he couldn't.

The lawyer argued that if a wise judge with years of worldly experience could not pick out a homosexual, how could a mere bartender? The logic held, though The Black Cat ultimately had to go all the way to the California Supreme Court to get a court ruling affirming the right of homosexuals to peacefully assemble.

The fact that a homosexual case had dared go to court and then actually won infuriated the ABC and the vice squad. They launched what would be a fifteen-year war on The Black Cat. Feisty Jose, however, proved equal to the challenge.

The city's thirty-five gay bars set up a network, calling each other at the first sight of a man who might be a plainclothes cop or ABC investigator. When the hapless agent came into The Black Cat, Jose would take to the stage, graciously introduce the gentleman, and ask everyone to give him a round of applause.

The police took to enforcing an archaic ordinance that forbade anyone from posing as a member of the opposite sex. Jose responded by simply getting the city's drag queens to pin to their dresses little slips of paper saying, “I am a boy.” Once in court, police could hardly claim that a man with such a sign was seriously posing as a member of the opposite sex.

Court dockets, meanwhile, became clogged with gays who followed Jose's advice, pleaded guilty, and demanded a trial by jury. Never eager for overtime, the city's judges started insisting that before bringing a case to trial, the police and district attorney's office have evidence against the accused—a troublesome detail that had long been avoided in gay prosecutions.

Even as Jose and his Black Cat battled on, the police and ABC carried out their vendetta against the newly emerging minority. Those were the days when the Catholic archbishop reportedly had veto power over the mayor's selection of police and fire chiefs. The police department, where much of the power structure rested on which parish controlled key positions, acted accordingly.

Paddy wagons routinely rolled up to the doors of gay bars and police bused all the patrons to jail, generally for being “inmates of a disorderly house.” Charges were dismissed most times, but usually after the city's newspapers printed not only the arrested person's name, but his address and place of employment. Police also followed up these arrests with calls to the victim's employer and family, even if charges were dropped within hours. This forced gay bars to observe the most circumspect standards. No touching or holding hands. Gays dancing together was itself an offense that could warrant a bar's closure. The few daring bars that did allow dancing kept a bouncer keenly observing everyone nearing the bar. If a person looked slightly suspicious, the bar's lights flicked on and off and couples raced to change partners, lesbians pairing up with gay men. Only through elaborate payoffs to police officers did the bars continue to operate.

One evening a year, like a chapter from a Cinderella story, the police would bestow a free night upon the homosexuals. Halloween had been staked out years before as the homosexual high holiday; gays did, after all, live most of their lives behind masks. The chief of police routinely escorted Jose to the center of North Beach that night, opening the car door politely for the elegantly gowned drag queen and giving the traditional send-off for the night's activity. “This is your night—you run it.”

Jose then held court at The Black Cat. For that one night the police let homosexuals roam the city freely, even if they wore dresses. But when the hours shifted from October 31 to November 1, the iron fist of Lilly Law would fall again. Few had any hope that it would ever change.

“Sex Deviates Establish National Headquarters in San Francisco.”

The headline in the
San Francisco Progress,
a small neighborhood paper, shocked the 1959 mayor's race as had few other charges. The city's gays knew all too well that the administration of Republican Mayor George Christopher was not coddling perverts, but City Assessor Russ Woolden was having a tough time stoking up his own campaign for mayor. Woolden's accusation that Christopher had permitted two gay groups to exist in San Francisco marked the first time that homosexuality had appeared as a local campaign issue since the post-earthquake clean up. It was also the first time many gays themselves learned that there were actually two local organizations serving their interests.

The first generation of American gay activists, born out of the traumas of World War II, had been trying to start various gay groups in the city since 1948. Only when police chased a Chicago advertising salesman, Hal Call, out of the Windy City in 1952, did San Francisco gets its first permanent gay activist. Call founded a local chapter of the Mattachine Society. The idea of even joining a homosexual group was so risky that the Mattachine chapters started as secret societies, becoming open organizations only as the 1950s wore on.

Police raids made going to gay bars so risky that four lesbian couples, led by lovers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, got together in 1955 to form the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the nation's first lesbian organization. The secret organization had purely social goals. They wanted a place where they could hold hands and dance, so the DOB's function was to organize parties at various members' houses.

Only when Del and Phyllis kept getting unusual phone calls did it strike them that there was something political about lesbianism. They heard many stories from women, whose in-laws were plotting to take away their children because for one stark moment the mask had dropped, women in jail as “inmates of a disorderly house” with all their friends too fearful to bail them out, women driven from their jobs and near suicide. The DOB started “public discussion nights” in 1959 where they could invite the public to hear gay complaints. Of course, only gays attended, but the term “public” provided a cover of respectability, and they were among the first gatherings of gays outside bars.

The two groups were publishing their own newsletters by the mid-fifties. The publications approached the subject of homosexual rights with utmost caution, insisting they were neither communist nor out to recruit new deviates. They used terms like sex variant, invert, and homophile rather than such loaded words as homosexual. The
Mattachine Review
regularly ran such tentatively titled stories as “Handicap or a Talent?”, “Rehabilitation or Punishment?”, “Disease or a Way of Life?”

These groups' memberships never soared beyond several hundred. Their impact was largely on gays themselves, not the heterosexual society they professed to educate. For the first time, gays could imagine that there might one day be a world where they could have meetings, discuss relevant issues, and petition their government, just like regular people. It took Assessor Russ Woolden to bring these groups into public debate by denouncing Mayor George Christopher's alleged leniency to gays in a campaign flyer.

I am convinced that the true purpose of the Mattachine Society is to subvert public morals and change our entire social structure to the point that homosexual activities will be regarded as normal and harmless. Do not be misled. Organized homosexuality in San Francisco is a menace that must be faced today.

TOMORROW MAY BE TOO LATE.

A flyer hand-delivered to the city's conservative neighborhoods also alerted citizens that their daughters were threatened too by the insidious activities of the Daughters of Bilitis.

Both the morning
Chronicle
and the
Examiner
ignored Woolden's broadside. They were relieved to finally have a Republican in City Hall. After the
Progress
headline, however, the papers turned on Woolden with a vengeance. The
Chronicle
wrote that Woolden's charges “degrade the good name of San Francisco.” The
Examiner
noted that homosexuality was a problem in most of the nation's big cities and that “The San Francisco Police Department deals with it firmly, as it should be dealt with.”

Woolden went to a bitter defeat, but to ensure that city government would never again hear charges of embracing gays, the police came down even harder on gay bars. By 1961, the harassment proved too much for Jose Sarria. He abandoned his red gown and high heels, donned a suit and tie, and stomped into City Hall to file his petition to run for the board of supervisors, the eleven-member body that serves as both city council and county commission for San Francisco's city-county consolidated government.

Jose had no problem raising money for a filing fee, but he faced a major obstacle in getting twenty-five signatures necessary to put his name on the ballot. In a city that already had the reputation as one of the freest gay centers in the world, it was still difficult to find twenty-five people who would sign their name to a paper endorsing an acknowledged gay. Jose got his signatures, however, and filed his candidacy. He did no campaigning; he simply spread the word among friends. Every vote would be a protest against police harassment of gays, he said.

On election night, political pundits were amazed when the drag queen entertainer polled an amazing seven thousand votes, not enough to win, but far more than many better-known political names. The fact that the first openly gay candidate for public office in American history could tally such a total stirred the imaginations of the handful of activists who then dared consider political action as a future option. Votes. Few had thought of themselves as equal human beings and citizens, so few had bothered to consider that no matter what police or judges could deprive them of, they could still vote.

The police and ABC were not impressed. Pressure continued on gay bars in general—and The Black Cat in particular. Cat employees frequently had to go without their paychecks, since every extra dollar went for lawyers' fees. The bar owner was a heterosexual who fought the authorities as a matter of principle. Toward the end of 1963, he took Jose aside. “I've got a family to support,” he told Jose. “This has been going on fifteen years. They can afford to keep doing it fifteen more years. I can't.”