Black Cat Bar

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The Black Cat Bar was a gay bar in San Francisco, California. It operated for 30 years, from 1933 to 1963. During its tenure the bar was a frequent flashpoint for the nascent homophile movement, its owners having fought all the way to the California Supreme Court in 1951 to secure the right to operate with a gay clientele.

The bar featured live entertainers, the best-known of whom was José Sarria. Sarria, who sang arias in full drag, would encourage patrons to be as open and honest at possible, and at closing time lead patrons in singing "God Save Us Nelly Queens" to the tune of God Save the Queen. Sarria would go on to become the first openly gay candidate to run for public office, garnering some 6,000 votes in a 1961 campaign for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

In 1948, the city's police department and the Alcohol Beverage Control Commission (ABC), in response to the Black Cat's increasing homosexual clientele, began a campaign of harassment against the bar and its patrons. Sol Stoumen, the heterosexual owner of the bar, was charged with such crimes as "keeping a disorderly house" and the State Board of Equalization suspended the bar's liquor license indefinitely. In response and on principle, Stoumen took the state to court. The state supreme court, in Stoumen v. Reilly (37 Cal.2d 713) ruled that "[i]n order to establish 'good cause' for suspension of plaintiff's license, something more must be shown than that many of his patrons were homosexuals and that they used his restaurant and bar as a meeting place." This was one of the earliest legal affirmations of the rights of gay people in the United States.

Police and city officials responded to the increasing visibility of the Black Cat and other gay bars in the city, and the Black Cat's success in court, by increasingly cracking down, staging more frequent raids and mass arrests. One favorite tactic was to arrest drag queens, since impersonating a member of the opposite sex was at the time a crime (Sarria responded by passing out labels for the drag queens to wear reading "I am a boy" so it couldn't be claimed they were impersonating women).

By 1963, following some 15 years of unrelenting pressure from the San Francisco police and the ABC, Stoumen decided he was no longer able to sustain the battle financially. The ABC lifted the bar's liquor license. After a final Halloween celebration, the Black Cat closed down for good.