it was closed by the vice squad amid much fanfare. The scandal led to a reform movement that helped shut down the infamously sexually liberal Barbary Coast district. Elsa Gidlowmoved to town from New York in 1926, at the invitation of Kenneth Rexroth, known as the father of the San Francisco Renaissance. Gidlow is best known for writingOnA Grey Thread(1923), considered the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. In 1954, she purchased Druid Heights, a rustic retreat near Mill Valley, which became a spiritual home to a number of influential writers and thinkers. Gidlow’s 1986 autobiography, Elsa, I Come with My Songs: The Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow, offers a detailed account of seeking, finding, and creating a life with other lesbians at a time when very little had been written on the topic. The first lesbian autobiography in which the author did not use a pseudonym, it offered a superb account of one participant-observer’s view of 20th-century artistic and bohemian life and of the cultural history of the Bay Area. On February 24, 1931, pioneer sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld arrived in San Francisco for a ten-day sojourn, giving public talks, paying social and professional calls, and visiting tourist sights. Called “the Einstein of Sex,” the groundbreaking German physician, sexologist, and author cofounded the ScientificHumanitarian Committee, the world’s first homosexual emancipation organization. The Black Cat Café, a bohemian hangout, opened at 710 Montgomery Street in 1933. The bar was at the center of one of the earliest court cases to establish legal protections for gay people in the U.S, which happened in 1950 when Sol Stoumen fought back against the California Dept. of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) Commission’s attempts to close his bar. For the first time, the California Supreme Court decided that bars cannot be discriminated against solely for catering to homosexuals. Despite this victory, continued pressure from law enforcement agencies eventually forced the bar’s closure in 1964. (Not to be confused with the Black Cat Tavern in L.A., which was the site of a famous LGBT demonstration in 1967.) Born in 1933 in a Salvation Army hostel in Oakland, RodMcKuenrefused to identify as gay, straight, or bisexual: “I can’t imagine choosing one sex over the other, that’s just too limiting. I can’t even honestly say I have a preference.” Best known as a poet of popular verse, he was also an actor and a singer-songwriter. And he was active in the LGBT rights movement as early as the 1950s, holding a leadership role in the Mattachine Society’s San Francisco chapter. McKuen spoke out against singer Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children“ campaign to repeal an anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County, and often gave benefit performances to aid LGBT rights organizations and to fund AIDS research. Native San FranciscanAlice B. Toklas returned to the Bay Area with her life companion Gertrude Stein in April 1935. Visiting East Oakland to see the house where she had lived and discovering that it had been razed, the property built over with little houses, Stein observed that there was “no there there,” a comment that has been endlessly misinterpreted as applying to the city of Oakland in general. The next year, Jack W. Gartmanopened Jack’s Turkish Baths, one of the first men-only bathhouse in the city. Open day and night, it was popular with servicemen during World War II. It was included in the Mattachine Society’s bar guide in the 1950s, and by the 1970s it catered to an older crowd. Mona’s, San Francisco’s first openly lesbian bar, also opened at Broadway and Columbus Avenue in North Beach, billing itself as a place “where girls can be boys” and featuring a female wait staff and entertainers dressed in tuxedos. Geared toward the local gay community as opposed to tourists, Mona’s became one of the most popular lesbian bars in the U.S., paving the way for more lesbian bars to open in the neighborhood, which became a “well-known lesbian enclave.” Bay area nativeRobert Duncan, a poet and public intellectual, was another key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. He acknowledged his own homosexuality in his landmark August 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society,” one of the first public defenses of homosexuality in the U.S. He often collaborated with his life partner, the renowned visual artist Jess Collins (known simply as “Jess”). While a student at U.C. Berkeley in January 1949, shortly after her 16th birthday, Susan Sontagmet Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, who introduced her to the queer bohemian scene in North Beach and Sausalito. After their brief affair, Sontag wrote in her journal: “my concept of sexuality is so altered—Thank God!—bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual. I know now a little of my capacity... the wonderful widening of my world which I owe to Harriet. Everything begins from now—I am reborn.” Douglass Cross and George Cory, songwriters and lovers, homesick after moving to Brooklyn, wrote “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” in 1954. Their famous pæan to the City by the Bay was popularized by Tony Bennett at a December 1961 concert at the Fairmont Hotel’s Venetian Room, and in 1969 it was adopted by the City and County of San Francisco as one of two official anthems (the other being the title song from the 1936 film San Francisco.) Over twenty years later, the now elderly George Cory underwrote a new show for his friend Hibiscus, a founding member of both the Cockettes and the 24 TheG&LR Found in an anonymous photo album. Courtesy the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California.
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