26 TheG&LR The June 26, 1964, issue of Life magazine (opening spread is pictured above) referred to San Francisco as the “Gay Capital of the World” and featured a photograph of the Tool Box, the first leather bar located in the South of Market area. The most celebrated element of the bar was a massive black-and-white painting depicting a variety of masculine, tough-looking men painted by local artist Chuck Arnett. The Society for Individual Rights (SIR) was formed in September 1964, representing a newly assertive and self-confident liberationist attitude. In time the largest homophile organization in the country, SIR prided itself on being more democratic and inclusive than the Mattachine Society. The group would become a model for gay political organizations to follow. In April 1966, SIR opened the first gay community center in America, on 6th Street. The Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH), the first gay religious organization, was founded in December 1964 by the Reverend Ted McIlvenna under the auspices of Glide Memorial Methodist Church with Daughters of Bilitis cofounders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin participating. CRH was dedicated to bringing together homosexual activists and interdenominational religious leaders. In 1965, Citizens Alert, a 24-hour hotline supported by the CRH, was established to provide lawyers, photographers, and others to assist victims of anti-gay police brutality. When attendees of a New Year’s Day 1965 costume ball at California Hall, organized to raise funds for the CRH, were harassed by police, the ACLU took the case, which was dismissed— a turning point in the city’s gay rights movement. Peggy Casertaopened one of the first hippie shops on Haight Street in 1965, a clothing store at 577 Haight Street at Ashbury. Calling her clothing store Mnasidika after a character in the ancient Greek erotic lesbian poetry collection The Songs of Bilitis so as “to appeal to gay women,” Caserta’s store became popular as the place to buy bell-bottom jeans, which were made by Caserta’s mother in Louisiana and flown into town. Caserta eventually struck a deal with Levi Strauss & Co. to manufacture its first bell-bottoms, which she sold exclusively for six months. One of her customers was Janis Joplin, with whom she became lovers. In the following year, Rikki Streicher opened a bar nearby, also in the Haight-Ashbury District, called Maud’s Study, which was said to be the world’s longest surviving lesbian bar at the time that it closed in 1989. About 25 people picketedGene Compton’s Cafeteriaon July 18, 1966, when new management began using Pinkerton agents and police to harass gay and transgender customers. The following month, a police officer tried to grab one of the queens, who, refusing to put up with the manhandling, threw her coffee in his face. Angry queer people broke windows, threw dishes and trays at the police, and burned down a nearby newsstand. The next day, after Compton’s refused to allow drag queens on the premises, a picket line sprang up, and the newly installed plate glass windows were smashed once again. Following the riots, considered “the first known incident of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in U.S. history,” activists formed C.O.G. (Conversion Our Goal), a network of transgender social, psychological, and medical support services that became the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first peer-run support and advocacy organization in the world. When Gale Whitington, an employee of the States Steamship Lines, was fired in April 1969 for revealing his homosexuality in a Berkeley newspaper, a group of gay people formed the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF), which picketed the company’s offices, becoming the first gay liberation group in the Bay Area. The next month, Tower Records fired Frank Denaro, believing him to be gay. The CHF picketed the store for several weeks until Denaro was reinstated. The group also ran similar protests at Safeway stores, Macy’s, and the Federal Building. On Halloween night 1969, activists gathered outside The San Francisco Examiner building to protest anti-gay articles that had been running in the daily newspaper. Like other papers around the country, The Examiner had a policy of printing the names and addresses of men arrested in gay bar raids or in tearooms. Purple printer’s ink was dumped from the roof onto the peaceful demonstrators, who used it to scrawl “Gay is Good,” as well as other slogans, and to slap imprints of their hands onto the surrounding buildings. A riot ensued after police moved in, and the event became known as “Friday of the Purple Hand.” THESE EVENTS represent only some of the highlights in San Francisco’s vibrant queer history, and each one merits much more investigation. Many of these events have been depicted in books and films. My goal here has been simply to enumerate some of the more outstanding moments in LGBT history in the hope that readers will investigate further on their own. While I Slept I came to your knitting show: exquisite sweaters for men. Your self-portrait looked down from a wall, Mineral-red, dark gold, like a doge. We walked then — you, tall and slim, dressed in one of your masterworks: fine wool with intricate cables. I heard myself say I’d have liked to learn to knit — even this late, to make something I may never finish. Then we were at the corner. Was it our last session? JOANLARKIN
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