lgbt history writing

Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Francisco's Gay Bars, 1950-1968

Author(s): Christopher Agee

Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 462-489

Published by: University of Texas Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629672

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Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics

of San Francisco's Gay Bars, 1950-1968

CHRISTOPHER AGEE

University of California, Berkeley

JOHN MINDERMANN ENTERED THE San Francisco Police Depart-

ment (SFPD) as a patrol officer in 1959. Born and raised in San Francisco, Mindermann was the son of a cop, and although he had graduated from college with the intention of becoming a teacher, he eventually followed in his father's footsteps. The hulking, six-foot-plus young man sought a life of adventure in the SFPD. Years later and after he had retired, Mindermann explained his attraction to police work: "I had interests in apprehending bad guys, in getting guns and knives off the street. Like a lot of police officers who were young and physically engaging, I enjoyed physical confrontations. I mean we used to kid among one another, I mean, physical confrontations could actually be good therapy."'

But when the young Mindermann was temporarily assigned to San Francisco's Polk Gulch neighborhood and he encountered his first gay bar, the Cable Car Village, the rookie officer smarted with confusion rather than excitement and pride. "I walk into the Cable Car Village," Mindermann remembered:

and I stopped as I go inside the front door. And I'm shocked because I see nothing but men down the bar, and in the back there's a jukebox, and there's I guess a small dance floor, because I never quite got back that way-it's maybe forty feet. And I see men dancing with each other back there, and whoa! and I stopped. I've never seen anything like this. I look in there and I go wha-could this be a-a-a, in the parlance of SFPD, could this be a "fruit joint"? Well maybe it is. And everything

'John Mindermann interview, 29 March 2004 and 14 April 2004. This article is based on the research from "Gayola: The San Francisco Police Department, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, and San Francisco's Homosexual Bars, 1950-1965," chap. 3 of my "The Streets of San Francisco: Blacks, Beats, Homosexuals, and the San Francisco Police Department, 1950-1968," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005.

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15 , No. 3, Septcmber 2006 C) 2006 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

462

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Gayola 463

stops when they see, when they see me. Everybody's apprehensive. They've never seen this guy before, you know. I look in, and I go, "I

better not do anything because there's so many of them and there's just me and I have no radio." But I think it's a fruit joint, so I back out and I go about my diligent business.2

Although Mindermann's superiors recognized that Polk Gulch neighbor- hood contained one of the highest concentrations of gay bars in the city, they had done little to prepare the young patrol officer for his encounter

with gay men. Mindermann related that he was only vaguely aware of the

mayor's and police chief's various policies on homosexuality. And if the patrol officer had been attuned to his superiors' attitudes, it is unlikely he would have gained a clearer picture of the appropriate course of action. Officers throughout the department often competed with one another to realize different visions of law enforcement, particularly on the issue of gay bars. This interdepartmental tension forced policemen to constantly assess the professional standards of the officers around them. Mindermann's su- pervising sergeant regulated some gay drinking establishments by collecting payola (meaning police extortion and dubbed "gayola" by the local press in 1960), possibly behind the back of his lieutenant. The sergeant doubted

that Mindermann would be willing to work within a payola regime, and when the young officer questioned him about the Cable Car Village, the

sergeant nervously insisted that allowing the bar to operate enabled him to locate the city's gay men when he needed to solve violent, gay-related

crimes. "My god," Mindermann recalled thinking, "this is police wisdom." The rookie cop's naivete ensured that he would never again be assigned the Polk Gulch beat.3

John Mindermann's story of shock, ambivalence, personal prerogative, and collegial mistrust challenges academia's understanding of the policing of sexuality. In recent years historical studies by Nan Alamilla Boyd and John D'Emilio have revealed that the expanded postwar policing of homosexual- ity-particularly the policing of homosexual bars-helped to energize and shape gay and lesbian civil rights organizing.4 These works, like most civil rights narratives, have portrayed police-community interactions as part of a larger, uncomplicated, two-sided conflict between the citizenry and the gov- ernment.5 Police departments, however, have their own political motivations,

2Ibid. 3Ibid.

'Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Scxual Communities:

7he Making of a Homosexual Minority in thc United States, 1940-1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

5The difficulty of researching police departnents is compounded when they have destroyed their past records, as the SFPD has done.

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464 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

and these interests profoundly affected the strategies of post-World War II

civil rights movements. Edward Escobar has studied the relationship between

the police leaders and civil rights organizing through his work on Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department. Los Angeles police

chiefs and commissioners, Escobar argues, helped racialize and criminalize Mexican Americans to build support for growing police budgets. Mexican Americans responded by using their new racial designation to demand the rights and protections conferred to other racially defined groups.6

Like the LAPD leadership described by Escobar, the SFPD's upper ech-

elons-called "the high brass"-had a political identity separate from that of city hall. But Mindermann's experiences complicate the picture further,

revealing that the policies and dicta of police chiefs often did not reflect the beliefs and activities of the rank and file. Indeed, rifts of class, rank, and station

all fragmented the SFPD's interests and separated the beat officer from policy makers in both city hall and the Hall of Justice. The high brass, moreover, maintained a decentralized organizational structure that gave patrol officers great autonomy in their daily activities. Police leaders prioritized their own political power over professional policing, and they therefore refused to either coordinate their policies across station lines or add the supervisory positions needed to monitor the officers on the beat. Thus, when line officers assessed the lawfiuness of community members on the street, they drew upon more than the legal codes and official department policies. The beat officers' own sense of right and wrong, their yearning for the admiration of their peers, their interest in winning or imposing respect from the community, and their desire to achieve all of these goals in the least time- and energy-consuming manner also influenced how they both defined and responded to cnme.

San Francisco's city leaders fully recognized that the decentralized nature of the SFPD provided beat cops with tremendous discretionary power in defining criminal behavior. Downtown politicians and pundits tolerated the police force's subjective policing when it was directed toward issues for which the city leaders saw a clear civic consensus. During the early and mid- 1950s, for instance, city hall leaders and the most prominent journalists character- ized the city's racial and sexual interests as homogeneous (meaning white and heterosexual), and they therefore encouraged the SFPD to criminalize behavior they deemed black and homosexual (city leaders never publicly considered that gay men might have been serving in the SFPD).7

6Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

'Conversely, the city's elite did accept religious, ethnic, and class pluralism, and it therefore admonished the SFPD when officers employed subjective charges against people for their religious, ethnic, or laboring status. Between the mid- 1950s and mid- 1960s San Francisco's mainstream discussions of race and crime focused almost exclusively on African American residents. During this period the major dailies occasionally reported on crimes committed by Chinese Americans and Latinos, but neither pundits nor politicians used these incidents

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Gayola 465

Within this policing regime police chiefs could affect police-homosexual relations by ordering individual raids and sweeps. Boyd and D'Enilio have focused their discussions of police around these well-publicized clashes and are correct to argue that the threat of police crackdowns spurred gay rights organizing and helped gay activists achieve public attention. Scholars of the history of sexuality have typically erred, however, in using the raids directed

by the high brass to generalize about the rank and file's daily activities. Raids seldom indicated an upswing in pressure from officers walking the beat. John Mindermann's narrative reveals that the individual personalities, values, and beliefs of the actors on the street shaped interactions between the

police and the community in general and the relations between the SFPD and the homosexual bars in particular. Recognizing the political divisions within the police department and the discrepancies between the police raids and the daily activities of beat cops reveals that the police's anti-gay bar activities were motivated by more than city hall's hostility toward gay men. Key confrontations between police and the gay bars also represented a mainstream political struggle for power over the police. Placing these clashes in the context of police politics shows that San Francisco's gay bar owners integrated their civil rights movement into the mainstream political sphere by exploiting an existing discourse about police organization.

A group of owners of gay bars first used police politics to advance gay civil rights in the celebrated 1960 "gayola scandal." The bar owners publicly accused eight law enforcement officials of extorting payoffs, and the media made front-page news of the subsequent trials. The first police officer whom bar owners targeted was John Mindermann's former sergeant from the Polk Gulch neighborhood. Scholars have correctly identified the gayola scandal as a watershed moment in San Francisco's gay civil rights history, but they have presented the affair as a simple fight between the SFPD and gay drinking establishments. Bar owners, however, were exploiting a clean government movement within the SFPD and pitting corrupt officers against a reformist chief of police. Throughout the 1960s the movements for gay civil rights and police professionalization repeat- edly used one another for their own political ends, and together the two restructured civic life in San Francisco.

to generalize more broadly on questions of race and policing. The mainstream's focus on African Americans was due, in part, to that population's rapid growth and political mobiliza- tion. Between 1940 and 1960 the black population jumped from .8 to 10 percent of the city's general population. The Chinese American population, on the other hand, rose from

2.8 to 4.9 percent of the general population during these years, and in 1960 the U.S. Census created a separate racial category for "Hispanics" and counted this group as 7 percent of the population. Mainstream discussions of race and policing began including Latinos and Chinese Americans during the mid- and late 1960s as both groups experienced surges in population

and upswings in political organizing. For population figures see Brian J. Godfrey, Neighbor- hoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco's Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97.

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466 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

THE SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT AND THE REGULATION

OF HOMOSEXUAL BARS

World War II brought tens of thousands of men and women into the mili-

tary ports and industrial shipyards of the San Francisco Bay Area. Leaving

the watchful eyes of their hometown families and neighborhood friends

to serve in sex-segregated military units and shipyard crews, many homo-

sexual men and women found that they had entered environments of sexual possibility. Some of these local war workers and visiting service persons

began to patronize a homosexual bar industry that had been a part of the city's tourist landscape since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. The U.S.

military's wartime purges of gay men expanded the city's gay and lesbian bar industry still further. Soldiers discharged in these military sweeps were

generally detained for the length of the purge and then released en masse into the streets of San Francisco. Given the choice of remaining in the Bay

Area or returning to their families to explain their dishonorable "blue"

discharge, many gay soldiers opted to make San Francisco their new home.8 By 1950 San Francisco contained at least thirty-four gay and lesbian bars. The day-to-day policing of these drinking establishments fell primarily into the hands of the SFPD's uniformed patrol officers.9

Recent historiographical reckonings of gender in midcentury America have helped to highlight the ways that gender identity was at issue on the streets.10 In San Francisco the mainstream press largely ignored the city's gay and lesbian drinking establishments; its limited homosexual reporting more frequently revolved around chilling images of psychopaths." Similarly, homosexuality was not a common topic of conversation within the ranks of the SFPD. When police did raise the issue of homosexuality, officers did not use the subject to provoke fear but rather to make effeminate gay men the punch line of their jokes. In 1959, for instance, the San Francisco Police Officers Association journal reported that two officers were "embar- rassed when they happened upon a pretty young thing, her satin skirt lifted, relieving herself between two autos parked on Fillmore St. But shucks, it

8Boyd, 1 1; Allan Berube, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 29-30, 51.

9For a discussion of the growth of San Francisco's gay bar industry see Boyd, 113-14,

125-33; Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 209, 214-16; Martin Meeker, "Come out West: Communication and the Gay and Lesbian Migration to San Francisco,

1940s-1960s," Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2000, 10; and B&rube, 113. '0A number of scholars have investigated the performance of gender in battles over street

space. See, for instance, Boyd; Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slip-

pers of Gold: Tlhe History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); and George

Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

See, for example, the reporting on the serial killer Stephen Nash: "Man of Hate Speaks Chillingly of Love," San Francisco Chronicle, 16 December 1956: 22.

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Gayola 467

was only gay Willie-Boy Bell. The boys at City Prison were delighted with his new Maidenform."'2

As this quotation illustrates, many beat patrol officers did not regard the

policing of gay people as "real" or manly law enforcement. The uniformed officers on the beat proved their manliness to one another by physically controlling citizens they deemed dangerous and by making what were called "strong" arrests-felony charges with long sentences."3 The arrests of gay and lesbian people often involved "weak" charges of vagrancy (charges that were frequently dismissed in court), and no officer would ever want

to admit that a gay man had posed a physical challenge.'4 Moreover, while many police found the antigay exploits of other patrol-

men amusing, most beat officers found working in close contact with gay men unsettling. Few wished to conduct this sort of policing themselves. Discussing temporary transfers to the inspector's bureau's sex detail, Chief Thomas Cahill later admitted, "Now I know that my officers who were on those assignments, vice assignments, resented it very much. They wanted no part of it. They'd rather get out and do regular police work than to be working undercover to entrap people like those."'5

Despite the obvious bewilderment that dealing with homosexuality on the streets elicited from young officers like John Mindermann, the high

"2San Francisco Police, November 1959: 9. I would like to thank Sgt. Ray Shine for pro- viding me with access to the back copies of the San Francisco Police Officers Association's (POA) journal, San Francisco Police. A complete run of San Francisco Police does not exist, and unfortunately there are significant gaps in the POA's collection.

"3Police officers generally viewed African Americans as the most physically threatening citizens, and the department therefore placed a premium on a patrol officers' ability to subdue black men physically.

"4The SFPD's sex detail investigated all forms of sex crimes. While uniformed beat officers focused on gay and lesbian people on the city's streets and in the bars, sex detail concentrated on gay activity primarily in parks, public bathrooms, and bus terminals. The sex detail included four to five officers and operated under the Bureau of Special Services, the inspector's bureau responsible for investigating so-called vice crimes. For a discussion of the sex detail, see 'S.F. Drive on Sex Deviates," San Francisco Examiner, 1 July 1954: 1, 12. The inspectors in the sex detail took a different approach toward gay men than did patrol officers for two reasons. First, inspectors could often make 'stronger" arrests for sexual activity in nonbar spaces such as parks, bus stations, and public restrooms. Second, inspectors had different standards of masculine polic- ing. Because inspectors were charged with addressing crimes that had already been committed rather than enforcing "order" in a specific neighborhood, inspectors placed less emphasis on physical prowess and more importance on investigation and crime-solving abilities.

"5'Thomas Cahill Interview," from the "Shedding a Straight Jacket Oral History Col- lection" (hereafter "Shedding a Straight Jacket"), Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society of San Francisco (cited hereafter as GLBTHS), no. 97-026. For other fear- fiul law enforcement accounts of policing gay men see San Francisco Police, November 1959: 9. Even inspectors from the sex detail were sometimes unnerved by close contact with gay men. In 1953, for instance, when two male homophile activists arranged a meeting with a sex detail officer, the inspector brought a female officer along in order to prevent any advances (although there is no evidence to suggest policewomen were consistently used to police gay men). "Don Lucas Interview," 325, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 97-032.

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468 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

brass provided the patrolmen with very little guidance on how to handle

gay and lesbian bars. Indeed, throughout the 1950s the SFPD's leadership failed to provide its rank-and-file officers with tactical direction in nearly all policing matters, and the high brass actively condemned patrolmen who requested assistance. Mindermann later explained:

One overriding theme that I'd like to touch upon, just briefly, is that during this period of time, if you were to be regarded as an effective

police officer in the SFPD, the bottom-line . . . criteria was that you

had to be able to handle anything that came up. Okay? That was it. If you had to call for help, if you had to call for assistance, if you couldn't figure it out, [in the voice of his supervising officer,] "What? Why did we hire you? We hired you specifically because we're going

to send you into situations, and you have to do what's 'right.' So don't call us." So you had to figure it out. There were a lot of ad-hoc, spontaneous, without form, but highiy effective resolutions to things that guys did.... And there wasn't anything out there. I mean, you were it. Which was one of the great attractions to the work.'6

SFPD leaders fostered this culture of independence in part to make a virtue of the police department's shortcomings. The SFPD, for instance,

was woefully backward in communication technology; patrolmen could

rarely call for assistance because the department did not provide them with portable radios and because the city installed its police call boxes a lengthy eight blocks apart. Patrolmen in the city's busy commercial areas also lacked adequate supervision. Precinct captains in the city's quieter residential districts repeatedly resisted attempts to redistribute their lieutenants and sergeants to areas with more police activity, and all members of the high brass opposed the creation of new supervisory positions that would diffuse their own personal political power.'7

The high brass also promoted the patrolmen's discretionary power as a means of self-protection. Under the SFPD's policing regime, department leaders were able to scapegoat police officers at the bottom of the ladder whenever police tactics or decisions angered politicians and the press.

"They left the troops . . . out there to try to come up with something,"

'6John Mindermann interview.

"7"Honesty vs. Graft in the Police Dept.," San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 13 October 1959: 4, and 16 October 1959: 39; John Lehane interview, 23 June 2003; and Kevin Mul-

len interview, 21 November 2002. John Lehane grew up in San Francisco and joined the

SFPD in 1947. Lehane was active in the San Francisco Police Officers Association and served

briefly as the organization's president in 1970. Born in 1935, Kevin Mullen graduated from

St. Ignatius High School and entered the SFPD in 1959. Also see 'Longtime Police Policies

Junked-Stern Ahern Hand Brings Change," San Francisco Ncws-Call Bulletin, 15 October

1959: 11; and William Joseph Winters, "Redistribution of the Patrol Force of a Hypothetical

City," master's thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1957.

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Gayola 469

Mindermann recalled in discussing the department's responses to black civil rights protests. "You were expected to take the proper police action, but you were given no direction. Yet you were accountable."'8

Without guidance from the high brass San Francisco patrol officers chose from a number of options when learning of the existence of a homosexual bar on their beat. One choice was to use the existing state penal codes, although this approach had become more complicated for law enforcement. In a 1951 San Francisco case the California State Supreme Court declared that law enforcement officials could not close a bar simply because it at- tracted a gay and lesbian clientele. The state legislature responded to the ruling with a series of laws enabling officers to prosecute homosexual bars,

but only if they viewed any sexual activity. The lawmakers set severe penalties for these charges, such as revoking a liquor license, and yet homosexual bar

prosecutions therefore involved lengthy hearings and considerable amounts

of time and effort on the part of the arresting officers.'9 Most patrolmen, accordingly, needed considerable pressure from city

officials to spend this amount of energy on work they found disgusting and outside the bounds of serious police work, and San Francisco's politicians

and media pundits never demanded gay eradication. In Sacramento the state legislators justified their stringent, antigay legislation as a preventive measure against Communist infiltration, but the political leaders in labor-friendly San Francisco did not share these cold war concerns. Moreover, San Francisco

officials recognized that high-profile crackdowns ran the risk of advertising the size of the city's homosexual population to the rest of the nation. Local

elites simply asked the police to keep homosexual bars out of the public eye. As a result, a gulf emerged between the state legislature's harsh laws and the local city leaders' more moderate expectations. This gap between laws and

"8John Mindermann interview. The most notorious postwar example of SFPD officials scapegoating a lower-ranking officer came in 1960, when the high brass made a lowly inspec-

tor responsible for the supervision of a massive protest against the U. S. government's House

Un-American Activities Committee. The inspector had no experience in crowd control, and

as the high brass remained far away, the officer ordered his men to attack the demonstrators.

The press eventually pilloried the inspector for his actions and for his subsequent false claims

that protesters had initiated the violence, and when the high brass offered him no cover, he

was forced to leave San Francisco in disgrace. For discussions of the 1960 city hall protest

and its aftermath see Ralph Tyler, "Why It Happened in San Francisco," Frontier June 1960:

5-11; "Jury Ready to Deliberate in Riot Case," San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 3 May 1961:

1, 7; "S.F.'s Riot-Haunted Cop," San Francisco Examiner, 17 April 1965: 19; and the film

produced by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California entitled Operation

Correction (San Francisco, 1961).

'9William N. Eskridge, Jr., Gaylaw: Challen,ging the Apartheid of the Closet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999; repr. 2002), 32, 61-62, 72. This legislative movement

included the 1954 opening of Atascadero State Hospital. Known as "Dachau for Queers,"

Atascadero staff subjected men convicted of either consensual sodomy or child molestation

to lobotomies, electrical and pharmacological shock therapy, and castration, all authorized by

a 1941 law.

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470 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

expectations enabled police officers to develop their own, informal, and less

taxing responses to gay and lesbian drinking establishments. A more common police tactic was to turn a blind eye. Discussing the

gay bars on his beat just blocks from the Hall of Justice, Sgt. John Lehane remarked:

It was just another bar. It's like it was down the street from the station. There were all gays in there so you . .. would only go down there when you get called. And they had the same problems as straight bars,

see. And . . . they didn't want the police around the place, see. And when you got there they usually took care of their beefs themselves,

or if you did, they wanted you [out] as fast as they could get you out of there. And the police didn't want to go near them, anyway. It was like a Mexican standoff.20

Some police officers, however, took a more aggressive approach to homosexual bars. These patrolmen focused most of their attention on gay bars rather than lesbian drinking establishments, but lesbian nightspots increased their chances for persecution if they allowed cross-dressing.2' Officers had a wide range of harassing tactics at their disposal, and some chose to pursue payola. In addition to providing personal profit, this last method required a relatively small amount of contact with gay people. The police particularly targeted the city's downtown and waterfront gay bars with extortion, since these male, lower-class establishments permitted physical contact ranging from dancing to sexual intercourse and other illicit activities, including drug use, gambling, and prostitution. "You've got to understand," former gay bar owner Bob Ross recalled, "that a lot of these people operating these bars were very shady to start with, and they were looking for quick money-and the cops knew that. And they were serving

20"Thomas Cahill Interview," 110, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 97-026;

and John Lehane interview.

2"For a discussion of police officers disregarding lesbians see Richard Hongisto interview, 8 April 2002. Hongisto was the son of a sheet metal worker, and after earning a degree from San

Francisco State College he joined the SFPD in 1960. Hongisto was elected sheriff in 1971 and

appointed police chief in 1992. For an example of the SFPD police journal ridiculing cross-dress- ing lesbians see San Francisco Police, September 1959: 9. Boyd has identified the 1954 police

raid on Tommy's Place, a North Beach lesbian nightspot, as an example of police persecution

of lesbians (9 1-101). However, the SFPD only became interested in Tommy's Place during an ongoing investigation into the relations between an African American man and a group of white

high school-aged women. Police closed Tommy's Place but did not use the incident to justifr a wider crackdown on lesbian bars or women. See also "Schoolgirls' Vice, Dope Revealed in S.F.

Bar Raid: Man Held as Corrupter of Youths," San Francisco Chronick, 9 September 1954: 1, 14. Lesbian bars faced a greater threat from male heterosexual residents and tourists who tried

to pick up, mock, and intimidate lesbian patrons. See Sherri Cavan, 'Social Interaction in Public Drinking Places," Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1965.

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Gayola 471

rot-gut booze in many cases, and the cops knew that also. So their prices were based according to that."22

Bob Ross's gay bar was in the lower Market Street area, and he paid his protection payment directly to a captain. The bar owner recalled how a

police officer first approached him on the issue of payoffs:

[Upon entering, the police officer asked,] "Hi Bob, are you the manager?" And I'd say, "Why yes." "Hi, I'm Lieutenant So-and-so." "You don't say, Lieutenant So-and-so." "Yes, the San Francisco Police

Department." And right away you'd go "Oh shit." You know, "What

are we up to now?" And the first time he came in he was soliciting for the . . . Police Athletic League. And I said, "Oh." I said, "I just

sent them $25 or something." And he said, "Oh." He said, "This is actually the Police Officer's Retirement League section of the Police Athletic League." I said, "I never heard of that." He said, "You will; let me show you." And I said, "What do you need, $100?" He says, "No, it's gonna be $500 a month." And he says, "The captain'll be by to collect it next Tuesday at 7:30." That's how brazen they were. The captain walked in at 7:30 to collect his money.23

In addition to the monthly payoff, Ross claimed, he was also responsible for buying the captain's dinner and supplying him with a female prostitute.24

The decision to extort money, as with other types of harassment, stemmed from individual patrolmen's bigotry and greed but also from pressure exerted by supervising officers. The culture of the SFPD condoned officers who made payoff demands, and officers could collect payola, particularly at the Northern, Central, and Southern police stations, without losing standing among their peers.25 Police officers judged each other, first and foremost, on their ability to arrest violent community members and physically subdue those whom they regarded as disrespectful; collecting payola did not prevent officers from fulfilling either of these goals. "You [could] be a very good cop," John Mindermann recalled, "and still take advantage with respect to money,

drinking, so forth. SFPD, the culture allowed for certain of these discretion- ary activities that were illegal.... I saw many, many excellent officers who worked diligently making very high quality officers and worked very, very hard who were involved in these kinds of petty activities."26

22Bob Ross interview, 5 October 1999. There is no evidence of San Francisco police officers

ever extorting money from a lesbian bar.

23Ibid. 24Ibid. 2"Northern Station covered the Polk Gulch and Fillmore neighborhood bar areas; Central

Station included the bars in the Tenderloin, North Beach, the Embarcadero, and the lower

Market Street areas; and Southern Station monitored the bars in the South of Market district.

26John Mindermann interview.

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472 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

Even as the department culture excused extortion, the SFPD's poor work-

ing conditions provided some officers with the justification they needed to

participate in payola practices. Patrolmen complained about limited training

and promotional opportunities, and they argued that the SFPD provided

them with substandard equipment and salaries that, while higher than the

state's other police departments, were diminished severely by the city's

high cost of living and the costs-borne by each policeman himself-of a

uniform, gun, baton, and handcuffs.27 "There wasn't ... much managerial concern for the needs of the troops," Capt. Kevin Mullen remembered of his early years in the department. "We didn't have heaters in the cars. And I

think we did not get heaters until cars stopped coming without them."28

Members of the SFPD's high brass who might have been inclined to

break the department's networks of corruption were stymied by its diffuse political and policing structure. During the early 1950s political power lay with the district station captains and the inspector's bureau chief and not with the chief of police. Under this decentralized system the various district station captains ran their police houses with little oversight, and each demanded or forwent extortion payments as they saw fit. But while captains or lieutenants could easily demand that their officers collect pay-

ments for them, thwarting extortion in the lower ranks was a more difficult proposition. The high brass's principal obstacle in preventing payola was its inability to supervise all of the beat officers. Each district captain had

three lieutenants who were then expected to control fifteen to eighteen sergeants, too many for the desk-bound lieutenants to monitor. Even if a lieutenant managed to keep tabs on his sergeants, it was impossible for the officer to know what activities the district's 63 to 116 patrol officers were doing on their sergeants' behalf. As the only officers who left their desks and monitored the patrolmen on the streets, the department's two hun- dred sergeants held the most policing power in the SFPD. It was therefore the SFPD's two hundred sergeants who exerted the most control over the department's gay bar policies.29

City hall officials tolerated or encouraged SFPD corruption during the early postwar period. Politicians benefited monetarily and politically from the payola regime; corrupt officers passed their political allies a cut of the tribute, allowed officials to use their morning briefings for campaign stops,

27The cost of these items in midcentury ran about $400. See Gale Wright interview, 4 June

2003. Gale Wright moved to San Francisco as a youth and after attending City College for

two years joined the SFPD in 1957. See also Elliot Blackstone interview, October 16, 1999. Elliot Blackstone was a San Francisco police officer, and during the late 1960s he served as the homosexual community liaison for the SFPD's Police-Community Relations Unit.

28Kevin Mullen interview. See also "The Untold Story of the San Francisco Police Depart-

ment,' San Francisco Chronicic, 8 February 1955: 1; and 'Honesty vs. Graft in the Police Dept.," San Francisco News-Call Bulktin, 13 October 1959: 4.

29Elliot Blackstone interview and San Francisco Police Department, San Francisco Police Department Study (San Francisco: City of San Francisco, 1957), 13.

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Gayola 473

and helped get out the vote on election days. (Conversely, police officers

aided their conservative political allies by allowing thugs to intimidate voters in precincts with large black or liberal voting populations.) San Francisco police officers had played these political roles for decades. Indeed, investiga- tors during the 1930s had publicly exposed the SFPD as an "organized" and "powerful electioneering force," but neither the city's downtown elites nor the general public had responded with sustained demands for clean government reform.30

In the early 1950s, however, a police professionalization movement arose from San Francisco's business class. The city's leading bankers and entrepreneurs argued that police graft impeded the migration of East Coast capital to the city. These police professionalizers cared less about other forms of subjective policing (such as harassment and brutality), but they proposed to eliminate law enforcement's economic power over businesses. The reformers set out to restructure the state's law enforcement agencies and place each department under the control of a more powerful chief.

The professionalizers hoped that by filling these posts with reformers they could clean up law enforcement from above.3'

The professionalization movement's first victory came at the state level in late 1954, when CasparWeinberger, a first-year Republican assemblyman from San Francisco, led a bipartisan effort to reform the state's corrupt

liquor control agency. Weinberger's work produced the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), and the reformist leaders of the new ABC eradicated most of their department's largest payola networks. The ABC's centralized and more aggressive policing regime increased the state's

police supervision over all bars, but liquor officials focused particular atten- tion on California's homosexual bars.32

The state liquor officials' special interest in gay bars stemmed in part from their 1951 legal defeat in the Black Cat Cafe case. In 1950 San Francisco

30"Honesty vs. Graft in the Police Dept."; and "Why Federal Agents Bypassed S.F. Po-

lice," San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 13 October 1959: 4, and 14 October 1959: 4. For

discussions of Republicans intimidating black voters see "Challenge 'Raids' on S.F. Polls," San Francisco Examiner, 9 November 1960: B; "Voter Challenges Set off Dispute," San Francisco Chronicle, 9 November 1960: 14; and "Row over Polling at Hunters Point," San Francisco

Chronicle, 7 November 1962: 1B.

3"Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American CriminalJustice, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131.

32"Knight to Fill New Liquor Post Soon," San Francisco Chroniclk, 4 November 1954: 1; "Knight Criticizes 'Food-in-Bars' Law," San Francisco Chronicle, 24 March 1955: 1; and Caspar W. Weinberger with Gretchen Roberts, In thc Arena: A Memoir of thc 20th Century

(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001), 102-3. Boyd's Wide-Open Town discusses the ABC's

policing of San Francisco's gay bars (123, 134, 144, 207). I have limited my discussions of

the ABC and other state and federal policing agencies (such as the Armed Forces Disciplin-

ary Board) because SFPD patrol officers rarely paid these outside organizations any heed. I disagree with Boyd's contention that the state liquor officials' various victories and defeats affected the intensity of policing by the SFPD.

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474 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

city officials had called upon state liquor officials to revoke the liquor license of Sol Stoumen, the owner of the Black Cat Cafe, when he refused to hire unionized workers.33 Although only a portion of the Black Cat's bohemian clientele was homosexual, liquor officials decided to use this patronage to justify their license revocation. Thus, by way of a labor dispute, state liquor agents entered the new territory of homosexual bars. Stoumen caught the

liquor officials off guard by fighting the revocation, and in the 1951 case Stoumen v. Reilly the moderately liberal California State Supreme Court unanimously sided with Stoumen. The justices declared that "mere proof of patronage by homosexuals" without additional evidence of "illegal or immoral acts" was insufficient for a license revocation. The shocking deci- sion made California the only state in the nation to provide a modicum of legal legitimacy to gay and lesbian bars.34

The high court's decision enraged and embarrassed some state liquor officials, but the Board of Equalization was too corrupt and decentralized for liquor control leaders to mount an effective campaign against homo- sexual bars. The cleaner and more tightly organized ABC now provided the resentful liquor administrators with the opportunity they desired. The ABC officials sent their agents to pursue gay and lesbian bars, organized a legal process that made it nearly impossible for homosexual bars to defend themselves against charges of sexual impropriety, and circumscribed the protections of Stoumen by persuading the State Supreme Court to expand the definition of "illegal or immoral acts."35 Indeed, in the 1959 Vallerga v. Munro decision the ABC pushed the state's high court to define "illegal or immoral acts" as any activity (not just sexual activity) that could be

33"Appellant's Petition for a Hearing by the Superior Court," Stoumen v. Reilly, Superior Court of the State of California, 14-15, and "Opening Brief for Appellant," Stoumen v.

Reilly, California District Court of Appeal, 66, GLBTHS. Previous histories have erred in

assuming that state liquor officials targeted the Black Cat Cafe because of its gay and lesbian

clientele: D'Emilio (187) asserts that Stoumen did not make the payoffs demanded of bars

with homosexual patronage, and Boyd (116, 121-23) states that the prosecution occurred

as part of a wider crackdown. By failing to understand the initial Black Cat case as a labor is-

sue, historians have overemphasized the street-level changes brought about by Stoumen. The

relative laxity of homosexual bar policing during the early 1950s can also be attributed to the

decentralization of policing and the reticence of rank-and-file officers. It is likely that some SFPD officers were not even aware of the Stoumen ruling, and policemen continued using informal tactics with impunity to either regulate gay bars or drive them out of business.

34"Opening Brief for Appellant," Stoumen v. Reilly, California District Court of Appeal,

66; Stoumen v. Reilly 37 Cal. 2d (1951), 713; and Eskridge, 94.

350ne way ABC officials stacked the legal process against homosexual bar owners was

-by instructing their agents not to warn gay and lesbian bar owners of infractions and not to document any information about the persons involved in the infractions. Thus, after a

year-and-a-half-long investigation, the ABC presented a bar owner with a list of incidents, some more than eighteen months old, in which faceless, unnamed, and unnumbered persons

were said to have committed specific illegal acts. See "Appellant's Opening Brief," Stoumen v. Munro, 50, 9-12, 283.

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Gayola 475

construed as homosexual. The ABC's new policing regime allowed liquor officials to reduce the average homosexual bar's lifespan to less than two years.36

The SFPD, however, remained unreformed, and police officers on the

take either failed to assist or actively interfered with the ABC's attempts to eliminate homosexual bars. After busting a gambling hall in 1955 a frus- trated official from the office of the state attorney general raged: "We always get an answer that they investigated and found nothing illegal was going on and we usually get the answer that they visited the place and asked the owner if he was violating the law.... Of course the owner says he was not. Such reports from the police are an insult to the intelligence of a low-grade moron."37 But Sacramento's efforts to shame the SFPD into assisting with the state's antivice campaign produced little effect. Thus, between 1955 and 1960 the ABC drive slowed the rate of increase in San Francisco's homosexual bars but failed to bring about a reduction (the number rose

from fifty to fifty-three).38 In the mid-1950s the San Francisco Chronicle, the city's second-largest

newspaper, took the lead in bringing professionalization to the SFPD. The

Chronicle sought to overtake the San Francisco Examiner (the self-pro- claimed "Monarch of the Dailies") in both circulation and political power, and the Chronicle's editor viewed its exposure of the department's corrup- tion as the key to both of these endeavors. Chronicle editors understood that articles on police criminality and incompetence made for good copy and would thus allow the newspaper to cut into the Examiner's readership. But the Chronicle also recognized that the Examiner depended upon the SFPD's lack of professionalism for its influence over city hall. The Examiner

36In the 1959 case of Vallerga v. Munro the state supreme court ruled that "any public display which manifests sexual desires and urges" that appeared in the bar "as a continuing course of conduct" could be considered harmful to the welfare and morals of society. Boyd's (206-7) and D'Emilio's (182) narratives both present this ruling as an advance in gay rights because it affirmed the right of gay and lesbian people to congregate in bars and because it spoke in the language of civil rights. But, as Boyd notes in passing, the vague meaning of "continuing course of conduct" and the potentially all-encompassing definition of "sexual desires and urges" suddenly placed all gay and lesbian bars at risk. Indeed, most contempo- rary observers viewed Vallerga as a victory for the ABC, and there is no public evidence to

support Boyd's and D'Emilio's argument that Valer,ga inspired owners of gay bars to expose police corruption. Nor does it appear that the ruling stifled the ABC's campaign. The ABC's Northern California prosecutor expressed delight over the Vallerga decision, remarking that it "probably" made the closure of all homosexual bars "inevitable." See "Oh, Bitter Dicta! A Case Won-and Lost," Ladder4, no. 5 (February 1960): 9, 7, 20; and "Appellant's Opening Brief," Stoumen v. Munro, 32.

37"Grand Jury to Get Report on Raids," San Francisco Chronick, 25 April 1955: 1, 10. For information on how the "tip-off flourishes" in San Francisco see "The Untold Story of the S.F. Police Dept.," San Francisco Chronicle, 31 January 1955: 1.

38Helen P. Branson, Gay Bar (San Francisco: Pen-Graphic Press, 1957), 43; "Appellant's Opening Brief," Stoumen v. Munro, 73; and Meeker, "Come out West," 28.

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476 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

mobilized police officers to campaign for friendly political candidates, and these politicians then repaid the Examiner by promoting the newspaper's allies within the SFPD. The Examiner also often influenced city hall by supporting the SFPD's attempts to manipulate elections by mobilizing it on certain issues. If the Chronicle could create a less corrupt and more apolitical police force, it could also help to remove the Examiner's influence from the mayor's office.39

The SFPD simply ignored the Chronicle's printed criticism, but in November 1955 the newspaper took a major step toward police profes- sionalization when it successfully backed George Christopher for mayor. Shortly after his election Mayor Christopher told reporters: "The success of my administration depends a great deal on the success of the Police De- partment."40 Christopher made it clear that he wanted a chief committed to ridding the SFPD of corruption, and in 1959 the mayor found his ally in Thomas Cahill. Known nationally as a "clean government" reformer, Chief Cahill quickly impressed Christopher and the Chronicle with several gestures toward professionalization. But the new police leader proved to be more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. Before making a controversial crackdown on the SFPD's organized extortion Cahill waited for an outside catalyst; or, as one officer later quipped, "Cahill didn't go looking for gayola; gayola came to him."4'

POLICE PROFESSIONALIZATION AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION

OF THE HOMOSEXUAL IMAGE

In late 1959 and early 1960 a series of events helped inspire owners of gay bars to challenge Chief Cahill on the issue of police extortion. First, a controversy over homosexuality and dirty politicking appeared in Mayor Christopher's 1959 reelection campaign. During this political scandal San Francisco's owners of gay bars watched as some members of the press toler- ated gay legal assertiveness against political corruption.

'9Scott Newhall, A Newspaper Editor's Voyage across San Francisco: San Francisco Chronicek, 1934-1971, and OtherAdventures: Oral History Transcript(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1990), 217-18; Kevin Mullen interview; and Malcolm Glover interview, 7 July 2004.

Malcolm Glover joined the San Francisco Examiner in 1946 and served as the newspaper's

police beat reporter for nearly four decades. 40"Christopher Promises Police Modernization," San Francisco Chronick, 29 December

1955: 1. Christopher worked to clean up the police department during his tenure as mayor

becausc he was genuinely disturbed by vice and he understood that city officials would focus on his business-friendly agenda, including his efforts toward redevelopment and the wooing

of major league baseball, only if he kept the police department off the front pages. See Kevin

Mullen interview; and "Big-Thinking S.F. Mayor of 50s and 60s Is Dead," San Francisco

Cbronicke, 15 September 2000: Al. ""Big Police Shakeup for 'Efficiency,'" San Francisco Chronicle, 15 November 1958: 1;

and Kevin Mullen interview.

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Gayola 477

Christopher entered the 1959 election riding high. His pro-growth, clean-government policies had made him a popular figure in the city, and it appeared clear that he was headed for an easy victory over his op- ponent, Russell Wolden.42 Wolden had run an incompetent campaign and desperately needed an issue with which to close the gap. Weeks before the election the challenger tried to shift the city's attention away from issues of government reform and economic growth to cultural fears; he proclaimed that Christopher had allowed San Francisco to become a haven for homo- sexuals.43 Wolden then revealed that the Mattachine Society, a gay rights organization, had recently held a convention during which it had passed a resolution praising the progay leadership of Christopher. The Mattachine Society boldly responded by going public itself, revealing that a Wolden operative had submitted this resolution and daringly announcing that it intended to sue Wolden for slander. In a rare turnabout the press reported neutrally on such public assertiveness by homosexuals. The media excoriated Wolden for violating the city's homosexual closet, but pundits also expressed tremendous scorn over Wolden's shady use of an operative. Prioritizing clean government over its long-standing closeting of homosexual people, the newspapers publicized the Mattachine Society's lawsuit against Wolden. Indeed, a local newspaper declared Mayor Christopher's and Chief Cahill's targeting of corruption in the police department evidence of a true "moral revolution in the city."44

42Previous histories have argued that Mayor Christopher's tough-on-crime image had made

him a vulnerable candidate in 1959. Scholars have assumed that voters saw the SFPD's new

assertiveness as a violation of the city's culturally permissive tradition (see Boyd, 142, 204). But during the late 1950s the press generally discussed Christopher's and Cahill's profes-

sionalization campaign in terms of government reform and the threats of predatory criminals.

For instance, the press celebrated Operation S, a professionalization program that saturated so-called high-crime neighborhoods with police officers, as a program targeting muggers and

murderers. Few mainstream pundits wondered whether Operation S also ensnared citizens the

city might view as less physically dangerous and more culturally interesting. Media figures did not present police interactions with bohemians in North Beach as evidence of Christopher's

and Cahill's professionalization. Rather, both cultural liberals and cultural conservatives used articles on relations between police and bohemians to argue for a centralization of police power.

Mayor Christopher was therefore rarely implicated in the discussions over the policing of the

beats. For longer discussions of Operation S and the policing of North Beach see Agee, "The Streets of San Francisco," chaps. 1 and 5.

43Jim Kepner, Rough News-Daring Views: 1950s Pioneer Gay PressJournalism (New York:

Haworth Press, 1998), 377, 379; and "Praise of Mayor's Policy on Deviates Engineered by

Ex-Police Informer," San Francisco Cbronick, 9 October 1959: 1, 5. Wolden did not enter the

1959 race with a reputation as a teetotaler. Prior to the election, Herb Cacn mentioned Wolden

and "his handsome wife" "rolling along California Street at midnight in their sleek convertible." See Herb Cacn, Only in San Francisco (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 15.

'Kepner, Rough News, 385-86; "Wolden Sued for Slander," San Francisco Chronicle, 9 October 1959: 4; "'Plant' Revealed in Wolden's Smear Drive," San Francisco Examincr, 9 October 1959: 1, 8; George Dorsey, Christopher of San Francisco (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 189-90; and "The Shining Badge," San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 19 October 1959: 14. For additional discussions of the Wolden scandal see D'Emilio, 121-22.

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478 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

The press's reaction to the Wolden affair suggested to owners of gay

bars a new political strategy. Historians have already recognized that the

1959 mayoral campaign helped provide gay activists with greater public

visibility, but the episode also showed that gay men could use the issue of

dirty government not only to enter the public discourse but also to take legal action against antigay corruption. Meanwhile, an upswing in both national police scandals and local antipolice protests were also beginning to normalize citizen challenges to law enforcement.45 In early 1960 these events

and an extended downturn in the local bar economy motivated a group of

owners of gay bars from the Polk Gulch, Embarcadero, and lower Market

Street areas to organize a coordinated attack against the payola demands of their local police officers. This group of bar owners-which included both homosexual and heterosexual men-met with Police Chief Cahill to

confront him with evidence of police corruption. The intense reaction to

the Wolden scandal had made it clear to Cahill that his job security hinged on his reputation against corruption, and he therefore agreed to entrap and prosecute the offending police.46

Captains and lieutenants were spared during the subsequent prosecu- tions, but in fewer than four months a grand jury had indicted seven Northern and Central Station police officers and one ABC agent for ex- torting money from gay bars. The first sergeant to go to trial pled guilty, but the seven remaining officers contested their charges in what the press dubbed the "gayola" scandal. The press desired government reform and thus expressed little antigay animus during the gayola trials. The accused officers, however, ultimately escaped with acquittals. During the trials de- fense attorneys succeeded in focusing the juries' attention on homosexuality rather than police corruption.47

Still, despite the not-guilty verdicts the gayola trials dramatically refigured relations between the SFPD and homosexual bars. Through this scandal Chief Cahill had exhibited his willingness to prosecute extortion- ists, and police at the station level were therefore obliged to dismantle their payoff networks. Bar owners had thus been able to use the politics

"s"Big Beatnik Rally to Protest Raids," San Francisco Chronicle, 31 January 1960: 5. In the summer of 1959 the Chicago Police Department experienced a well-publicized scandal. See Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Poliec Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977), 170.

'"Bob Ross Interview," 45-46, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 98-012. 47"lst Bar Bribe Cop Plans Guilty Plea," San Francisco Examiner, 10 July 1960: 3; and

"All 4 Cops Acquitted in 'Gayola' Trial," San Francisco Chronicek, 20 August 1960: 1, 5. Not understanding the importance of police professionalization has prevented historians from recognizing why the press discussed the gay bar owners with relative civility during the gayola scandal. Boyd, for instance, speculates that the journalists wished to chastise Cahill for his more assertive policing policies (209). I argue, however, that by avoiding sensational discussions of the bars and their owners the journalists were supporting Cahill and his attempts to use the bar owners' accusations to clean up the department. For example, see "Police Candor," San Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1960: III, 2.

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Gayola 479

of police professionalization to forge a temporary alliance with govern- ment reformers and free themselves from the demeaning and financially burdensome practice of extortion.

This victory, however, carried heavy consequences. Payola had served as

a form of harassment, but the payments had also offered gay and lesbian bars a modicum of protection from the antihomosexual whims of outside politicians and agencies. Corrupt officers had profited from homosexual bars, and they had therefore resisted demands for sweeps and crackdowns.

Under the new policing regime these corrupt officers were no more likely to prosecute homosexual bars on their own, but they were more willing to conduct raids when ordered to do so by their superiors. Policing power over gay bars was thus shifted from the SFPD's beat officers to the mayor

and the chief of police.

In the wake of the gayola scandal Mayor Christopher launched an of- fensive against homosexual drinking establishments. Concerned that gay and lesbian bars provided spaces for sexual activity that could offend the

public while also providing tempting shakedown targets for dishonest police, Christopher called for an open-ended sweep, and Chief Cahill responded with raids on disreputable bars, both homosexual and hetero- sexual alike.48

More important, Cahill now began providing the ABC with plainclothes policemen. During the late fifties owners of homosexual bars had begun photographing ABC officers, and the state liquor agency department there- fore required additional agents who were not recognizable to bartenders at

these establishments. With its new supply of SFPD officers the ABC spent

the next year and a half shutting down twenty-five gay and lesbian bars, including all of the bars that had been involved in the gayola scandal. But

as quickly as the SFPD and ABC used their power to close homosexual bars, more opened.49

Indeed, law enforcement officials found that the average owner of a gay and lesbian bar was far more likely to resist license revocations than the bar owners of the previous decade. This increased fortitude largely stemmed from the fact that a growing number of gay and lesbian bar owners were homosexual themselves. Although these gay and lesbian entrepreneurs

remained dedicated to the bottom line, many viewed their bars as more than business ventures. Gay and lesbian owners of bars often saw their establishments as community-building efforts and therefore showed a

48"City, State Officials Plan Crackdown on 'Gay Bars,'" San Francisco Chronicle, 29 June

1960: 4; and "Appellant's Opening Brief," Stoumen v. Munro, 176-77.

49San Francisco Chronicle, 21 April 1960 and 29 April 1960, GLBTHS, 1950s and 1960s

news clippings box, gayola folder; "65 Freed in 'Gay Bar' Case," San Francisco Examiner, 7

September 1961: 3; and "Special Cops for 'Gay' Bars," San Francisco Examiner, 12 October

1961: 3; Eskridge, Gaylaw, 80; D'Emilio, 183; and Morton Colvin interview, 5 November

1999. Morton Colvin served as an ABC prosecutor in San Francisco during the 1960s.

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480 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

greater tenacity and resolve in their conflicts with law enforcement.50 Thus, when the ABC revoked the license of bar owners who were gay or lesbian,

these entrepreneurs often did not abandon the idea of operating a bar but

instead quickly reopened using friends, lovers, or relatives as "fronts" for the license application.5' These individual acts of resistance impeded the ABC's drive. As a result, even though the ABC's postgayola offensive had

successfully eliminated twenty-five homosexual bars by 1962, the city still contained twenty-four other gay and lesbian drinking establishments.52

The rise in gay and lesbian ownership of homosexual bars facilitated the development of a small social world among homosexual bar owners and bartenders, and this gay and lesbian network took concrete shape in August 1961 with the first convening of the Tavern Guild. Initially a social organi- zation, the guild quickly developed a wide array of strategies by which to

combat law enforcement. Its members distributed images of ABC and SFPD undercover agents, informed one another of legal loopholes to avoid bar closures, and even began funding legal challenges to the constitutionality of antigay state statutes.53

Nan Boyd has discussed three of the factors that allowed the bar owners to transform the Tavern Guild into the engine of the city's homosexual libera- tion movement. First, bar owners possessed a job security and steady source of income that allowed for open and vigorous challenges to the SFPD; after all, bar owners did not need to worry about losing their jobs or clientele. Second, the members of the Tavern Guild were able to capitalize on the

"0For a discussion of San Francisco gay and lesbian bars serving as "home territories" or community service centers see Sherri Cavan, "Social Interaction in Public Drinking Places,"

Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1965, 147-48, 276.

5"See, for example, 'Bob Ross Interview," 60, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 98-012; and "Charlotte Coleman Interview," 72, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS,

no. 97-023.

52Eskridge, 80.

53William "Uncle Billy" Morrell, owner of the 585 Club gay bar and steakhouse, orga-

nizcd both the bar owners involved in the gayola prosecution and those involved in the first meeting of the Tavern Guild. It is not clear from the existing sources, however, that his work

with the heterosexual and homosexual bar owners in the gayola prosecution inspired him to

create the Tavern Guild. See "Bob Ross Interview," 30, 58, 60, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 98-012; "Bill Plath Interview," 15, 16, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 97-024; "Charlotte Coleman Interview," 72, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 97-023; Tavern Guild Foundation, "What We're All About" (n.d.), Tavern Guild of San Francisco Records (cited hereafter as TGSF), GLBTHS, box 1, folder 1; Minutes, TGSF, 19 February 1963, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 11; Minutes, TGSF, 2 February 1965, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 14; and "Remarks of Darryl V. Glied, President of Tavern Guild of San Francisco," 30 March 1965, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 14; George Applegate to William

Plath, 21 May 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 4, folder 12; Minutes, 19 May 1964, written 26 May 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13; and Minutes, 30 June 1964, written 10 July

1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13. D'Emilio (189) and particularly Boyd (223-26) have provided important and useful discussions of the Tavern Guild. This section of my article builds upon these studies by utilizing the recently processed Tavern Guild Papers.

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Gayola 481

organizing potential of bar space. Bars represented one of the few semistable

homosexual gathering areas in the city, and guild members used these sites to raise money and disseminate information. Third, as small businesspersons, guild members were able to cultivate a professional homosexual identity in the press.54

The cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s helped bar owners win public support in their battles against police. As scholars such as D'Emilio and Richard Candida Smith have noted, the publicity given to both the

North Beach beat scene and the obscenity trials of sexually explicit avant- garde art expanded the boundaries of acceptable gender and sexual behav- ior.55 It was not unusual, however, for police leaders to simply ignore the press's critiques of its repressive tactics, and the SFPD's high brass generally

decreased the intensity and severity of its enforcement tactics only when the mayor or judges forced it to do so. By forging new alliances with liberal pundits and civic leaders, the city's gay bar owners ultimately pushed both city hail and the courts to restrain Cahill's crackdown. The gay and lesbian businesspersons in the guild made connections with liberal elites by proving

that their professional masculine image was not only culturally tolerable but also politically and financially useful. As Boyd reveals, the Tavern Guild opened its meetings to campaigning politicians and supplied them with both funds and votes.56 Bob Ross remembered these gatherings and explained

that by 1964 the guild had established itself as "the sounding board for the [gay and lesbian] community on politicians."57

Because the gayola scandal had shifted the power over the SFPD's gay bar policies off the patrol beat and into the offices of Christopher and Cahill,

the bar owners' success in centralizing the policing of homosexual drinking establishments made their new professional image particularly attractive to a young generation of establishment liberals intent on challenging the mayor's

54Boyd, 223-36; Tavern Guild Foundation, "What We're All About" (n.d.), TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 1. Gay bars held three fimd-raisers for the Mattachine Society in 1964. See Martin Meeker, "Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s," Journal of the History of Sexuality

10, no. 1 (January 2001): 109. For discussion of the "cross-pollination" between the Tavern

Guild and the Society of Individual Rights see "Herb Donaldson Interview," 8, "Shedding a

Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 97-025.

55D'Emilio, 176-82; and Richard Cindida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pt. 3.

56Boyd, 226. 57"Bob Ross Interview," 54, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 98-012. In

1964 the organization also established a political committee that arranged meetings with city

officials to build bridges between the guild and the existing city government. See Minutes,

19 May 1964, written 26 May 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13; and Minutes, 18 November 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13. The Tavern Guild also used bar benefits to make contributions that connected it with the city's other homosexual and nonhomosexual progressive agencies. See Tavern Guild Foundation, "What We're All About" (n.d.), TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 1.

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482 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

leadership of the city. This rising group of liberal journalists, lawyers, politi- cians, religious leaders, and businesspersons had first gained visibility during the late 1950s, when the city began debating law enforcement in the North Beach neighborhood. The city's conservatives encouraged the police to harass North Beach bohemians, warning that cultural and sexual pluralism threatened the city's civic reputation. The new generation of liberals, however, entered the debate by insisting that tolerance for cultural and sexual pluralism was both safe for the city's streets and a more modern, urbane, and self-assured

expression of a civic sensibility. They expanded the debate over police profes- sionalization, arguing that the city should curtail not only the patrolmen's independence in decision making about tactics but also the officers' powers to label cultural and sexual crimes. Moreover, the liberals recognized that the city's crackdown on homosexual bars would enable them to implicate Mayor Christopher and Chief Cahill in their charges of old-fashioned politics. (The young liberals had painted patrol officers as philistines and prudes in their dealings with the North Beach beats but had not been able to extend these charges to Christopher and Cahill.) The new generation of political liberals could use the gay bar discussions to present themselves as a hipper and more attractive alternative to the leadership in city hall. Thus, the rising liberals, including the reporters and editors at the Chronicle, began supporting gay bars and building bridges with gay bar owners.8

Evidence of the developing alliance between liberals and gay bar owners first appeared in the summer of 1961, when, just prior to the formation of the Tavern Guild, the police conducted a large-scale raid of the Tay-Bush Inn. In the aftermath of this event bar owners used their new professional homosexual image, their nascent coalition with liberal reporters, and the SFPD's new policing regime to curb the aggressiveness of Mayor Christo- pher and city hall. Police stormed the Tay-Bush Inn late in the evening of 13 August. A portion of the bar's 242 patrons were working class and people of color, but in the days following the raid the San Francisco Examiners

58San Francisco's professional gay image was first cultivated by the area's homophile activ- ists. The historian Martin Meeker explains that activists in the local Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were successful at injecting this new "mask of respectability" into the city's press. Indeed, journalists covering the gayola scandal took their cues from the homophile movement's images and described the gay bar owners as professionals (Meeker, "Behind the Mask," 81). For a similar analysis see Mark Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 212-19. George Chauncey argues that a new and self-consciously masculine gay male culture first arose in America's urban homosexual communities on a significant scale during the 1940s. Chauncey terms this image the "new virile look" and explains that homosexual men during this period could adopt a masculine identity because society as a whole was now dividing men along lines of sexual-object choice, not gender persona (358). Throughout the fifties middle-class homosexual novels and homoerotic muscle magazines continued spreading this masculine gay image. See Don Romesburg, "Camping out with Ray Bourbon: Traveling Female Impersonators and Queer Dread of Wide-Open Spaces, 1930-1970," unpublished paper, courtesy of the author, 25.

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Gayola 483

and San Francisco Chronicle's front-page accounts presented the Tay-Bush arrestees as white male professionals. The conservative Examiner was

critical in its descriptions of the Tay-Bush's bar scene, but the newspaper printed a photograph of some of the accused bar patrons: all white males

wearing suits and ties. Moreover, the newspaper calmly reported that the

Mattachine Society hoped to use the raid to build "tolerance" for gay and

lesbian people.5 The Chronicle offered a more sympathetic depiction of the bargoers and featured Bob Johnson, the white, gay, twenty-seven-year-old owner of the Tay-Bush Inn, as a persecuted professional. Characterizing Johnson as a martyr who "seemed more concerned about his patrons than

himself," the newspaper used Johnson's quotations to mock police for their parochial and prudish regulation of white men's sexual privileges.60

As liberals ridiculed the police moderates in the press and at city hall grew sensitive to charges of outmoded politics. Thus, some pundits began

accepting the professional homosexual bar image and called on law en- forcement to segregate rather than eradicate gay bars. Two months before

the Tay-Bush raid Guy Wright, a local newspaper columnist, stated that while he was neither "tolerant" nor "even broadminded" on the subject of

male homosexuality, he believed that local law enforcement should ease its pressure on gay bars and return to its earlier and less aggressive closeting

strategy. Wright argued that the closures of gay bars would simply push gay

men into heterosexual bars. But while Wright was ostensibly disgusted by the prospect of his own intimate contact with gay men, he also character-

ized the city's acceptance of closeted gay bars as a sign of its cosmopolitan self-assuredness. Remarking on the new law enforcement regime, Wright turned his scorn toward the ABC agents and quipped: "None of the cus- tomers is shocked by anything that goes on [in gay bars], only the tourists from the liquor board."6'

Chief Cahill could afford to ignore the liberal critics and even the calls by moderates for turning a blind eye to the gay bars. As an appointed official with strong backing by city hail, Cahill remained relatively insulated from shifts in public sentiment. His job security during the 1950s had rested on his ability to rid the department of corruption; in the 1960s it was based on his capacity to control mass demonstrations and the supposed threat of black male violence. He therefore ignored the subtle gestures of support for gay bars, and the SFPD continued warning the city of the dangers lurking

59"Vice Raid Justified-Mayor," San Francisco Examiner, 15 August 1961: 12; and "Vice Case to Test Public 'Tolerance,'" San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1961: 1. There

is evidence that in other cities police used raids to compel bar owners to make extortion payments. It is probable that some raids were used for this purpose in San Francisco prior to

Mayor Christopher's tenure. But after the gayola scandal Mayor Christopher and Chief Cahill

directed raids to eliminate payola opportunities.

6"Big Sex-Raid-Cops Arrest 103," San Francisco Chronicle, 14 August 1961: 3. 6""Separate Barrooms for the 'Third Sex'?" San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 26 June

1961: 15.

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484 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

within the city's homosexual closet. After closing the Tay-Bush Inn, for instance, police spokesmen emphasized the same-sex dancing they claimed had been occurring inside the bar as a sign of its immorality.62

Mayor Christopher, however, was much more vulnerable to shifts in public opinion. Sensing a political danger in his personal connection to the SFPD's gay bar raids, he adjusted his own rhetoric. Rather than characteriz- ing homosexual people as an insidious sexual threat, Christopher rationalized the Tay-Bush's closure as a response to dangers inherent in the crowded bar's alleged violations of fire codes. The mayor insinuated that the SFPD's goal was to maintain a protective closet for homosexuals in San Francisco and not to break open a dangerous or disruptive one. Christopher's shift in language reflected a change in policy. To distance Christopher from the gay bar crackdown Cahill decreased his department's gay bar raids. Arrests for lewd and indecent acts, lewd conduct, lewd vagrancy, and visitor to a disorderly house therefore dropped from 730 in 1961 to 217 in 1962 and to 195 in 1963. (These four charges were the most common accusations the SFPD used against homosexual bar patrons, but the department did not identify gay and lesbian bar arrests specifically. )63

After its formation the Tavern Guild also grew increasingly assertive in its legal challenges to police raids throughout the early 1960s. This

62San Francisco Chronicle, 14 August 1961: 3. 63"Vice Raid Justified-Mayor," San Francisco Examiner, 15 August 1961: 1; the San

Francisco Police Department, City of San Francisco, Annual Reports, "Adults Arrested and

Charged by Sex and Race" (San Francisco, 1961, 1962, and 1963), San Francisco Public Li-

brary. D'Emilio has noted that Christopher "'applauded' the raid as 'justified' and praised the

police for 'being on the right track'" (184). This is correct but misses the important change

in how the mayor explained the term "justified." Boyd attributes the post-1961 decline in

high-profile raids to the state legislature's rewriting of California vagrancy law, Penal Code

647a, which included the offenses of "disorderly conduct," "solicitation," and "lewd vagrancy." She mistakenly states that when the legislators revised the vagrancy code in June 1961, they

circumscribed the police's ability to arrest homosexual people for their gay status and thus

denied officers the "power to control and dominate queer public space" (Boyd, 216-19). But while the legislature reformed the vagrancy code to protect most citizens from status-based

charges, the lawmakers specifically strengthened the codes targeting gay and lesbian people.

As in the Valler,ga decision, Penal Code 647a allowed police to criminalize homosexual people by making criminal vagrants of anyone who solicited others to engage in "lewd or dissolute

conduct in any public place or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view," an extended definition of space that spoke directly to the semipublic, semiprivate nature of bars. Penal Code 647a also allowed police to consider as vagrants all persons who loitered at

a public toilet or who loitered around "any school or public place which children attend or normally congregate." In the 1960s American Civil Liberties Union lawyers and other civil libertics attorneys worked to constrict and overturn these provisions, primarily using argu- ments about the law's vagueness. Penal Code 647a remained on the books, however, until

it was overturned in the 1979 Pryor v. Municipal Court case, when a superior court judge accepted the argument that the statute violated due-process guarantees because it was vague

and arbitrarily enforced only against gay men. See "Appellant's Opening Brief," Stoumen v. Munro, 176-77; ACLU News, July 1961: 3, July 1963: 2, August 1963: 1, and October

1964: 1; and Eskridge, 110.

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Gayola 485

aggressiveness and the SFPD's continued repression fueled a rise in bar

owner participation in the guild. In the latter half of 1964 the ebb and flow of the Tavern Guild's active membership seems to have given way to

a steady and stable growth, and by November the guild's minutes were proclaiming that attendance "seems to get larger at every meeting."64 With growing energy and funds the Tavern Guild in the mid-1960s stood

securely at the center of the city's burgeoning gay rights movement.

THE NEW YEAR'S DAY BALL AND THE LIBERATION OF

SAN FRANCISco's GAY AND LESBIAN BARs

By the end of 1964 gay bar owners had used the professionalization move-

ment to constrict the policing options open to patrol officers and fostered

a public image that had somewhat restrained homophobes in city hall. But

bar owners still had little power over Chief Cahill. Indeed, while the SFPD leader had curtailed the department's attention-grabbing raids, he quietly

continued supplying the ABC with officers in its ongoing antihomosexual bar drive. In a city that was by that date dominated by concerns about black violence and mass protests bar owners could not build enough political

pressure to threaten the police chief's job security. The 1965 New Year's Day Ball, however, provided bar owners with a new opportunity to coerce

the chief and a new legal avenue by which to end police repression.

In 1964 the Tavern Guild used its fund-raising capabilities to help

launch an effort to bring together San Francisco's homosexual activists and the local progressive Protestant clergy. Traditionally, San Francisco's gay and lesbian activist groups had chosen obscure and unrevealing names for their organizations in order to shield them from public scrutiny. But by this point the gay and lesbian organizers of this effort felt comfort- able enough with their own professional image and protected by the legitimizing presence of the clergymen that they named this alliance the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH). The creation of the CRH marks the first time in American history that an organization used the word "homosexual" in its title.65

"Minutes, 24 November 1964, written on 3 December 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13.

65"Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Interview," 1 May 1990, 16-17, Scott Bishop Papers, San Francisco Public Library (hereafter SFPL), no. 90-11, box 1, folder 10; and "Cops Invade Homosexual Benefit Ball," San Francisco Chronick, 2 January 1965: 12. The CRH worked

to repay the Tavern Guild for its funding by excrting pressure on the ABC. A few days after six ministers from CRH conferred with the state liquor agency an ABC hearing board officer

broke from convention and ruled against an ABC agent making charges in a B-girl case. (A B-girl was a covert employee of the bar who induced male patrons to buy her cocktails. The bartender secretly served the B-girl nonalcoholic drinks so that she could continue encourag-

ing more drink orders.) The ABC hearing officer criticized the manner in which the agent

misrepresented himself in gathering the evidence. Minutes, 24 November 1964, written 3 December 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13.

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486 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

On 1 January 1965 the CRH held a New Year's Day Ball to celebrate

its incorporation. The SFPD initially signed off on the dance and granted

the temporary license for the event, but Chief Cahill backpedaled on the department's agreement, and on the night of the dance officers arrived with floodlights, cameras, and a stack of blank identity information cards. These scare tactics succeeded in sending a majority of the fifteen hundred attendees

back home, but five or six hundred braved the situation and passed by the

SFPD's flashing camera bulbs.'6 The CRH's religious leaders attempted to reason with the police, but

their efforts were hampered by the conspicuous absence of Catholic priests from their organization. In the mid-1960s the SFPD was still a force staffed overwhelmingly by Catholics, and neither the Catholic Church nor the city's

Catholic lay groups (which led local Catholic responses to so-called vice issues

until 1966) were pressuring the department to rethink its policing policies toward gay and lesbian San Franciscans. Indeed, the police may even have viewed the coalition of homosexuals and Protestants as a threat to the city's

old Catholic tradition.67 Thus, the police attempted to enter the ballroom illegally to find building code violations and arrested four CRH organizers who impeded their way.' When the police realized that they could not muster any grounds on which to arrest the revelers, they lined up outside on the

street and tried to incite a riot by taunting the guests in the ballroom. The CRH organizers linked their arms across the building's entrance to restrain the increasingly agitated dancers, and the police finally relented and left the event. Although the SFPD failed to make substantial arrests, the department probably viewed the evening as a success. As in earlier bar busts, the SFPD had been primarily interested in embarrassing gay and lesbian people and disrupting their attempts to socialize in public view.69

The following day the CRH struck back with a news conference in which the ministers and their wives lined up before the media cameras and railed against the police department for its tactics. The SFPD paid little attention to these protests, but the subsequent trial of the four CRH organizers arrested

'"Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Interview," 19, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-11, box 1, folder 9.

67"Robert Cromey Interview," 25 April 1990, 11, 12, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-1 1, box 1, folder 8; and "Herb Donaldson Interview," 14 February 1990, 2, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-1 1, box 1, folder 5. The participation of the Protestant ministers in the CRH did not necessarily reflect or lead to a more progressive attitude toward San Francisco's

homosexual population by the Protestant population at large. Many of CRH's most forceful religious spokesmen received their salaries from national or state organizations and were on special assignment or serving in missionary capacities. These religious leaders therefore did not have to answer to local congregations. See "Charles Lewis Interview," tape 1, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 02-169.

'"Herb Donaldson Interview," 50, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 97- 025; and "Charles Lewis Interview," tape 1, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 02-169.

69ACLU News, February 1965: 4; Bob Ross interview; and Boyd, 229.

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Gayola 487

that night represented a turning point in relations between the police and the local homosexual community.70

Fortuitously for the gay and lesbian activists involved, the trial of the four CRH organizers landed in the courtroom of Judge Leo Friedman, a liberal former defense attorney. For the past decade and a half the city's more con- servative judges had allowed police to give contradictory, inaccurate, and formulaic testimony in their antigay cases, but when the SFPD witnesses in the CRH trial failed to match their testimony to the charges they had issued, Friedman took the officers to task. Conducting much of the cross-examination himself, Judge Friedman ultimately directed the jury to deliver a not-guilty verdict. Momentously, Friedman then turned to the defendants and offered them the opportunity to file a wrongful arrest lawsuit.71

The gayola scandal had consolidated the responsibility over gay bars into the hands of the police chief, and the CRH now threatened Chief Cahill with a potential 1.5-nillion-dollar lawsuit. Cahill responded by ceasing the police department's large-scale bar raids, and the chief cut off his supply of plainclothes officers to the ABC. This latter decision left the ABC too undermanned to enforce liquor laws, and the agency was quickly over- whelmed by an upswing in gay and lesbian drinking establishments. Thus, through their manipulation of the SFPD and the police professionalization movement San Francisco's homosexual bar owners successfully established a stable social world for the city's gay and lesbian community.72

The gay and lesbian community's victory over the police department was far from complete. Chief Cahill had ended the department's support of

the ABC and had eliminated large-scale police actions, but the continued

70'Angry Ministers Rip Police," San Francisco Chronicle, 3 January 1965: IA; and "Robert Cromey Interview," 25 April 1990, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-11, box 1, folder 8.

71"Witness Breaks up a Courtroom," San Francisco Chronick, 11 February 1965: 2; "Trial Halted on Technicality," San Francisco Chronicle, 12 February 1965: 3; "Judge's Q. and A.

on Raid," San Francisco Examiner, 11 February 1965: 9; 'Court Orders Jury to Free 4 in Trial," San Francisco Examiner, 12 February 1965: 14; and "Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin

Interview," 20, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-11, box 1, folder 9. Serving as assistant

district attorney from 1920 to 1925, Friedman earned notoriety for prosecuting the Roscoe

"Fatty" Arbuckle case. Friedman then served nearly four decades as a criminal lawyer before

his election to the bench in 1963. See "Friedman's Big Hurdle to Municipal Court," San

Francisco Examiner, 6 November 1963: A.

72After nearly a decade the lawsuit was settled out of court for $50. "Bob Ross Interview,"

57, "Shedding a Straight Jacket," GLBTHS, no. 98-012; and Bob Ross interview. The New Year's Day Ball is a well-covered subject in the historiography of gay and lesbian San Francisco,

but historians have not previously discussed the potential lawsuit or its importance. Rather,

scholars have focused on the public support the ball organizers received from the city's Protcstant clergy and the acquittal the CRH ministers won in their trial. These studies have

then assumed that this negative publicity and failed prosecution persuaded the police to curb

their repression of gay bars. But the SFPD frequently ignored press conferences and critical newspaper reports, and police officers could still expect to secure convictions from the city's more conservative judges. For previous discussions of the ministers' press conference and the CRH trial sce Boyd, 234-35; and D'Emilio, 194-95.

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488 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

diffuse supervision and control of the SFPD's lower ranks made the chief largely unaccountable for individual acts of police harassment and brutal-

ity.73 Indeed, many rank-and-file officers remained only vaguely aware or completely ignorant of the raid on the CRH New Year's Day Ball and its

aftermath.74 Thus, in June 1965 the Tavern Guild worked to aid four gay men who had been severely beaten and unlawfully detained by eight po-

lice officers. To establish an organized response system to these individual encounters between homosexuals and policemen, gay and lesbian activists

created Citizens Alert, a police-brutality hotline service. Citizens Alert ultimately failed to reduce police brutality, but the organization proved an important vehicle in building alliances between gay and lesbian organizers and activists representing the city's other ethnic and racial communities who had also experienced police brutality.75 Gay and lesbian activists also started working to expand their political reach beyond their taverns and into the halls of government itself now that their bars were protected from police repression and their status as white professionals was more firmly

established. A new period in San Francisco's homosexual history began as leadership in the homosexual movement passed from gay and lesbian bar owners into the hands of full-time activists, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Moving police politics to the center of gay civil rights history reveals how San Francisco's gay bar owners used an existing discourse about police organizational reform to integrate their movement into the mainstream

political sphere. Earlier studies of gay and lesbian civil rights have discussed

the cultural changes that allowed activists to achieve access to public space and a mainstream political voice. In the best discussion of California's postwar cultural revolution Richard Candida Smith's Utopia and Dissent

shows how legal debates over the censorship of avant-garde art broadened mainstream acceptance of marginal gender and sexual behavior. Gay bar raids, Nan Boyd and John D'Emilio argue, allowed bar owners to capitalize on the electorate's increasing tolerance for sexual pluralism. The media's coverage of the bar raids provided bar owners with a venue in which to advertise themselves as culturally tolerable. Shifts in culture certainly helped

7While Cahill could expose a police officer's shakedown practices through a prearranged

sting, the chief could not re-create acts of brutality. Community members thus had more

difficulty holding Cahill accountable for not putting an end to brutality.

71 interviewed seven former SFPD officers who were walking a beat in 1965, and only two, both of whom eventually formed political alliances with gay and lesbian activists, rccalled

the ball or the trial.

75Minutes, 22 June 1965, written 1 July 1965, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, foldcr 14; and

John Mindermann interview. On Citizens Alert see San Francisco Chronick, 27 August 1967:

20. In 1965 the Tavern Guild also created an agreement with a bail bond agency in which the

agency examined the daily arrest records and notified the guild of any gay-related arrests that

had occurred in Tavern Guild bars. See Minutes, 22 June 1965, written 1 July 1965, TGSF,

GLBTHS, box 1, folder 14.

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Gayola 489

bar owners to win public sympathy, but scholars have overemphasized the role of public opinion in shaping SFPD policies. Gay and lesbian activists never created a public outcry powerful enough to threaten the job security of San Francisco police officers. Bar owners, however, used their clashes with the police to forge alliances with political elites engaged in an ongoing debate over police corruption and professionalization.

Between the end of World War II and 1966 the relationship between the SFPD and San Francisco's homosexual bars passed through three major stages. In the first period, the years before 1960, city leaders allowed patrol

officers broad discretion in both their definitions of and responses to criminal and homosexual behavior. Some police chose to regulate gay establishments through extortion, but as early as the mid-1950s business leaders began expressing concern over the SFPD's payola practices. The second stage, ini- tiated by the gayola scandal of 1960, freed gay bars from extortion. Power over the SFPD's gay bar policy then shifted into the hands of the mayor and the chief of police. At the same time these two civic leaders sought to eliminate the establishments that had provided the payola networks, and so they initiated raids on disreputable bars and supported state liquor agents in their undercover policing of gay and lesbian establishments. This centralized policing regime proved far more effective at closing homosexual bars, but the consolidation of policing power by the high brass also provided gay bar owners with more concrete targets. Bar owners removed the mayor from the campaign against gay bars by building alliances with a new generation of liberals. Even while it was difficult to apply the same political intimidation to the chief of police, the gay bars and liberals together greatly expanded the terms of the police professionalization debate. By 1965 the growing alliance between homosexuals and liberals had found its weak spot in the SFPD in the CRH's potential lawsuit. At this point the police-gay bar relationship entered a third stage. Gay and lesbian bar owners used both their status as

legitimate civic participants and their legal claim to force the chief of police to end the department's organized pressure on gay bars.

The story of liberation for San Francisco's homosexual bars suggests

how important it is for scholars of both politics and sexuality to reassess the relationship between urban citizens and urban government during the post-World War II era. Previous historians have correctly noted the massive expansion and centralization of government authority during the cold war period, but this trend did not always produce a single coordinated effect. For many marginalized San Franciscans beat patrol officers represented the government officials with whom they had the most day-to-day contact, and these relationships were highly contingent on the individual actors on the street. By exploiting the politics of policing, San Francisco's gay and lesbian bar owners used their street-level conflicts with the police to win unprecedented civic legitimacy.

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