Gay bars have always been places to find community, camaraderie, and cosmopolitans. But where there’s community, there’s activism. 

Gay bars have always been ground zero for planning protests and actions. For example, in Seattle, the Mocambo was where the Dorian Society would meet and strategize. But one of the most famous historical gay bars and activist hubs was the Black Cat in San Francisco.

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Though the Black Cat’s first iteration started in 1906 and became a place to see vaudeville, it closed in 1921 after police harassment. It reopened 12 years later, after Prohibition, with the same owner. But that owner sold the bar to Sol Stouman in 1945, who shepherded the Black Cat to regain its status as a cultural core. The Beats called the Black Cat home, and Jack Kerouac even honored it in his classic On The Road.

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It was under Stouman that the Black Cat grew its gay clientele. Though straight, Stouman was a Holocaust survivor, according to KQED, and accepted all comers. Between Stouman’s acceptance and the fact that many of the Beats were themselves gay, it’s not a surprise that the Black Cat’s status in what was then called the “homophile” community grew. 

Allen Ginsberg told the queer newspaper Gay Sunshine in 1973 that he found that the gay bar scene in San Francisco was much better than the one in New York City, saying that the city by the bay was “always more advanced… in terms of the acceptance of homosexuality. It’s like a Persian city.” 

Ginsberg had particular praise for the Black Cat, calling it the “greatest gay bar in America.”

“It was totally open, bohemian, San Francisco, Viennese; and everybody went there, heterosexual and homosexual. It was lit up, there was a honky tonk piano; it was enormous. All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. All the poets went there.”

Unsurprisingly, the Black Cat’s embrace of the queer community—combined with Stoumen’s refusal to bribe the cops with “protection money”—led to more police harassment, just like what sunk the original bar. The harassment even led to a 1951 state Supreme Court case, where the court ruled in Stouman’s favor. The court wrote that though many arrests had happened at the bar, there were no convictions nor any evidence of “illegal or immoral acts.”

Though the owner was willing to fight for his bar and the LGBTQ+ community’s rights, one name repeatedly comes up as the person who made the Black Cat truly what it was: José Sarria. Sarria started out as a waiter before entertaining the crowds with drag and eventually starting his organizing career. Sarria even told his biographer Michael R. Gorman that it was he who “made it gay.”

“I started performing more, and I started doing female impersonations. I began my opera parodies. I became very popular. I became the Black Cat,” he said.

Sarria would stage gay-themed parodies of operas; his most famous was his take on Carmen, which he set in contemporary San Francisco. He played the title role as someone who would pick up men in Union Square—then a hot spot for cruising—and escape the vice squad. In other performances, Sarria would read newspapers on stage and riff jokes on the stories of the day, according to SFGate. 

From the stage, Sarria frequently urged his audience to reject the closet. “United we stand, divided they arrest us one by one” was his catchphrase. Every performance would end with a performance of “God Save the Nelly Queens,” a pro-gay parody of the United Kingdom’s national anthem. An album of Sarria’s show, No Camping, was even recorded and released on a small-press label in 1960.

But hilarious as he was, Sarria didn’t just bring comedy to the Cat. He used the Black Cat as a launching pad to found a number of groups. First came the League of Civil Education in 1960, a political group designed to educate the outside community about gay rights. His work also galvanized the gay community to back his 1961 run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 

Sarrio was the first openly gay candidate for office in the United States. He came in fifth out of 29 candidates, and he said afterwards that his run made politicians pay attention.

“From that day on, nobody ran for anything without knocking on the door of the gay community,” Sarria said.

As important as the Black Cat was—and despite the bar’s state Supreme Court victory—police continued to harass it, as well as other gay bars. Though the 1951 ruling was the first time the state of California said that gay people had the right to congregate in public places providing no “illegal or immoral conduct” was happening, it also led officers to start using undercover police to entrap patrons, according to SFGate.

Five years after the ruling, Republican George Christopher was elected mayor of San Francisco. Backed by the conservative Christopher and one of the city’s newspapers, the Examiner, the SFPD increased its harassment of the gay community. There were laws against “impersonating a member of the opposite sex”, so Sarria gave drag queens badges reading “I am a boy” so it was clear they weren’t fooling anyone. 

Stymied by Sarria, undercover cops also tried to engage gay people into “lewd acts” (like—gasp!—kissing) so they could arrest them, and then use those arrests as a pretext to revoke a bar’s liquor license. This technique was more successful.

Though Stouman again sued, lower courts sided with the police and, this time, the state Supreme Court wasn’t interested. The bar’s true last hurrah was on Halloween of 1963, the day after the city stripped the Cat of its liquor license, but it limped along for another few months, attempting to make it on just food sales. 

After the closure of the Black Cat in February 1964, Sarria founded the homophile group, the Society for Individual Rights (better known as SIR) and co-founded the Tavern Guild of San Francisco. The Tavern Guild was a group of gay bar owners in the city, founded to help fight police harassment. But perhaps his most known organization is the Imperial Council of San Francisco, founded in 1965 as an offshoot of the Tavern Guild. 

Though much of Sarria’s best-known activism came after the demise of the Black Cat, it’s safe to say that without the Cat, his career would have looked much different. If it didn’t exist, Sarria would have likely made another gay bar his homebase. But without the Black Cat, and in particular, Stouman’s willingness to fight the police, Sarria may not have had such a safe place as a pulpit to organize the community while making them laugh. 

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