Though it closed six months after it opened - owner Tony Taverossi propositioned a member of the vice squad - it's success inspired a new generation of rough trade bars, many of which opened up in industrial confines of the South of Market district. Located in the Tenderloin District, Why Not? was San Francisco's first leather bar and served a clientele fresh from the rough, hierarchical, all-male world of the military. Members set up a phone-tree to warn each other of impending raids, set up relief funds and raised money for homophile groups like the Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society and the ACLU. In response to police harassment, San Francisco bar owners formed the Tavern Guild - the first gay business association in the United States - at the Suzy-Q bar on Polk Street. But in 1960, the "gay-ola" scandal exposing such bribes became a media sensation, and began a discussion about the rights of gays to equal protections under the law. Until 1960, most gay bars were expected to pay bribes to police officers for 'protection' from raids. The Handle Bar (1960), California and Hyde: He prevailed, providing sustenance to the growing homophile movement.
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I951, after two years of police harassment, owner Sol Stouman took the police to the California Supreme Court, and argued that a bar could not be shut down just because gay men congregated there. "There's nothing wrong with being gay - the crime is getting caught!" So said Jose Sarria, a waiter in drag who sang arias as he served hot dishes. Even mega-star Bob Hope popped in to see what was up at Finocchio's.Ĭapitalizing on the success of female impersonation clubs like Finocchio's, Mona Sargent opened a club where "Girls Will Be Boys," thus establishing the city's first lesbian club, and a trend: lesbian bars soon began popping up around North Beach. The drag show at Finocchio's was more of a tourist draw than an honest-to-goodness gay club, but it helped bring gay culture - and drag culture - into the mainstream spotlight. It was shut down by the vice squad almost as soon as it opened, after a high-profile judge was linked to bar, leading to a reform movement that helped shut down the infamously sexually liberal Barbary Coast district.
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The bar featured cross-dressing waiters who would perform sex acts in nearby booths for a $1, a huge sum back in those days. San Francisco may have had gay bars before the The Dash, but none were as notorious. Below are some seminal SF bars that not only helped turn a city queer, but helped launch a revolution.
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They may not have the respectability of PAC or a the picket fence, but bars were often at the frontlines of our struggles. I was struck by how many of the battles we fought - and won - started in these bars, and how often bars served as a launching pad for our claims, places where activities became an identity. The project, part of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, shows a lost world of piano bars and bathhouses, butch-femme discos and beachside hustlers. After several prominent bars in San Francisco started shuttering - victims of Manhunt and Grindr and time - I started mapping a city's worth of shuttered gay bars. We don't give gay bars the respect they deserve. (Above: A scene from The Tool Box depicted in a Life magazine story called "Homosexuality in America.")