Drag Black Cat Cafe Became A Gay Bar 1921 San Francisco with a hereafter
Last week’s Portals told the story of the first Black Cat Cafe, an Uptown Tenderloin dive driven out of business in 1921. Twelve years later, it reopened across town — and this incarnation would become a legendary watering hole and the stage for one of the city’s most unforgettable characters, Jose Sarria.
As Nan Alamillo Boyd notes in “Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965,” the new Black Cat was run by the same manager, Charles Ridley, who ran the original. The joint was on the edge of North Beach, at 710 Montgomery St. across from the fabled Montgomery Block building, and was frequented by an intriguing mix of bohemians, artists and waterfront workers.
In 1945, an Austrian Holocaust survivor and libertarian named Sol Stoumen bought it, and it began to attract a new clientele: homosexuals. A gay artist named Earl McGrath called the bar “a real drinking establishment. ... (There were) sailors and hookers and just everything in there. Intellectuals; painters; it was very ‘ odern,’ in that sense, because you had everything from transvestites to businessmen to girls out on dates with young boys.”
Not all the bar’s patrons were happy with the change. In his little book “Bohemian San Francisco,” Harry Evans wrote, “The Black Cat (once) was by far the best place for a wild drunk that an adventurer could hope for. But the place changed hands and the new owner encouraged the fruit and the place went to hell.”
Sin guide
Some regulars may have been unhappy, but the Black Cat’s growing reputation as a daring, very San Francisco place to go attracted tourists. A 1948 guidebook bearing the unsubtle title, “Where to Sin in San Francisco,” told readers, “Rebels have been flaunting convention at the Black Cat for over 20 years. During the war, many a Montgomery Street bohemian went forth to work or fight, but they’re back now. Any night you can watch genuine artists, intellectuals and andsoforths boisterously protesting, or being loudly indifferent to such common social practices as sobriety and amiable conversation.”
The Black Cat attracted many well-known artists, writers, actors and musicians, including Hassel Smith, Ed Corbett, Maynard Dixon, John Steinbeck, Tallulah Bankhead, William Saroyan, Bette Davis, Gene Kelly and Johnny Mathis. It was also a favorite watering hole of two inseparable police reporters, one from The Chronicle and one from the Examiner, who after 5 p.m. would wander down from the press room in the Hall of Justice — at that time just a block away — to quench their thirst, leaving word where they were in case a crime wave broke out.
But of all the Black Cat’s colorful cast of characters, the most remarkable was a native San Franciscan of Colombian descent named Jose Sarria.
After serving in the military, Sarria began studying to be a teacher, but was arrested for sexual solicitation in the men’s room of the Oak Room, a bar in the St. Francis Hotel known as an upscale pickup joint for gay men.
His teaching career derailed, Sarria tried his hand at the theater. He had always had a good singing voice, and he entered a drag contest at a gay bar in Oakland and won second place. This led to a gig at a famous gay-friendly bar called the Beige Room. From there he began working at the Black Cat — at first waiting tables, then singing and dressing in drag.
‘I made it gay’
In “The Empress is a Man: Stories From the Life of Jose Sarria,” Sarria told author Michael R. Gorman that when he first went to the Black Cat in 1947, “it was not like it was later. It wasn’t a gay bar. I 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.”
Even making allowances for Sarria’s hyperbolic tendencies — he later declared himself “Empress Jose the First” — his account wasn’t far from the truth.
Sarria quickly became famous for his drag act and his Sunday afternoon parodies of operas like “Madame Butterfly” and “Carmen,” which attracted audiences of hundreds of people. And his flamboyant act had a political edge.
He had always been comfortable with his sexual identity, and in the supportive atmosphere of the Cat, he left the closet behind. He addressed everyone who came into the club as if they were gay: “I told everyone that once you came in here, your reputation was lost.”
Out of the closet
He read the papers aloud and made witty comments on the news and on the gay community. By teasing the audience about their sexual orientation and making outrageous jokes, he implicitly proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with being gay.
And soon, his affirmation of gay pride became explicit. As Boyd writes, “Sarria’s performances, indeed the culture of the Black Cat, encouraged gay people to accept their homosexuality. Sarria insisted that living a double life (or staying in the closet) left gay people vulnerable to the police, and he championed the slogan, 'United we stand, divided they arrest us one by one.’”
At the end of every performance, Sarria would lead the audience in a version of “God Save the Queen,” which he rendered as “God save us nelly queens.” (A nelly queen is an ultra-stereotypical, limp-wristed gay man.) The song was at once a hilarious parody and an act of gay solidarity.
Political campaign
Sarria’s long tenure at the Black Cat helped transform it from a bohemian joint whose homosexual patrons were often in the closet into a genuine gay bar. And he took his crusade beyond the Black Cat: In 1961, he ran for city supervisor and finished with a respectable 5,613 votes. His campaign slogan was, “Gay is good.” He would have been not only San Francisco’s first gay, but its first Latino, supervisor.
Besides entertaining thousands, Sarria’s in-your-face persona helped change the way straight San Francisco thought about gay people. Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called him “the nightingale of Montgomery Street.” The ground-floor joint across from the old Montgomery Block had indeed revived the bohemian spirit of Mark Twain, Gelette Burgess and the other writers who had once gathered there.
But the authorities did not like the Black Cat and its gay clientele. They saw it as a hangout for “deviates,” and they were determined to close it down. Their long campaign to kill the bar — and the Black Cat’s defiance — will be the subject of next week’s Portals.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the 2013 Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: metro@sfchronicle.com
Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.
Comments