San Diego’s LGBTQ history, viewed through the lens of its postwar gay bars and nightclubs (and through the voices of witnesses who lived through this history) in many ways parallels the development of the modern LGBTQ community in other large cities throughout North America, and gives the documentary, while regional in its focus, a wider relevance. From 2017 to mid-2018, I sorted through a multitude of photographs, gay periodicals, and ephemera in the process of producing San Diego’s Gay Bar History, a documentary that was initially broadcast in June 2018 on KPBS, San Diego’s public television station, and had its premiere at FilmOut 2018, San Diego’s LGBTQ Film Festival.
They are some of the many artifacts in the Lambda Archives, a repository for collecting, storing, and preserving the LGBTQ history of San Diego and northern Baja California. The images I’m marveling at offer candid glimpses of San Diego gay bar culture from different epochs in modern gay history. A third snapshot: a festive lineup of Halloween-costumed contestants-a drag version of Tippi Hedren (a stuffed crow entangled in her stylish platinum updo), a garish clown, and a butch female cowboy-all vying for prizes awarded long ago in an unidentified San Diego gay bar.
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Another photo presents a dance floor crowd, beaming faces glistening under a sheen of sweat, big 1980s hair and lip gloss in full effect on the women (and on some men, too). There’s a shirtless, mustachioed blond on roller skates in front of a 1965 red Plymouth Barracuda the position of the Giant Dipper roller coaster and street signage in the background establishes the photo was taken in the vicinity of the Apartment, a women’s gay bar that opened in Mission Beach in 1974.
I’m alone, but surrounded by faces smiling to me across the decades. I’m hunched over a smoky glass table covered with a treasure trove of photographs, shivering from the chilly air conditioning as much as from the excitement of discovering photographic gold nuggets. At the stroke of midnight uniformed cops burst into the bar, billy clubs swinging. Sixteen patrons were arrested inside the Black Cat, and police chased two more men into New Faces, another gay bar nearby.7:45 p.m., Lambda Archives, June 17, 2017 31, 1963, a dozen plainclothes policemen observed the New Year’s festivities inside the Black Cat, a gay bar in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood.
Its owner, Sol Stoumen, refused to pay off the police for protection against harassment, and his bar was routinely raided and fined from the 1940s through the early 1960s.
All the poets went there.” At a time when homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society were largely conciliatory to the police and to city officials, the Black Cat was noteworthy as a site of resistance. The poet Allen Ginsburg, who knew it in the ’50s, described it as an enormous bar with a honky-tonk piano that “everyone” went to: “All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. It wasn’t until after World War II, when gay men and lesbians swarmed San Francisco after service in the Pacific, that the Black Cat assumed a “gayer” personality.