Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (review)

In this landmark work of U.S. queer history, Nan Alamilla Boyd aims to explain how San Francisco became a "wide-open town," a city not only home to "disproportionately large gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender [GLBT] communities," but one where "a queerness is sewn into the city's social fabric" (2). In analyzing that fabric, Boyd weaves together a social historian's interest in community studies and political movements with a cultural studies scholar's gaze upon transgressive practices. Boyd stands at the forefront of researchers now investigating not only "why do so many people associate San Francisco with homosexuals and homosexuality?" (1) but more critically, what are the implications for GLBT community politics and urban cultures? While other researchers investigating the city's queer history have trained their sights on social networking and on the city's Latino, transgender, and leather communities, Boyd reveals how queer public cultures—both female and male—developed from the late nineteenth century up through the mid-twentieth century. She also provides the most thorough examination to date of the connections and conflicts between bar-based lesbian/ gay communities and the emergent, mid-century homophile movement.

Boyd, chair and associate professor of Women's Studies at San Francisco State University, conducted forty-five oral history interviews with participants in the city's queer political and/or social worlds. She begins each of her five chapters with an oral history excerpt offering first-person accounts of the key events and themes of the subsequent chapter. The narrators include some of the better-known figures in U.S. GLBT history, such as Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the pioneers of the Daughters of Bilitis, and José Sarria, the Latino drag performer who became the nation's first openly queer candidate for political office. They also feature lesser-known figures such as George Mendenhall wistfully recalling the lost joy of "the secret society" (194) that once was queer life, as well as his openness about his sexual orientation (and even occasional sexual encounters) at his factory job. Complementing Mendenhall's rosy memories are the stories of Reba Hudson and Joe Baron, who recall how bar-goers negotiated police raids, entrapment, and other legal and political challenges to their communities. These narratives vividly illuminate how individual San Franciscans experienced the evolution of GLBT politics and public culture during the middle-third of the twentieth century. Moreover, the transcripts are especially valuable to oral historians as the interviewees speak to history, locating themselves in a broader narrative: Sarria declaring himself "the grandma of the community" (24) and Baron contextualizing local anxieties among late 1950s bar patrons in the McCarthy era and the Johns Committee purges in Florida, for example.

Over the first half of Wide-Open Town, Boyd traces the continuities and breaks between San Francisco's tourist-driven, pre-Prohibition bohemian homosocial cultures and the public worlds created by and for lesbians and gay men from the 1930s onward. Boyd deftly frames the growth of such communities within national developments such as Prohibition's repeal. During World War II, military and civilian police forces kept close watch over gay bars, while the early Cold War saw increased undercover policing. Such attempts to regulate queer space inadvertently fostered a new sense of collective identity and new strategies of resistance among GLBT San Franciscans. During the McCarthy era, lesbians and gay men increasingly owned and operated bars that sustained visible queer-affirming space, connected queer people with each other, and ultimately provided the foundation for political mobilization.

In contrast to bar owners and patrons ' defense of their collective rights to assembly, early homophile activists relied upon a discourse of individual privacy rights. The "antagonistic cooperation" (165) between San Franciscans engaged in these two forms of political resistance—a tension fundamentally grounded in racialized, classed, and gendered discourses of appropriate and inappropriate behaviors—comprises the core of the second half of Wide-Open...