A Queer Capital under Construction

Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Nan Alamilla. Boyd Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii + 321 pp.

Despite San Francisco's reputation as a queer capital, the early phases of the city's gay and lesbian culture have not been fully documented. In Wide Open Town Nan Alamilla Boyd sets out to remedy that situation. Citing works like George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994); Marc Stein's City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves (2000), about Philadelphia; and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), about the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York, Boyd examines the evolution of San Francisco from a gold rush boomtown, to a Prohibition-resisting metropolis protective of its "vice" tourism, to a haven for gays and lesbians well before Stonewall.

The book devotes particular attention to the ways in which early bar society, harassed by police and turning increasingly toward self-defensive legal battles, encouraged the growth of a sense of community. Boyd carefully details the progress of these court battles and the two California Supreme Court decisions that guaranteed gays and lesbians the right of public assembly, as well as the efforts by police and Mayor George Christopher to resist these advances in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Boyd's meticulous research also reveals the evolution of the defense strategies of those arrested for "vagrancy," "disorderly conduct," or "lewd behavior" from an automatic guilty plea, entered to avoid public humiliation, to a growing tendency to resist police accusations in court and thus force police and city attorneys to prove their cases and defend the very constitutionality of the laws they sought to uphold. Boyd cites as a turning point in San Francisco's gay rights movement a 1961 police raid on the Tay-Bush Inn, in which, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, 101 "suspected sex deviates" were arrested (213) but only 2 were brought to trial.

While acknowledging the influence of and devoting a chapter to the efforts of homophile organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, Boyd compellingly argues for the conceptual resituation of bar culture alongside these organizations, as well as in opposition to their more conservative, "integrationist" impulses. For example, she cites court cases in which members of the Daughters of Bilitis, who at times discouraged "female transvestism" ("Truly self-confident people have no need to express themselves or barricade themselves by costume" [180]) and urged lesbians to accept their femininity, were hailed as models of lesbian behavior in comparison to the bar-going lesbians who were on trial.

Likewise, in contrast to scholars who cite World War II as the turning point in the formation of gay communities, Boyd suggests that San Francisco's liberal tendencies can be traced back to the heady days of the gold rush and the Barbary Coast. Here was a city in which prostitutes during the gold rush were welcomed into high society, "provid[ing] the city with its own version of a social aristocracy" (40), and in which police officers in the 1920s could be formally reprimanded for enforcing Prohibition laws (47). Boyd describes the cohabitation of prostitutes and queer men and women in early bars, as well as the way in which police looked the other way as male prostitutes in drag sought customers on Market Street in the Tenderloin (44).

Less theoretical and more anecdotal than some of its predecessors, Boyd's popular history is most compelling in its attention to lesser-known early figures in the effort to create queer identities and queer rights. The book sprang in part from oral histories compiled by Boyd, five of which are transcribed as chapter introductions. Those interviewed include José Julio Sarria, a famous drag performer who espoused liberationist views during his performances, urged audience members to come out of the closet, and was the first openly gay...