← New Books Network
New Books Network
Damon Scott, "The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco" (U Texas Press, 2024)
01:09:59
An interview with Damon Scott
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we are speaking with Dr. Damon Scott about his book published by the University of Texas Press in 2024, titled the City Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Post War San Francisco, which is a really interesting history. It's a history of a queer environment, it's a history of urban development, it's very much a history of a post war city, trying to figure out what that means in terms of labour, in terms of economics, in terms of city planning, in terms of what the city wants to be. So there's obviously quite a lot to get into. So, Damon, thank you so much for joining us to tell us all about it.
- [01:53]
C
Miranda, thank you so much for that rousing introduction and also your interest in my book. I'm happy to be here to talk about it.
- [02:00]
B
I'm glad to have you. Could we start please with you introducing yourself a bit and explaining why you decided to write this?
- [02:08]
C
Of course, sure. So again, my name is Damon Scott. I'm a geography professor at Miami University of Ohio. This is my first book, first full length monograph, and I think the best way to kind of introduce the book is to say a little bit about how it did come about as a. My very first foray into kind of the archives. I see myself as an urban historical geographer who looks at questions of the post war city and its impact on the social geographies of people, particularly queer people. And so as a graduate student, I spent a summer as a summer intern at the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California. Which is essentially a community based archive in the city of San Francisco that has its roots back in the late 1970s among a bunch of people who were sort of living through a changing city and collecting oral histories, collecting organizational records, collecting publications into this rich archive of material about the queer history of San Francisco in the kind of Bay Area region. When I arrived as a graduate student in geography, they took an interest in my background in cartography and ability to use mapping software to generate spatial representations of places. And so they connected me with one of the archivists who was the keeper of this amazing list. People refer to it as the. Is the cites list or the queer cites list. The person that I met with had inherited it, I think, from several other people who had worked on it. And essentially it was a set of word files that all had tables in them that included names of places, addresses, and in some cases, information about dates in which particular sites in the city had some connection to kind of gay history or the gay past. Included bars, bathhouses, restaurants, sites where there were raids, A whole bunch of different things. They asked me to create a map and I created a map, A large poster size map of this database. Again, since they're just addresses and names of places. In the process of creating that map, I kept running into these problems, these mapping errors. The software package that I was using kept saying, unable to map these places. And I looked more closely and it was a handful of places on the San Francisco waterfront at the end of Market street, in the area around the Ferry Building. Was anyone able to map them? What I quickly realized are these places there was maybe 10, 15 places or so, or at least names and addresses, is that those addresses no longer existed Because I was using a modern contemporary map. And I was trying to map them in an area that had been a 28 block area that had been torn down and rebuilt. And so not only were the buildings gone, but the street grid was completely been reconfigured. And so this book really is the story of those places that I was unable to map. In that early foray and in the process of writing the book, it took me into a lot of different directions and a lot of different archives. Most Importantly, it took me into the archives of the city to try and understand a little bit more about the urban planning history and urban development history of San Francisco in the post war period. Because many of these places dated to the late 1940s and they all disappeared in the early 1960s. So it's really the results of my quest to understand the origins, history and fate of a handful of bars on the San Francisco waterfront that flourished in the two decades after World War II.
- [06:18]
B
Thank you for that wonderful introduction to the project and the book and how it so helpfully lays out where we're looking and when we're looking. Can we therefore talk about what we're looking at? What do you mean by queer land use and how do you use this role in identifying the kind of what at the focus of the book?
- [06:40]
C
Great question. Yeah. Queer land use is a term that I, that I came to, I began using myself. It just kind of emerged from trying to understand the histories of these places and what they were, what they. What they. How they originated. It's a term that I coined. It's not one that I found elsewhere. And it was a helpful term. It has been a helpful term because what I was really looking at are patterns of commercial activity that accommodated non normative sexual desires during this period. Places that provoked anxieties about urban decline, places that undermined urban land values, and places that fueled post war urban redevelopment projects. I like the word queer land uses better than maybe more familiar terms like gay bar. The kinds of places I'm talking about were largely drinking establishments, but it also includes hotels and lunch counters and different kinds of drinking establishments. I like queer land uses better than gay bar because gay bar to me signifies a more kind of sexual identitarian sort of politics that emerges in the 1970s and a little sort of later period. It's not that gay bar was not a term that was used earlier. The earliest occurrence I've seen of the use of the term gay bar in the city of San Francisco was in the mid-1950s. But Queer Land uses signifies a much more inclusive way of thinking about sexual and gender non normative populations and publics that inhabited these places. And also again, these places were not just bars. The final thing I'll also say is by intentionally focusing on and using the word land uses, I really want to center the narrative in the book on questions of land ownership, land tenure, property leases, and in particular the role of state actors operating under a very particular vision for managing post war urban development in normalizing and stigmatizing different kinds of Commercial activities. It's really about the ways in which people and city leaders, particularly people using the powers and tools of urban planning and urban design, that are trying to kind of make changes in this area. And they're talking about it in often stigmatizing ways. The book focuses on how marginalized sexual subjects created, adapted, defended, and reconstituted queer land uses in the face of large scale urban landscape destruction. And I'll just say one more thing about land uses. This area, Again, roughly a 28 block area at the foot of Market street near the Ferry Building, historically, was a place where there was a jumble of different, what I refer to as sort of sailor town land uses. There were hotels, cigar stores, clothing shops, coffee shops, naval stores, locker clubs. Places that people who were tied into the maritime economy, either because they were dock workers loading and unloading boats, ships, or because they were sailors who were passing in and out of the port. This was the place that they stayed in town, often in between work assignments. So the mix of kinds of buildings there that were really dedicated to this sort of subset had a kind of occupational, kind of maritime economy that sort of underlied the earlier use of those areas.
- [10:23]
B
No, that's very helpful. Thank you for helping us understand kind of what we're looking at, who we're talking about, both in terms of minority sexuality as well as the jobs that we're looking at. That does very much come into play as the time goes on. But I do want to add one more thing in or really ask you to add one more thing.
- [10:45]
C
Of course, sure. Yes, please.
- [10:48]
B
To what extent was this waterfront with people on land at sea going back and forth between them, a variety of sexualities? It's, you know, different kinds of businesses. To what extent are we also talking about a racially integrated place or a racially mixed place? And what were some of the drivers of that?
- [11:10]
C
Really, really great question. I'm really glad that you picked up on that, that thread. To kind of understand a little bit more about the who of sort of who inhabited and passed through the waterfront during the 1930s into the 40s and the 50s and 60s, it's important to know a little bit about kind of the history of maritime labor unions and union organizing. And I really have to give credit to the amazing trailblazing work of Alan Barabay. His book Coming Out Under Fire talks about experience of gays and lesbians during World War II. And his subsequent research is focused particularly on a group called the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which was a really important labor union operating on the Pacific coast, out of Pacific ports. And in his work, what he has sort of shown is that as early as the 1930s, San Francisco was a center of a very particular kind of like, cross racial, cross sexual kind of social solidarity within the labor union movement. And it occurred in part because of the dramatic advances that came in the wake of a major strike in 1934 that shut down the western ports and resulted in maritime workers having much more leverage over the conditions of their labor. In particular, what it meant is that maritime laborers were able to organize and negotiate labor contracts over time and also have the ability to set up their own hiring halls. These were places where they would keep a roster of active members of the union. They would sort of rotate through job assignments, and they would detail or they would send work gangs or labor crews to the waterfront to staff these contracts that they had negotiated periodically with shippers. And so this sort of system of contract labor with labor union halls also had within it. I'm going to get into your question about kind of the racial kind of geographies of this system. Maritime labor, maritime trades were segregated in a kind of racial hierarchy. And in particular, the waterfront workers who were part of the merchant marines. When I say merchant marines, I'm referring to the people who were working in the civilian, naval, non military people, but working aboard ships at sea. Within this labor force, you had an important subset of them that were part of the stewards department of ships. And what that means is, particularly on passenger liners, these are the staff aboard ships that would tend to the needs of the passengers. So the stewards department had the cooks, the janitors, the cabin attendants, the pastry chefs, the bartenders, the porters, A whole mix of the kinds of people we often think about as being associated with a hotel on land. This was a kind of fraction of the labor force on these passenger ships in the 1930s and 40s. They tended to be disproportionately places that had a higher number of people of African American. There were more black workers working aboard this kind of labor and ships, as well as what were referred to at the time as queens, gay men who worked as waiters or other stewards aboard ships. And so in the 1930s, after these labor unions were able to kind of create these hiring halls, you see a growing power and leverage and social solidarity among people in this kind of like, maritime trade group. And they often kind of fought against efforts to undermine the solidarity of the group that came from either kind of racial divisions or homophobic divisions or ideological divisions. And again, I'M drawing a lot on Alan Barabay here to kind of draw this out. They were very proud. This labor union, the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, were very proud about fighting against what they referred to as red baiting, queen baiting and race baiting of their unions. And so what happens during World War II? So this is already established in the 1930s. What happens during World War II is there's a major labor shortage on west coast ports, in particular in San Francisco, which is really the center of operations for dispatching troops to of the Pacific Theater war. So large numbers of service members coming through, but also a lot of ancillary wartime industries involved and not a lot of workers. And so during this time period, 1940s, these labor unions on the waterfront, maritime unions of the civilian Navy became much more racially integrated because of the demand for labor. And also certain labor unions having a history of being a little bit more open to kind of racial integration. And so by the end of World War II, it's estimated that about 20% of the longshoremen in San Francisco, the people loading, unloading ships, were African American. And it's estimated that in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which had a membership of about 19,000 people, about half of them were African American by the end of the war. And so I can see this from sort of statistical, demographic, sorts of bits and pieces I could find, but also you could even see it in the land uses of the kinds of places and who were occupying them. On the San Francisco waterfront, I saw examples in census records of several different residential hotels that were part of this maritime sailor town economy, of sailors staying in town in between sets of sea that was predominantly African American. We saw also kind of a jazz nightlife culture in some of the bars on the San Francisco waterfront, as well as from oral histories, some recollections of cross racial sexual tourism and same sex desire in the basements, in cruising zones and in the YWCA on the San Francisco waterfront.
- [17:51]
B
That paints a very clear picture of sort of where we're at at the moment of ending World War II and also helpfully how we got there. So thank you for that answer. If we then move to the post war word really in the title, there's a pretty big change that happens to this community that you've just described and sort of set up for us with the merchant Marines and the naval forces that to my reading, when I read that part in the book, I was like, wow, and there's still a waterfront after this, so can you walk us through kind of what is this big change and what does it do to the Queer Waterfront?
- [18:35]
C
Yeah, well, great question. And what I would, what I would say is I think things really get complicated and interesting in the late 1940s. And it's not really the. It's not World War II and the ending of World War II. It's the onset of the Cold War. It's this rising tensions in the wake of the communist revolution in China. There's an enormous sense of anxiety and concern about subversives entering into the country and undermining American political life and cultural life and power structures and so forth, as we all sort of know about during the Cold War. But the way it kind of played on the West Coast, I think deserves more attention. And I've tried to draw some of this out in the book, and that is that there was a great deal of concern about these port facilities and the potential for the infiltration in port facilities of this sort of spreading communist threat throughout the Pacific. And what begins to happen, and it happens first under the Truman administration and then again under the Eisenhower administration, is a program to systematically screen subjective subversives and homosexuals out of the merchant Marines. And other scholars have written very beautifully about the ways in which during the Cold War, homosexuals were targeted in all kinds of different sort of government bureaucratic and military positions. A lot of that focuses on, in part, what happens at the federal level in Washington, D.C. but it also is happening systematically on west coast ports in particular, because west coast ports and west coast labor unions had a longer history of being more ideologically aligned with leftist causes, had been more organized, and were also on the western flank of the country facing the Pacific Rim. Right. And so one of the first places a systematic program was set up to issue papers to port workers and then check the identities of those workers against records. Criminal records happened on the San Francisco waterfront. And the Marine Cooks and Stewards union was one of the. The sort of primary, targeted most leftist sort of labor unions that saw the beginnings of this intensive sort of scrutiny. Right. Well, similar things are also happening in the longshoremen's union and then in a non civilian context. It's also happening in a military context through sort of the armed forces as well. And so this process of screening really systematically kind of unrolls in the early 50s through a series of, again, these administrative state sort of control over the labor unions leads to a population of displaced maritime workers who are no longer given port access to jobs on the waterfront. Yet they are still hanging out. They're still going to. They're seeking out opportunity in these informal waterfront hangouts, these hiring halls, the bars, the taverns, the cocktail lounges, and the hiring halls on the waterfront. And San Francisco becomes a really important place where a lot of this activity is happening, I think in part because there's this idea that San Francisco is a place that at least has a longer history of this success in advocating for and having sort of social solidarity among waterfront labor union workers. Right? And so. So that begins happening, and you start seeing then, in the context of lavender scare, you start seeing local officials and state officials identifying and calling out and targeting bars. And one of the bars that was targeted early on was the Black Cat Cafe. The Black Cat Cafe is a place that many people have written about as a place that the owner of that bar successfully fought a long legal battle that went all the way up to the California Supreme Court. And one of the key issues in that battle was over whether or not he, as a straight man, owner of this bar, had the legal right to serve homosexuals. And he won that case. And it was seen as a kind of civil rights victory, early civil rights victory for gay lives and people. But it actually emerged in one of these bars that was tied very much into the kind of west. West coast kind of maritime waterfront labor economy, although it wasn't directly on the. On the waterfront. I'll just add a couple other things. You start also seeing in about 54, 55 places like the sea Cow Cafe, which was a bar that was actually the very center of this earlier labor fight that I mentioned in 1934 that kind of established the greater leverage for Maritime Unions by 1954 is a place where transgender and queer people are sort of hanging out, and it's being raided by the police. And also a place that gets a shout out. As I mentioned in the Mattachine Society, homophile organization had an early conference in the city of San Francisco and offered the conference goers a kind of short sort of guide to the city of places to go and suggested that they go to the Sea Cow Cafe for beer and semen. S E A M A N Right. And it is now becoming to look like and take on the character of a gay bar. Right? Or at least in the parlance of the time period, what was referred to by the police and in the press as a, quote, hangout for homosexuals.
- [24:50]
D
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can Help you choose an option that's right for you. Whether you prefer talking in person on the phone or using the award winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor. State Farm is there.
- [25:15]
A
New year, same extra value meals at McDonald's.
- [25:19]
C
So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.
- [25:31]
B
All right, well, you, you've mentioned the police, so I think this is a good time to bring them into the conversation now that we've got an idea of what, what's happening and developing on this waterfront. And as you just mentioned, right. Gaining, it's known, it's gaining some amount of notoriety. So how do the police, how does the city government react to all this?
- [25:53]
C
Yes, well, you know, I guess when I started this project, you know, and from some reading histories of the city and you know, kind of like, kind of popular cultural kind of understandings of like, you know, the history of this terrible period of bar raids in the city that, you know, left, you know, queer people in the city, you know, terrorized and afraid to kind of go out. And which I think some of that, that a lot of that did happen. When I look at the sources and you look at kind of the commercial histories of some of these bars, what you realize is you see a lot more persistence than actually closure. So the places that I was seeing, they lasted a really long time. But if you only look at the periodic sensationalized police stories in the newspapers, stories of public crackdowns or street sweeps or roundups, and those definitely did happen and they did terrorize people. And that was a really dark, terrible period. What you also begin to learn and you sort of see is that those places very quickly and quietly sort of reopened. And some of them, there's evidence of actually the direct role or participation of police in allowing them or facilitating them to sort of do operate and remain open. And so, for example, a place called Jack's Waterfront Hangout or Hideaway had different names for a period that it was in operation, was actually owned by the Port of San Francisco and then owned and then sold to the California Department of Highways. And those state entities operated as essentially the landlord for what was a kind of known gay bar. Right. These places advertise relatively openly in coded language. But it was kind of a little bit clear what was going on in nightlife columns of the city in regular newspapers. But the most Damaged sort of evidence of the kind of awareness and participation of police in the operation of some of these bars is the Gayola scandal that kind of broke through into the headlines in 1960. What it exposed is a whole system of police graft in which police officers and also state liquor agents were showing up on a monthly basis to get a cut of the proceeds of the bar tabs, and also maybe picking up a couple bottles of liquor, sometimes bringing their wives or girlfriends. It was essentially kind of a holder. How I sort of think about it is it's a little bit of a holdover of a kind of like a prohibition sort of world of speakeasies, where places are kind of hidden and concealed from sort of plain view, but not really to sort of completely hide them or make them invisible, but instead to allow law enforcement plausible deniability when they're exposed that they didn't know anything that was going on. They were unaware those things were happening. And so I did see bits and pieces of examples of the role of police in actually facilitating opening and the closure and the movement of some of these places. And what that added up to me was to sort of see that by the late 1950s, the period of sort of sensationalized bar raids and bar crackdowns splashed over the news. It tended to kind of come around, around political mom and some political decision times had turned into actually a process of kind of like trying to sort of manage or steer queer nightlife away from certain areas and towards other areas. So I think there's a spatiality to this that you can kind of look at. If you look at opening and closing and some of the decisions that were made that come out of this Gayola case and sort of why, where there was permissiveness and where there wasn't permissiveness. And you see a lot more crackdowns on, for example, a neighborhood called north beach, more crackdowns in the Tenderloin, and a more kind of laissez faire attitude about the waterfront. And what I attribute this to is that by the mid-1950s, city leaders, elected officials, and also business leaders working together, had already kind of settled on this idea that the San Francisco waterfront, at least the area around the Embarcadero, was going to be redeveloped. It was going to be transformed into a totally different physical landscape that took advantage of the two new major bridges that spanned the bay that were open at the beginnings just before the start of World War II, but never really had the full effect of transforming commuting patterns and land use patterns. Those become very Much on the mind of city leaders in the Post World War II period about how to shift away from a kind of maritime, waterfront, ferry building oriented world to one that was devoted to the automobile. And also to reconfigure and rethink about the city as being really the administrative and financial core of an expanding Bay Area metropolitan region in which the kind of maritime land uses and the maritime kind of infrastructure would be relocated out of San Francisco and largely shift to either the periphery of San Francisco or across the bay to Oakland. So those sort of longer range sort of plans were already kind of being talked about, often behind closed doors. And this is the moment also in which essentially they had kind of given up on the waterfront and treated it as a kind of managed vice district and steered queer nightlife to Lower Market street for a brief period during which it kind of grew and flourished in pretty amazing ways.
- [32:14]
B
In some ways. I want to not stomp on the flourishing in amazing ways, but we do have to kind of stick with the actual history, unfortunately. So staying on the. I don't know if we want to call them evil, corrupt politicians, that might be going too far the other direction. But this whole plan for the redevelopment behind closed door side of things seems to come out in the open very much around this word blighted.
- [32:40]
C
Yes.
- [32:41]
B
When and why does that word really become. In a lot of ways, it seems a weapon against this flourishing community. Tell us about kind of this word and the role it plays.
- [32:54]
C
I will do that, but let me just circle back to flourishing and I'll just say there are bits and pieces and glimpses of this flourishing queer nightlife world on the waterfront that I was able to sort of gather and consolidate and kind of interpret from this amazing archive of oral histories that were collected not by myself, but by people who are connected to the Gay Lesbian Historical Society. These are interviews of people, many of them World War II veterans or people who transited the city during this time period, who weren't really being interviewed about the waterfront itself, but were just being interviewed about their experience of the city and what it was like. And often you see these bits and pieces and references to places on the waterfront. You can stitch them together and kind of get a sense of the flourishing of it. But to your question about the blightedness, actually the connection between flourishing and blightedness. So blight is a very specific word that has a lot of a power. Blight is a word that is used in a kind of planning context with legal implications to declare an area blighted. This Was a kind of administrative procedure that came about as a result of urban redevelopment laws, One of the first urban redevelopment laws in the country. It was a California community redevelopment law in 1945. And one of the justifications behind that law was to actually redevelop the San Francisco waterfront. So very early on, one of the main projects the state legislature in Sacramento wanted, among other things, Was to kind of redevelop the San Francisco waterfront. At that moment, they were focusing on the kind of the produce market area, the area where the warehouse district that. Where fruits and vegetables were being brought into this, the city, to be distributed by retailers. And so in that law and other laws, blighted. To declare something blighted means to create a map and draw a line around a certain area of the city and designate it blighted, which opens up the possibility of utilizing state power of eminent domain to acquire land, to put it to a higher economic purpose. So the way they would operationalize or kind of calculate what blight was Is an area, a block, a neighborhood, a section of the city that is taking more tax revenues than it's giving back. It's a net drag on the city's coffers. It's a kind of economic kind of formula in there to kind of figure that out. Once those areas are declared blighted, what that means is they are candidates for applying for large amounts of public funds to acquire land buildings from owners at fair market price for public use, Tear those buildings down and repeal them. And so there's state power and also money that goes along with declaring things flighted. It's a way of condemning something. But it's combination that has the power, full power of governmental authority to kind of intervene in the urban land market and completely tear down and rebuild sections of the city. And so the implication was for the San Francisco waterfront. And there were several. The beginnings of rumblings of plans to redevelop the waterfront and describing it in kind of like pejorative ways, that it was obsolete, that it was dilapidated, that it was dirty, that it was dangerous. There was a site of sexual predation and gender abnormality. These are all kinds of tropes that were used to kind of reshape the imaginary of what was going on in the waterfront, to sort of promote and justify and rationalize declaring the air blighted. Those all took time to kind of work their way through. But the air was officially blighted, declared blighted in 1954, 55. And in that blight decoration, city leaders drew a line around 28 blocks, which really pretty much corresponded to most all of the sort of maritime land use quarter of the city, which was the produce market. But other things as well, like these sort of hotel, maritime Siemens hotels, other sorts of things. But it took about 10 years or so, a little bit less than 10 years to actually act on those plans. And so once it's supplied, it actually it discourages any further investment. It creates this sort of holding pattern of these places where there's this intense desire of the state to kind of acquire this land, but there's also this interest in downgrading its value so that you can actually purchase it for a lower and lower value. So there was a sort of logic here in steering queer nightlife to the waterfront as a way to further depress the sort of, you know, land values and the cost of acquiring this land, to rebuild it. And I think it was in that logic that this sort of, like, moment of allowing things to happen there on, you know, unabated and relatively unpoliced, but, you know, subject to extortion by law enforcement creates this sort of context in which there is a lot of queerness happening on the waterfront. I mean, the descriptions of the San Francisco YMCA in the 1950s from multiple people who visited there and recalled them in oral histories are lurid. I mean, they just. They refer to places like an open brothel that the people who even live in the city would sort of check in for the weekend because they knew that the shower stalls were kind of a cruising zone that people had. It was just a kind of open sexuality in the halls of this ywca because it was a kind of anything.
- [39:12]
B
Goes kind of zone, which is fascinating thinking about kind of what the word blighted means legally, economically, and also sort of in the popular imagination. Is there anything further you'd like to tell us about queer land uses after kind of this word has been deployed, but as you said, as it's sort of trickling down and hasn't actually kind of kicked people out yet.
- [39:37]
C
Yeah. So in this period I just referred to as a period of flourishing, and I would say that period is sort of like the late 50s to early 60s. You get interesting characters. I shouldn't say character interesting. The kind of coalescing of a kind of a queer bar culture along the waterfront and one of the interesting places that bring it to the book, there's a couple chapters that focus on specific locations and how those sort of changed over time. And they're kind of meant to kind of go together to sort of see how things Were under this older regime of police controlled, managed, regulated, sort of speakeasy. Like underground, like vice. And that was a place called the Ensign Cafe. Had some other names as well. On one hand, it goes back all the way to World War II. At least, if not older. And then across the street, there was another place. The address was 90 market. But the places that were in 90 market. The names of places changed. There were multiple places in the same space. It was a really large space that was. Had a cocktail lounge with multiple bars in it. It had a restaurant in the front. From the outside, it seemed relatively unassuming. One door or two. But once you entered, you could go all the way back to the building. And it really occupied much of the lot of that area. That building, 98 Market street was the site. And this really, really blew my mind. And this actually kind of came out of trying to understand a little bit more. About the history of these places. There's a very close connection between 90 market and the Black Cat. And that connection is in the sort of actions and operations. And the life of a really important and treasured figure in San Francisco. Jose Sarria. Who's known pretty well as somebody who was a singing waiter at the Black Cat. Who went from singing kind of campy sort of songs to some crowds. To then offering a kind of regular Sunday drag performance. In which he lampooned the police and drew big crowds. And always ended his performances with a kind of an appeal to the people in the crowd. To kind of stay together, to hang together, to, you know, together. You know, sang together. If we're divided, they'll catch us one by one. With something that affect what he said. Well, people in San Francisco know a lot about this figure. And he's even has a national sort of profile in terms of importance. And it's largely linked to his. Not just his role at the Black Cat. And kind of from the stage, you know, calling on people to kind of come together. And form a community and act together. But also for his being the very first person. To run as an openly gay person. For a position in public office. He ran for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. It didn't win, but it was a demonstration of the political power. And the size of the gay community in the city. And he has a much more interesting and even more compelling kind of life beyond that. In which he was very much involved. In the creation of a whole organization. That organized queer bar performers. Into a kind of pantheon of aristocratic realms and regions. In the international court system of drag. That is international and still exists today. Anyway. So that's a lot about Jose Cerea, but was not clear before I wrote this book. And what the book does show is that Jose Zurrillo was really instrumental in actually expanding beyond the black cap to setting up operations in 90 market, which was a much larger venue which had a showroom and a stage. I got receipts in his personal archives of buying lumber and nails and things to kind of reconfigure the interior of that space to make it his big sort of show palace. He kind of essentially was the manager and he ran the place, but he also set up in the front of it a lunch counter. And he was aspiring business person, not just a performer, but also a business person. In his lunch counter. And I think there's really interesting parallels to other kind of civil rights sort of histories of lunch counters and the role of kind of mobilizing people to kind of push back against state violence. So he's running this lunch counter in 1960 or so in 90 market, in the center of center of this sort of urban redevelopment area. And across the street is Southern Pacific, which is a big transit shipping company. And during lunch hour, a lot of its employees are flooding out into the street and coming across the street and having lunch. And a lot of them are queer. And so people in these reminiscences of San Francisco during this time period talk about the Southern Pacific building, which had a giant sign on the roof with its initials S.P. it had the reputation, it had this sort of nickname as the Swish palace, because the large number of queer, like clerical staff that would sort of flood across the street, you know, at the end of the day, but also during lunch, they would come across the Jose Seria's place. And the executives at the Southern Pacific tried to shut him down. They tried to put him out of business. They threatened his customers that if they continue to go there, that they would be fired. And Jose Sarria sort of talks about in an oral history that was the impetus for him to actually get organized, to kind of mobilize people to show political power and strength at the voting box. So I think it's powerful and interesting that right here in the middle of this urban redevelopment area, this sort of entrepreneurial kind of queer drag person, who's the son of immigrants from Latin America, is seizing on and taking his sort of political power as a person who can rally people, his customers and people in this kind of bar culture on the waterfront to assert their rights in the community. And he also gets involved not only in running for Supervisor. But he also gets involved in starting one of the very first newspapers, gay newspapers in the city called the League of Citizens Education, the News, or the Citizens News. The names change a couple times. It begins publication in 1960, and it becomes publication as actually that the organ to promote his candidacy. But it also becomes the first, I think, the first I've seen, first example of a gay newspaper, regularly published, serialized publication that begins offering advertisements. So you start seeing the very first advertisements of gay bars listing kind of the entertainments and the, you know, a roster of fundraisers and all kinds of other things. And what they're actually doing is not only raising political awareness and getting people to kind of register to vote and show the political power, but they're also organizing commercial interests and raising money for a legal defense fund to protect the right of business owners that begin in this period also to be facing eviction orders, letters from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency that they need to kind of vacate the premises, leases that are suspended, and a heightened period of more policing and also vigilante violence of groups of thugs coming in and beating people up. And it was a really dark sort of period. And this is sort of the 1962, 63 at the moment, in which land acquisition is finally happening. And there's this immense sort of power that comes down on trying to kind of evict through whatever means possible and dislodge this kind of queer world on the waterfront. And this is a moment of political organizing, of social consciousness. It's a moment of the city becoming aroused.
- [48:18]
B
All right, well, there's two threads there I really want to ask you to tell us a bit more about. So I think I'm going to ask about the sort of political organizing side first, and then we'll talk a bit more about the evictions and the police. What you're describing with the newspaper, with the organizing, with the illusions, you know, the lunch counter illusions that we see with the civil rights movement. This really is sort of community political organizing. But maybe San Francisco's waterfront queer bars is not necessarily where we think of the origins of the gay rights movement coming from. Why do you think it's important to maybe change that picture and center that origin here?
- [49:03]
C
So it's really a great question, so really inspired in my work by Alan Barabay, Alan Barabay, who have already mentioned, but also John d' Amelio's work on gay communities and gay organizing. And so John d' Amelio sort of talks about this really important sort of moment in which the Homophile organizations and the gay bar cultures kind of come together and unify. And that is sort of what he identifies as a sort of moment of kind of like the emergence of a kind of gay community kind of logic or a gay community sort of framing of political rights and fight for minority rights. I hope I haven't oversimplified his arguments, but that always sort of struck me. Kind of. That totally makes sense to me. But I wanted to know more about the sort of the gay bar part of that and the pre. Sort of homophile organizational sort of story of that. And I think it happens in 90 Market Street. I think it happens. There's a moment in which at 90 Market Street, Jose Sarria invites the police representative of the district attorney's office, home of file organization representatives as well. And he wants to have a conversation in 90 Market street at this bar. It was called the Talk of the Town at the time. He'd just become sort of a part of it. A conversation about kind of lessening the kind of raids and arrests and the harassment of gay bar patrons and kind of work, you know, kind of working with police to kind of, you know, get them to sort of back down on this sort of crackdown. And it's kind of at this moment that the homopho organizations, which were really powerful and really important through the mid-1950s, the early 1960s. I'm talking about the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Belides, as well as some others nationally, are really important in the United States. Give San Francisco its national significance and importance as a kind of gay mecca and a kind of early, really important place in which queer people begin to kind of make assertive rights for civil rights. But the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Belitas, they were always very kind of cognizant of not talking about specific places. They never mentioned bars, they never mentioned restaurants. They never mentioned the sort of lived experience world, queer worlds in which their members sort of circulated in. In part, I think it was to kind of, you know, pursue a kind of politics of legitimation and normalizing queer gay citizenship. But it was also about protecting those places from being targeted or broken down on. And so this all kind of breaks down on the waterfront when these queer land uses become the sites in which a new politics about protecting, defending, preserving, actively promoting, reconstituting in new places. When places are shut down, we're preserving the kind of the gathering space and a place for these queer drinking publics to kind of reconstitute themselves. It really leads to Kind of a different kind of politics. It is a community based, emergent bar culture kind of politics that I think is an important kind of like pivot point in the logics of activists during this time period who are pursuing rights for minoritized gender and sexualized subjects. So I think that's really important. I think the other thing that's really important is this sort of queer history of San Francisco has the historiography of it has really emphasized a lot of the importance of people like Harvey Milk. It's centered around a kind of narrative about the gayborhood, the creation of a gay neighborhood, a commercial zone where there's a whole bunch of different kinds of what I would say, queer land uses that are bars, bookstores, all kinds, clothing stores and so forth. I think what my book sort of shows is something about what. What was the pre gaborhood sort of world of San Francisco? What did it look like? It wasn't organized in a kind of neighborhood sort of sense, but it did have a sense of social solidarity. It had a kind of investment in places. But those places look quite different. And I would say that the kind of the catalyst, the catalyst for people to kind of, you know, showing up, showing out and pushing back against, you know, several decades of harassment is the loss of physical spaces. It's about the kind of like the loss of the city underneath them, which does happen. That whole area does get torn down and redeveloped. But it also requires enormous amount of energy and effort, organizational power and energies and solidarity to then begin reconstituting their social spaces in other areas. And now they've got a publishing mechanism, they've got a newspaper, they've got all kinds of new organizations that kind of flourish after this moment of the shutting down of the queer waterfront and the proliferation of more queer gay land uses that kind of. That rise to the level. Actually something that's visible as a. As a neighborhood.
- [54:49]
B
Really interesting to see those threads carry forward. I did promise, however, that we are going to. I was going to ask you a bit more about the police because I thought this was a really interesting aspect of the book because in a lot of ways the image we've painted so far is of course true of the kind of, okay, everyone's getting eviction notices, all right? There's really an increase here in pressure, in violence and intimidation. But you also talk about in the book that it's not exactly, exactly the same for every queer place. That there's some differences in kind of how law enforcement goes about this, in terms of timing, in Terms of levels of intimidation. So can you take us through that nuance?
- [55:36]
C
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for drawing that out. Yeah. I guess I would go back to the contrast between 90 Market street and the Ensign Cafe. So the Ensign's Cafe was the corner of Market and the Embarcadero. Today it's actually a park, which for a while was referred to as Justin Herman Plaza and Park, named after the head of the redevelopment agency that was largely responsible for spearheading and up, you know, making this redevelopment project, moving it forward. If you just look at, sort of, again, back to the kind of earlier thing I was trying to understand at the beginning of this process of this whole research project is the kind of the opening and closing dates, a very simple kind of question like, when did the. When did this gay bar open? Right? And so that opens a lot of questions. Well, what is a gay bar? And when does it. Does it. Is it. Are all gay bars the same? How do you define a gay bar? And what is the gay bar close? Well, on the second part of that, when did these two gay bars close, Quote, unquote, gay bars or hangouts for homosexuals? The Ensign Club is one of the very last buildings in all of this 28 block area that is acquired by the redevelopment agency and torn down. The person who opened the Ensign Club back in The, I think, 1930s is the last person that he is in continuous operation of this place that over a year, for decades, has hosted not only kind of, you know, basically a kind of a sex club in a sense, in the basement, but a gay bar. A place where trans people hung out, advertised in sort of national trans magazines, periodically closed, but always opened again. He was a longtime survivor. He was the kind of person who was not a gay person himself, as far as I know, but somebody who was very much operating under this system of police craft, never made cases. It was never a place that was politicized in quite the same way. It didn't have a kind of a queer kind of constituency or kind of bar culture that really organized or pushed against and acquired and pushed for political power. And it's telling that it becomes the one that is left to stay to the very end. Right? The last one that closes, in contrast, across the street, 90 Market street, the place I started mentioning, associated with Jose Sarria, its last owner operator, was a guy named Saul Stoneman, who was the same guy who ran the Black Cat. He was the same guy who all the way to the Supreme Court defended his right to serve to homosexual patrons. He is one of the only Businesses in the entire 28 block area of Redevelopment Agency that actually went bankrupt as a result of the eviction and the dispossession of all of his properties in that area. And it essentially ruined his career. It ruined his business, his bar business. So I guess to your question about policing, there is a very different logic to it, and it has to do with a subset of these waterfront gay bars. The ones that were very politically mobilized and organized, the ones that had fundraisers to raise legal defense funds, the ones where Jose Sibrillo traveled around and got people to register to vote, rallied people. The places that had drag shows that were also fundraisers. The places that advertised in this magazine, in this newspaper, the League of Civitizen Education. All of those places met a much more destructive, swift, damaging, violent end at the hand of either the police and or the Urban Redevelopment Agency than the one that was across the street. That was essentially a kind of managed vice, dismanaged vice operation where people were getting money in graphs, was coming out of it, but wasn't actually a place that its patrons were kind of politically organized or radicalized or making any kind of claims of citizenship.
- [60:01]
B
Absolutely fascinating to hear those details and sort of see how that all happens. If we bring these things together, then what does actually happen to the queer waterfront? If we fast forward to sort of the end of the 1960s, what are we looking at compared to the picture you painted us just a few decades earlier?
- [60:26]
C
Yeah, so in a material sense, in a physical sense, 1963, 64, 65. During those years, those are years of active, like, physical destruction, evictions, the raising of buildings and the rebuilding of the waterfront. What I end the book with, however, and I think this is important because the book is not just about the destruction of the waterfront. I use this term very intentionally. The creative destruction of the waterfront or the destruction and the creation of the waterfront to point to the fact that even almost 10 years later, there is a kind of ongoing living, shared public memory of the waterfront is a queer place. And I illustrate that with this really amazing collection of photographs that I found that were published in a fundraiser by the International Court System. This is again, the organization started by Jose Sarria, every year having a big coronation ceremony to honor the next person who's gonna be the empress for the year, the queen for the year. And so in the program from I think it's 1972, 73, is this really interesting photo montage. It's a quiz where there's a set of maybe 40 photographs, recent photographs taken around that time, 1972, of sidewalk photos of bits and pieces of the urban landscape. And the question is, identify what this past closed gay bar was. So it's actually trying to remember. It's prompting people who are participating in this to remember, oh, 10 years ago. Do you remember these places we used to hang out? These are the places that really got started on the Waterfront. And many of them, all of them that I sort of was able to sort of talk about in the book. And many of them, all of them that I just sort of mentioned by name, there are more are captured in photographs, but the photographs are photos of active construction sites, giant holes in the ground, freeway on ramps or off ramps, new parks, that sort of thing. They're physically torn up and they're gone, but they kind of live on in the kind of public memory of the people who recognized the kind of social and political significance of those places, even though that they were long gone. So they were not ephemeral places, they were formative places. And then beyond that, many of the oral histories that I drew from, many of them were collected in the late 70s to the early 90s. You know, that's several decades even later, where people are looking back all the way to the late 40s, early 50s, and reminiscing about these places. These places were powerful, informative in the lives of a number of people, kind of move through them that are places that kind of arouse their sense of sort of social solidarity and their kind of political consciousness.
- [63:48]
B
Hmm, fascinating.
- [63:50]
C
But they're all gone. They're all gone. And I guess I would also sort of add here. I think it would be a pretty compelling. I think the book provides a really compelling argument for actually renaming what was Justin Herman Plaza. Renaming it Jose Sarria Plaza because it really documents and shows this really untold, unknown, previously unknown, unrecognized history, queer history of the waterfront that was intimately tied to the history of urban renewal and urban redevelopment in San Francisco.
- [64:26]
B
Who knows, maybe it will be renamed. That would be pretty cool. But even if it isn't, having this history, being able to engage with it is a massive step forward. So thank you for sharing it with us, leaving me with only my final question. The book is out in the world pretty recently, in the last few weeks, but it is available for people to go read and get so many more details than we could possibly cover. Is there anything you might be working on now or next, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's on this exact topic that you'd like to preview for us.
- [65:02]
C
That's a great question. Yeah. Well, I'm taking a little bit of a breather, but my energy is really now focused. Yes, thank you. It's been a haul. My energies are now really on ensuring that the stories that I've kind of recounted and the life histories of the people that were integral into kind of transforming the city, and also ways of thinking about sexuality in profound ways, that it reaches a wider audience. So that's my main focus right now, to make sure that the book does not become just an interesting footnote, but actually really helps us sort of change our thinking about what mobilizes people to work together, what's the nature of sort of social solidarity, and what are the possibilities and prospects for different forms of queer solidarity in. In world making, in placemaking, in world making. So that's the first thing. And then I guess the second thing I would say I really am. There's much more that didn't actually make it on the pages of the book. There are other stories of urban redevelopment in the city of San Francisco and how, given multiple options of how to transform and tear down parts of the city and rebuild it, they leaned on and they focused on and they targeted the queer spaces as the places to sort of locate and prioritize redevelopment. So there's some of those that I want to sort of follow along with articles and then I would really like to know more about. I think there's much more to say about Jose Saria, about Jose Sarria and his role in creating the court system and the larger sort of national and even international sort of footprint of queer social solidarity and kind of queer bar publics that are still present today, that are part of this earlier formula that kind of came out of this sort of past moment. So following that thread forward is also something I'd be very much interested in doing.
- [67:16]
B
Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for that preview. And I think it's even more reason for people to read the book because you're still working on a lot of these topics. So again, the title is the City Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Post War San Francisco, published by the University of Texas Press in January 2024. So, really thank you so much, Damon, for talking to us about the book and talking to us, you know, right when it's come out. So thank you for being with us.
- [67:43]
C
Thank you so much, Miranda. I really appreciate, appreciate the opportun.