09/16/2026
Before Stonewall, Before Harvey Milk, Was Jose Sarria.
For the love of Mama Jose...
The Black Cat Cafe in San Francisco's North Beach was not supposed to be a gay bar. It opened in 1906, in the rubble left by the earthquake and fire that leveled the city. It survived Prohibition as a speakeasy. By the 1940s, John Steinbeck drank there. Part of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" is set inside it.
Then the sailors came home from the war and the gay men came with them; the Black Cat became something the city had never quite seen before. Allen Ginsberg described it as "the best gay bar in America. All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. All the poets went there."
The owner, Sol Stoumen, was straight. He didn't care who his customers were. That decision cost him years of his life.
The raids started in 1949. The California State Board of Equalization suspended the Black Cat's liquor license on the grounds that allowing gay people to congregate violated "public welfare and morals." Stoumen could have fired the drag performers, cleared out the q***r clientele, and kept his license. Instead, he hired a lawyer and sued the state.
In 1951, the California Supreme Court ruled in his favor. The decision in Stoumen v. Reilly was blunt: simply having homosexual patrons was not sufficient grounds to revoke a liquor license. Gay people had a legal right to assemble in public. It was one of the first civil rights victories for LGBTQ Americans in U.S. history, and it happened because a straight bar owner in North Beach refused to back down.
The state didn't take the loss quietly. In direct response to the ruling, California passed a constitutional amendment creating the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control with expanded powers to shut down gay bars. The new agency used the one loophole the court had left open: bars could still be closed for "illegal or immoral acts on the premises." Undercover vice officers began showing up at gay bars across the city, trying to entrap patrons into kissing or touching so they'd have grounds to pull the license.
At the Black Cat, a waiter named José Sarria had started performing opera parodies in drag between serving drinks. He would go on to become one of the most important gay rights activists in American history, but that comes later.
At the Black Cat, he added lyrics to his songs warning the crowd which cruising spots were under surveillance. When the vice squad walked in, he led the entire bar in singing "God Save Us Nelly Queens" until they left. He organized patrons into the League for Civil Education in 1960 to raise legal defense funds and fight the raids politically. He handed out badges reading "I am a boy" to drag queens so they couldn't be arrested for impersonation.
None of it was enough. The ABC yanked the liquor license again in 1963, and Stoumen couldn't afford to fight it a second time. The Black Cat closed in 1964.
Stonewall happened five years later. It gets the credit for starting the modern gay rights movement. But the template was already there, in a bar on Montgomery Street, where a straight owner went to the California Supreme Court for his gay customers and won.
