The Tay Bush Inn Raid

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

On Sept. 14, 1961 242 patrons, nearly all of them men, were packed into the Tay-Bush Inn at the Corner of Taylor and Bush in San Francisco. The photo shows the scene – a block of apartments occupies the block where the Inn was. Gary Kamiya tells SF Gate what happened on that night.

“The Tay-Bush was a one-room cafe that drew night owls who danced to its jukebox until dawn. Some walked up the hill from the theater district after the shows let out.

At 3:15 that September morning, three undercover police officers in the bar gave a prearranged signal, the jukebox went silent, a loudspeaker outside blared and uniformed cops barged in. They began herding the patrons onto the sidewalk and arresting them.

The headline on The Chronicle’s story the next day read, “Big Sex Raid – Cops Arrest 103.” The secondary headline said, “139 Get Away.” (Police later insisted only five or so had escaped.)

The story called the raid “the biggest action of its kind in the history of the department.” Many of the arrestees were students, it said. “Others called themselves clerks, laborers, hairdressers; one said he was a psychologist. Police said the men were dancing together and kissing.”

The raid “was reminiscent of the old speakeasy days of Prohibition,” The Chronicle wrote. “Three paddy wagons shuttled back and forth between the inn and the city prison – seven loads in all – and apartment house dwellers watched from their windows.”

Most of the patrons were booked as “visitors to a disorderly house.” The bar’s owner, 27-year-old Robert Johnson, was booked on four counts, including “lewd and indecent acts” and “keeping a disorderly house.”

Asked by a reporter if any “deviates” had been at his club that night, Johnson said, “Yes, of course. But we have a lot of show people and others – they like the New York atmosphere – you know, brick walls.” ”

Despite having the names of the arrested printed in the papers, charges against all but two of those arrested were dropped. The raid – years before Stonewall – raised a political consciousness in the gay community. The Mattachine Society seized on the incident to push for civil rights.

The Tay-Bush raid made the civil rights of gays and lesbians a legitimate subject for debate, and marked the beginning of the end of San Francisco’s crackdown on gay bars. The SFPD’s final attempt to repress gays took place on New Year’s Day 1965, when police raided an advocacy group’s masquerade ball at California Hall on Polk Street. Even John Shelley, the mayor, condemned the police action. San Francisco was now Gay.

The Eldorado

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The Eldorado was a famed destination in Berlin for lesbians, homosexual men, transvestites of both sexes, and tourists during the 1920’s and 30’s. As soon as the Nazis came to power, gay bars and clubs like the Eldorado were closed down. The “El Dorado” was situated at 29, Lutherstraße. It had a lavish floor show. It was closed down in about 1932. Clubs with the same name have since re-opened.

A Gay Party in The Eldorado, 1926
A Gay Party in The Eldorado, 1926

Tony’s Smart Set notes:

“Berlin’s 400 or so bars were divided in tourist guidebooks according to a strict taxonomy of desire. Flush heterosexuals might choose the Kakadu, with Polynesian-style décor and caged parrots hanging over each table; when patrons wished to leave, they could tap their glasses and the bird would squawk loudly for the check. Gay men would descend on the Karls-Lounge, where the waiters and “Line Boys” all wore neat sailor’s outfits. Lesbians liked Mali and Ingel, where guests were obliged to dance with the randy owners, or the Café Olala, where some customers liked to dress in Salvation Army outfits. Male cross-dressers went to the Silhouette, female cross-dressers to the Mikado, and everyone the entire sexual spectrum over blurred at the Eldorado, where one dancer, when quizzed by a slumming grand dame as to gender, replied in a haughty voice: “I am whatever sex you wish me to be, Madame.” ”

The Gay Man in Margaret Thatcher’s Government

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

Nicholas Eden, 2nd Earl of Avon, was born on 3 October 1930 and died on 17 August 1985, from Aids. He was a British Conservative politician and was the younger son of former Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his first wife, Beatrice. He was educated at Eton. He succeeded in the earldom on the death of his father in 1977. His older brother was killed on active service in Burma.

Nicholas Eden served under Margaret Thatcher as a Lord-in-Waiting from 1980 to 1983, as Under-Secretary of State for Energy from 1983 to 1984 and as Under-Secretary of State for the Environment from 1984 until shortly before his death in 1985. Lord Avon was unmarried and his titles died with him. He was openly gay.

Harlem’s Hidden Gay History: The Rockland Palace Drag Balls

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

The Hamilton Lodge was a black gay social group that held extravagant drag balls in Harlem, New York, in the 1930s. Prohibition put an end to the Hamilton Lodge drag formals at the Rockland Palace on West 155th Street.

New York’s drag balls were given national exposure by the 1990 documentary “Paris is Burning.” Harlem’s gay scene was well known before Prohibition, and Hamilton Lodge was one of the foremost venues for the area’s thriving LGBT community. Artists who supported Harlem’s gay community during the 1930s included Tallulah Bankhead.

Inside the Rockland Palace, The Black Archives
Inside the Rockland Palace, The Black Archives

“You had a large majority of drag queens and what we now call gender-queer pushing the boundaries,” says Hael Fisher, who is relaunching the Hamilton Lodge drag balls. “And you had a lot of white onlookers who came up from the West Village to be a part of this.”

The Rockland was torn down in the 1960s and the site became a car park.

The London Gay Teachers Group

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

The London Gay Teachers Group, known as Schools’ Out, was co founded by the late Paul Patrick, who came out in 1969, before he became a teacher, and some colleagues. The organisation became an effective campaigning organisation which published a series of ground breaking discussions and booklets, including “Aids Hysteria” in 1987 and “Schools Out” in 1989.

In 2004 Paul Patrick and Sue Sanders of Schools Out founded the UK Gay History Month.

Paul Patrick was born on July 23rd, 1950 and died on May 22, 2008.

The Hall-Carpenter Archives at the LSE hold some archive material for the London Gay Teachers Group.

Gay Centres

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During the 1970s era of gay liberation, gay centres were established usually by squatting in unused or unwanted, dilapidated premises in various cities around the world. One such gay centre was The South London Gay Community Centre at 78 Railton Road, Brixton, London, an empty shop, which was established in the mid 1970s.

Gay centres afforded a safe space where, often for the first time, gay men and lesbians could meet and exchange ideas, and discuss politics. Not only campaigns were formed in them, but also gay groups and organisations, businesses, theatre companies, dance companies and the like. It was such a catalyst for ideas and activity that within months, the immediate area was home to two women’s centres, the Anarchist News Service, Squatters Groups, a Claimants’ Union for those on welfare benefits, the Brixton Advice Centre, Icebreakers, the Race Today Collective and a food cooperative.

The centre at Brixton is important in the UK’s gay history because it was the first one, and formed the template for those following. The squatters were evicted after two years.

A Brief History of Homophobia in Russia

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

Stalin didn’t think much of gay rights.

Dan Healy of the Moscow Times had given us a history of homophobia in Russia.

“Orthodox clerics condemned sex between men and youths. They also condemned men who shaved, used make-up, or wore gaudy clothing as devotees of the “sodomitical sin.””

Peter the Great outlawed sex between men in his Military Code of 1716, to be punished by flogging, and male rape, by penal servitude. In 1835, motivated by reports of vice in the Empire’s boarding schools, Tsar Nicholas I formally extended the ban on male same-sex relations to wider society in a new criminal code. Men who engaged in voluntary “sodomy” (muzhelozhstvo) were exiled to Siberia; sodomy with minors or the use of force netted exile with hard labor. This law remained in force until 1917. There was no law against lesbian relations.

Tsarist Russia avoided enforcing the law against upper-class homosexuals. There was no Russian equivalent to Oscar Wilde, Colonel Alfred Redl of Hungary, or Prince Eulenberg of Germany. Many supporters of the Romanov dynasty, and members of the tsar’s family, were flagrantly gay but when the government drafted a new criminal code — never to be adopted — in 1903, it continued to criminalize male homosexuality.

When revolution came in 1917, the Provisional Government wanted to enact the 1903 criminal code, but lost power to the Bolsheviks, who abrogated all tsarist law in November 1917. Until 1922 there was no written criminal law.

Police raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad who were accused of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.”

Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Lazar Kaganovich, noting “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing that a law against “pederasty” be adopted. The new law was adopted for all the Soviet republics in March 1934, with a minimum sentence of three to five years for consenting male homosexuality.

Healy continues:

“Harry Whyte, a British Communist working for the English-language Moscow Daily News wrote to Stalin in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. He boldly explained why it violated Marxist principles. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.”

The anti-homosexual law remained in place until 1993 in Russia. Without access to FSB and presidential archives we have only a rough idea of how many men were prosecuted under it; at minimum, tens of thousands suffered.

De-Stalinization under Nikita Khrushchev actually cemented the law in place. In 1958 the Interior Ministry issued a secret decree “on the strengthening of the struggle against sodomy,” telling police to enforce the law with renewed vigor. From this date about 1,000 men were imprisoned annually in the Soviet Union for their homosexuality. Soviet authorities worried that the millions of men released from the single-sex Gulag camps were a source of “sexual perversion” dangerous to Soviet society.

Discussions during the Perestroika years seemed to point toward reform, but the Interior Ministry fought vigorously against any relaxation. In April 1993, as part of a package to bring Russian legislation in line with Council of Europe standards, the Yeltsin administration decriminalized male homosexuality, but there was no amnesty for the hundreds of men still in prison under the law at that time.

In 2002, during a Duma debate about changes to sex-crime legislation, nationalist-conservative deputies called for the re-criminalization of voluntary sodomy and for the first time in a millennium of Russian legal history, the criminalization of lesbian acts. The Kremlin ignored these calls, but the status of Russia’s lesbians and gays remains an open question. Like Harry Whyte in 1934, we might well ask, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to be a citizen of the Russian Federation?””

Lambda

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

The lambda was selected as a symbol by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York in 1970, following the Stonewall Riots, and was declared the international symbol for gay and lesbian rights by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1974. The lambda signifies unity under oppression.

The Scottish Minorities Group hosted the first ever International Gay Rights Conference in Edinburgh from 18 to 22 December 1974. It was co-organised by Ian Dunn and Derek Ogg. Ian Dunn had organised the first meeting of what was to become the Scottish Minorities Group in 1969. Derek Ogg later founded Scottish AIDS Monitor in the 1980s.

The conference tried to provide an international sharing of experience, so that delegates could find out the social, political and legal situation for men and women from other countriesm, and included sessions on the rights of young homosexuals and of gay women. The problem of lesbian invisibility was explicitly addressed by a delegate from Campaign Against Moral Persecution in New South Wales, Australia.

Nearly 400 people attended the conference, which led in 1978 to the establishment of the International Gay Association, later to become the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA).

The gay rights organization Lambda Legal and the American Lambda Literary Award derive their names from this symbol. Gay News offered a range of jewellery items featuring the Lambda symbol.

Leonard Matlovich

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

Leonard P. Matlovich was born on July 6, 1943 and died on June 22, 1988. He was a Vietnam War veteran, race relations instructor, and recipient of the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Matlovich made history by becoming the first gay service member of US forces to out himself to the military to fight their ban on gays. In the 1970s he and Harvey Milk were the best known gay men in America.

The gay community rallied behind his fight to stay in the USAF. His photograph appeared on the cover of the September 8, 1975, issue of Time magazine, making him a symbol for thousands of gay and lesbian servicemembers and gay people generally. Matlovich was the first openly gay person to appear on the cover of a U.S. newsmagazine.

In October 2006, Matlovich was honoured as a leader in the history of the LGBT community .

A Mormon and church elder, Matlovich found himself at odds with the church, and their opposition to homosexual behavior. He was twice excommunicated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for homosexual acts.

In 1986 Matlovich was diagnosed with HIV/Aids. Typical of the man, he was among the first patients to try a newly developed treatment, AZT.

His grave at the Congressional Cemetery does not prominently bear his name. The inscription reads: “When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” His grave is in the same row as that of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

~ Alan Turing ~ Leave a comment

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a colourful and distinctive charity, protest, and street performance organization of Queer Nuns who fight sexual intolerance with drag and religious imagery. They also satirize gender and morality issues.

The movement started in 1979 when a group of gay men in San Francisco began wearing habits in visible situations to draw attention to social conflicts and problems in the Castro District. The original three men procured habits from a convent in Iowa pretending to be putting on a a performance of The Sound of Music!

They are an international organisation, and there are around 600 Nuns in Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay.

It was a time when religious participation in politics was growing, and Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell were crusading against the acceptance of the gay life style. The Castro District as a major gay neighborhood was targeted by several dozen church members who took to its streets to preach about the immorality of homosexuality.

The name of the group became familiar in 1980. The nuns held their first fundraiser, and a write-up in The San Francisco Chronicle by Herb Caen printed their organization name, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The benefit was for San Francisco’s Metropolitan Community Church Cuban Refugee Program.

The community was then hit with the AIDS crisis and the Nuns played a major part in organising awareness, and are thought to have produced the world’s very first Aids awareness literature.

Members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who have died are referred by the Sisters as “Nuns of the Above”.