San Francisco Was a Wide-Open Town

INTRODUCTION San Francisco Was a Wide-Open Town I think it’s important to realize that San Francisco did not happen after New York or after Stonewall. This was something that developed in San Francisco and evolved because there were a large number of Gay people who just did the traditional American thing of organizing— organizing around people’s interests. Larry Littlejohn, interview, 1990 San Francisco is a seductive city. Perched on the edge of a continent, its beautiful vistas, eccentric characters, and liberal politics reflect both the unruly nature of its frontier-town beginnings and the sophisticated de- sires of an urban metropolis. Sociologists Howard Becker and Irving Horowitz call San Francisco a culture of civility, noting that “devi- ance, like difference, is a civic resource, enjoyed by tourist and resident alike.” 1 But while the strength of the city’s queer communities is world renowned, there are few texts devoted to San Francisco’s gay and lesbian history.2 What follows, as a result, charts new ground. It asks the question “Why San Francisco?” Why do so many people associate San Francisco with homosexuals and homosexuality? In my research—and casual conversations—many answers have emerged. There are the same- sex dances of the Gold Rush era, the city’s location as an international seaport, the homosocial entertainments of the city’s Barbary Coast, the artistic revivals of the turn of the twentieth century, the tradition of vigilante law and order, the persistence of civic graft, the strength and di- versity of the city’s immigrant communities, the staunch resistance to anti-sex and anti-alcohol ordinances, the military presence of two world wars, and the bohemian, Beat, and hippie cultures that flourished in the postwar generations.3 But, by and large, when asked “Why San Fran- 1 2 INTRODUCTION cisco?” most people refer to San Francisco’s history of sexual permis- siveness and its function as a wide-open town—a town where anything goes. These powerful (and sexual) metaphors frame the chapters that follow. What does it mean for San Francisco to be wide open? What im- pact did this have on the growth and development of the city’s queer cultures and communities? Why does San Francisco remain so enigmati- cally attached to a sexually permissive and queer sensibility? San Francisco is a queer town not simply because it hosts dispropor- tionately large gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities but because a queerness is sewn into the city’s social fabric. From its earliest days, sex and lawlessness have been fundamental to San Francisco’s character. The Gold Rush of 1849, for instance, transformed San Fran- cisco into a vibrant and opulent city with a reputation for licentious en- tertainment and vigilante government. Prior to that time, San Francisco had been a frontier town on the far reaches of overlapping empires. Still, its early history of shifting colonial rule and international commerce re- veals a web of alliance and exploitation that would be its legacy. In 1776, when Spanish settlers constructed a mission and presidio—the twin pillars of Spanish-American colonization—near the territories of the Coast Miwoks, Wintuns, Yokuts, and Costanoans, they did so with Indian labor, luring Indian settlers into a colonial township at the northern edge of a tenaciously expanding Spanish empire. With Mexican in- dependence from Spain in 1821, however, Yerba Buena village (as San Francisco was then called) became part of Mexico’s northern territory and barely governable as the port secularized and became increasingly active for ships seeking commerce with traders and trappers. By the mid- 1840s, as Mexico braced for war with the United States, Yerba Buena’s population grew as foreign-born (Anglo-American) merchants moved into town and married the daughters of Mexican landowners and civic leaders, using sexual and familial connections to create wealth, social standing, and political alliances. Thus, in 1848, when the United States acquired California through the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco, the city’s population of Indians, Californios (Mexican ranchers), Anglo-American settlers, and their chil- dren—a total of just over eight hundred—reflected San Francisco’s colonial history as well as its frontier-town ethics.4 The discovery of gold in the California foothills coincided with Cali- fornia’s transfer from Mexican to U.S. authority, and these events dra- matically altered San Francisco’s economic development: almost over- night, San Francisco became a booming commercial center.5 In 1848, INTRODUCTION 3 San Francisco had the best port in California, and the cargo ships that served the west coast docked there. As a result, San Francisco became a home base for the thousands of fortune seekers who passed through the town on their way to the gold fields. Miners who needed tools and pro- visions purchased these goods from San Francisco’s growing class of merchants and shopkeepers. Later, as vast fortunes in gold and silver moved back through the city for trade or investment, San Francisco became a banking and financial stronghold. By 1868, ten insurance com- panies managed almost $6 million in capital, and by 1887, twenty-six banks controlled almost $150 million in assets.6 In addition to its function as a financial center, San Francisco became a conduit for international trade. As agriculture and manufacturing developed through the 1860s to meet the needs of California’s booming population, surplus goods traveled through the port of San Francisco, and investors secured lucrative global markets. For instance, along with Spanish-colonial trade routes to South America (particularly Chile and Peru), the Caribbean, and the eastern ports of North America, San Franciscan investors developed trade relationships with Japan and China and secured a virtual monopoly with the Hawai’ian Islands and the Philippines.7 By 1890, the city’s merchants handled an astonishing 99 percent of the coast’s im- ports and 83 percent of its exports.8 By the turn of the century, San Fran- cisco had become the economic capital of the Pacific coast. The consolidation of U.S. national authority and the growth of San Francisco’s economy stimulated a vast in-migration of miners, merchants, and adventurers. By 1850, just a year after the Gold Rush of- ficially started, San Francisco counted 35,000 residents. The city’s ex- ponential growth continued through the end of the century, its population jumping from 57,000 to 149,000 between 1860 and 1870, and by the turn of the century, San Francisco was the eighth largest city in the United States, with a population of almost 343,000.9 Contrary to the traditional story of “the west,” San Francisco’s swelling population and vast economic growth were not due to the migration of Anglo- Americans who traveled the overland trails or braved the long sea pas- sage around the Cape of Good Hope—though there were many who traveled these paths. In the years between 1850 and 1860, the majority of San Franciscans were foreign born (the average in other U.S. cities at the time was 10 percent).10 The first wave of gold miners came from Valparaiso, Chile, and Lima, Peru—two South American port cities with a history of gold mining and long-established trade relations with San Francisco.11 Chilean gold miners brought tools and technology, 4 INTRODUCTION notably the arrastra, a large circular drag mill that extracted gold from crushed rocks.12 An abundance of gold seekers also came from South China’s Guangdong province—they came initially as temporary work- ers sent to augment their families’ household income, but many stayed, carving out a new life for themselves in Gam Saan or Gold Mountain, the Cantonese term for California.13 And while many African Ameri- cans traveled to California with “gold fever,” many migrated west to es- cape southern slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.14 San Francisco’s overlap of cultures and communities, foreign and na- tive born, contributed to a live-and-let-live sensibility, but it was the city’s early history of lawlessness, boss politics, and administrative graft that solidified its reputation as a wide-open town. Prostitution and gam- bling quickly became big business in San Francisco, and for the right price the possibilities for sex and gaming seemed endless. In fact, at the start of the Gold Rush, a colony of Mexican and South American pros- titutes settled on the southeastern slopes of Telegraph Hill, forming the nucleus of what would become the city’s North Beach district.15 A de- cade later, the Barbary Coast emerged in the degenerated storefronts on what was San Francisco’s most important commercial thoroughfare. This was Pacific Street, or Terrific Street, as it was called in the 1890s, between the waterfront and Kearny Street. The Barbary Coast came to be known as San Francisco’s roughest vice district, “the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind,” an indignant historian reported in 1876. “The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cut-throats, murderers, all are found here.” 16 To sustain its reputation, the Barbary Coast hosted a battery of cheap amusements: grog- geries with sawdust-covered floors, wine and beer dens (also known as “deadfalls”), melodeons (liquor dens with mechanical music boxes), dance halls, and concert saloons. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, however, periods of flamboyant economic growth coincided with anti-vice campaigns that displayed the tension between San Francisco’s reputation for vice and the reality of periodic purges.

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