Focus Features

In 1977 San Franciscans elected the first openly gay man to public office in the United States, Harvey Milk, whose life and death are commemorated in Gus Van Sant's new film Milk staring Sean Penn in the title role.

In some ways, Milk's election was a natural. For more than a century, San Francisco had been among the gayest of cities. But how did the City by the Bay—Sodom by the Bay as the Christian right would have it—develop into a Mecca for the LGBT community?

In her seminal book, "Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965," Nan Alamilla Boyd writes, "San Francisco is a queer town not simply because it hosts is proportionately large gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities but because queerness is sewn into the city's social fabric. From its earliest days, sex and lawlessness have been fundamental to San Francisco’s character."

Well maybe not from its earliest days. In 1846, during the Mexican-American war, the United States laid claim on the California town of Yerba Buena ("mint" in English), population 1,000. Renamed San Francisco in 1847, this sleepy little berg became a boomtown when gold was discovered in California in 1848. Across America, thousands of single men left their hometowns, lured west by the California Gold Rush. By 1850, San Francisco's population had jumped to 35,000, as the '49ers made San Francisco the destination to which they went to whet their carnal appetites.

A saloon culture of brothels, wine and beer dens (known as "deadfalls"), gambling joints and dance halls thrived on what was known as the Barbary Coast, near the present day Jackson Square. With a scarcity of women, the miners famously came to enjoy same sex dances.

Reacting to this licentiousness, the sober San Francisco citizens who went to Church and owned the banks that managed the gold mine profits called on their elected officials to curb public immorality.

Local officials waged anti-vice campaigns in the 1850s, 1870s, 1910s and 1950s.

In 1876, B.E. Lloyd, a local historian damned the Barbary Coast as "the haunt of the low and vile of every kind." He continued: "The petty thief, the house burglar, the tramp, the whoremonger, lewd women, cut-throats, murders, all are found here. Like the malaria arising from a stagnant swamp and poisoning the air for miles around, does this stagnant pool of human immorality and crime spread its contaminating vapors over the surrounding blocks on either side. Nay, it does not stop here, for even the remotest parts of the city do not entirely escape its polluting influence ... Licentiousness, debauchery, pollution, loathsome disease, insanity from dissipation, misery, poverty, wealth, profanity, blasphemy and death, are there. And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also." But where some saw hell others saw heaven. "It's an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and posess all the attractions of the next world," said Lord Henry to Dorian Gary, in Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray."

Such lurid descriptions and highly publicized anti-vice campaigns attracted much media attention. The world took notice; the town was branded. "San Francisco's reputation for vice thus became its calling card," writes Alamilla Boyd. "Despite periodic anti-vice crusades, a wide range of adventure-seekers, homosexuals among them, made their way through the Golden Gate."

The Dash, a large bar on Pacific Street (aka Terrific Street), opened in 1908 and featured drag performances and private booths. On Oct. 20, 1908, the "San Francisco Call" reported on the town’s new bar, "Inside is a small stage, on which a low variety of performance is given. Flanking the stage on either side of the big room are curtained boxes, in which are ensconced degenerate female impersonators. The 'Dash' is the home of unspeakable vices."

Other drag stars were more refined. Among the most famous female impersonators in San Francisco was Bothwell Browne. The "Los Angeles Times" described his portrayal of Cleopatra in his "Serpent of the Nile" act this way: "[Browne] fondling the reptile, then holding it from her in horrible fascination of fear, determined upon death, yet putting it away from her, [he] finally crushes the venomed head to her bosom and expires in ecstatic agony."

In his 1933 book "Barbary Coast," Herbert Ashbury wrote, "While most of San Francisco's reputable citizens publicly bemoaned the inequities of the Barbary Coast and performed lip service to the many campaigns designed to eliminate its more objectionable features, secretly they were, for the most part, enormously proud of their city’s reputation as the Paris of America and the wickedest town on the continent."

Following Prohibition, popular San Francisco nightclubs, like Mona's and Finocchio's, catered to a gay, straight and transgendered clientele and tourist trade, and featured drag performances.

The most historically significant gay bar in San Francisco was the Black Cat Cafe. It opened in 1906 at Eddy and Mason, closed in 1921, and reopened at 710 Montgomery Street in 1933. In 1940, the Black Cat was bought by Sol Stoumen. Under his ownership it went from gay-friendly bohemian to explicitly gay. Not everyone appreciated the change. Henry Evans in his 1955 book, "Bohemian San Francisco," "The Black Cat was by far the best place for a wild drunk that an adventurer could hope for, but the place changed hands and the new owner encouraged the fruit and the place went to hell." Truman Capote, while at The Black Cat, denied he had a drinking problem, rather he was a "a drinker with a writing problem."

The 1948 guidebook "Where to Sin in San Francisco," said of the Black Cat: "Any night you can watch genuine artists, intellectuals andsoforths boisterously protesting, or being loudly indifferent to such common social practices as sobriety and amiable conversation." The bar is mentioned in Jack Kerouac's "On The Road." And patron Allen Ginsberg boasted that it was "the greatest gay bar in America."

Lou Hogan, who in the '20s was a drag performer Sonia Pavlijev, wrote "The Scarlet Pansy" under the name Robert Scully in 1932.

Hogan published "The Gay Detective" under the name Lou Rand in 1961 (published as "Rough Trade" in 1964). "The Gay Detective" is set in Bay City, the ville de plume of Hogan's hometown San Francisco.

In Lou Hogan's 1961 novel set in the 50s, "The Gay Detective," a federal agent asks, "Why does the Bay City have such an overlarge percentage of these queer people? They seem to be actually encouraged here. Why, they even have their own clubs and bars. I may be old fashioned, but I just don't get this local tolerance."

Gay bars offered a refuge from the dominant culture. In his 1951 book "The Homosexual in America," Donald Webster Cory wrote, "From the gay street to the gay bar may be but a few steps, or several miles, but an aura of respectability is to be found at the latter that is lacking at the former. One need not hide one's head as an acquaintance walks by."

Alamilla-Boyd observes that in San Francisco, the gay movement that elected Milk to the board of supervisors in 1977 was born in the bars. "In San Francisco, the emergence of the gay bar as a public institution...enabled the city's queer and transgender populations to sustain a publicly visible urban space," she writes. "Thus, out of the vice-filled barrooms of the Barbary Coast, the gay bar evolved into a kind of political community center - a site for the development of new political ideas and responsibilities."

Gay bars threatened the boundaries of the dominant culture. And that did not go unnoticed or unpunished. In 1949 the Black Cat was raided by police in citywide crackdown against establishments "featuring lascivious entertainment and catering to lewd persons."

Gay bars, after all, served to legitimize a then-illegitimate lifestyle. In 1954, the "San Francisco Examiner" editorialized: "[T]here must be sustained action by the police and the district attorney to stop the influx of homosexuals. Too many taverns cater to them openly. Only police action can drive them out of the city...before the situation so deteriorates that San Francisco finds itself as the complete haven for undesirables."

And as a major port, San Francisco was part of the seafaring culture that has contributed to the development of gay culture worldwide, as sailors were conduits for information about different practices and attitudes around the world. In 1951, the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board placed the Black Cat Café on the military's roster of establishments that were "off limits and out of bounds." As the board explained, the Black Cat was a place "patronized by persons considered to be homosexuals."

That 1951 edict was a final, and belated, attempt to police the morals of the more than 1 million servicemen and some servicewomen who passed through San Francisco during World War II. This influx of soldiers returned San Francisco's demographics to that of Gold Rush days when the male population greatly outnumbered the female.

Historian John D'Emilio has written that World War II "marks the beginning of the nation's, and San Francisco's, modern gay history." Historian Allan Bérubé put it this way: "By uprooting an entire generation, the war helped to channel urban gay life into a particular path of growth - away from stable private networks and toward public commercial establishments serving the needs of a displaced, transient, and younger clientele."

In the '40s and '50s, local state and federal governments purged thousands of gays and lesbians (along with communists) from the public payroll. They were fired from jobs in public institutions like schools and drummed out of the military (without the great veterans benefits that other veterans were granted). Suddenly without a job, a good number of these persecuted homosexuals packed up and moved to San Francisco, a city that had a reputation for tolerance - and a place where many had passed a pleasant time during the war.

San Francisco's gay political movement was in some ways born at the above-mentioned Black Cat. Throughout the '50s and early '60s, the bar’s owner Stoumen spent a fortune going to court to fight attempts to shut the bar down. Established 1906-1921 and again in 1933 at 710 Montgomery St. Allen Ginsberg said of the Black Cat: "It was totally open, bohemian, San Francisco...and everybody went there, heterosexual and homosexual...All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. All the poets went there."

The bar was famous as the venue for José Sarria, a wildly popular drag performer who sang parodies of popular torch songs. Sarria was known for his wit: "There's nothing wrong with being gay—the crime is getting caught," and "United we stand, divided they catch us one by one."

Sarria encouraged solidarity among bar goers by closing each performance with his audience standing and singing "God Save Us Nelly Queens."

Journalist George Mendenhall told historian D’Emilio that listening to Sarria was the "beginning of my awareness of my rights as a gay person." In the 1977 documentary, "Word is Out", he recalled: "[The vice squad] used to come in and stand around and just generally intimidate people and make them feel that they were less than human. It was a frightening period. ... But Jose would make these political comments about our rights as homosexuals. ... It sounds silly, but if you lived at that time and had the oppression coming down from the police department and from society, there was no where to turn ... and to be able to put your arms around other gay men and to be able to stand up and sing 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.'...We were really not saying 'God Save Us Nelly Queens.' We were saying, 'We have our rights too.'"

In 1961, Sarria ran for city supervisor. (12 years before Harvey Milk made his first run for that office.) He explained to D'Emilio that he got on the ballot because he eventually found enough "very bold queens" brave enough to sign the petition to put his name on the ballot. "I was trying to prove to my gay audience, that I had the right, being as notorious and gay as I was, to run for public office, because people in those days didn't believe you had rights." Sarria lost, with only 6,000 votes. And in 1963, Stouman lost his last appeal, and the Black Cat was finally forced to close.

Despite his loss, the Black Cat had provided a space for early gay rights activists to organize gay bar cliental to oppose police persecution. One of the defining moments in that struggle was the 1965 New Years Day Mardi Gras costume ball that six gay and lesbian groups sponsored as a benefit for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. This was a San Francisco group founded in 1964 by protestant ministers and "homophiles" whose definition of "all God's children" included gays and lesbians. In a December 1964 newsletter, the Mattachine Society's Hal Call wrote, "Never before have all six groups united in concert to promote a community project." (The organizations included the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Tavern Guild, the Society for Individual Rights.)

The evening of the ball, the police arrived, set up kleig lights and photographed the people attending the benefit (600 of the 1500 ticket holders braved the SFPD gauntlet). The cops also demanded to be allowed into the ball to "inspect the premises." The minister's lawyers protested, and four people, three lawyers and a female ticket taker, were arrested. The next day the seven ministers who helped organize the benefit, and who had attended it with their wives, held a press conference. The "San Francisco Chronicle," in an article titled "Angry Ministers Rip Police," reported that the clergy accused the police of "intimidation, broken promises and obvious hostility." In the subsequent trial of the four people arrested on New Years Day, the police explained that they were photographing the party goers "because some of them might be connected national security." The next day the presiding judge, Leo Friedman, halted the trial and instructed the jury to return a not guilty verdict, saying, "It's useless to waste everybody's time following this to its finale."

In San Francisco, it was downhill from there for the forces of bigotry. Queers joined blacks as a persecuted minority whose rights must be defended. In many ways, that 1965 court ruling was the first major victory in the battle for LGBT rights in San Franscisco, helping set the stage for Milk's election 12 years later.

Following Milk's assassination, San Francisco's queer community took to the streets.