At the stroke of midnight uniformed cops burst into the bar, billy clubs swinging. Sixteen patrons were arrested inside the Black Cat, and police chased two more men into New Faces, another gay bar nearby. 31, 1963, a dozen plainclothes policemen observed the New Year’s festivities inside the Black Cat, a gay bar in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. Its owner, Sol Stoumen, refused to pay off the police for protection against harassment, and his bar was routinely raided and fined from the 1940s through the early 1960s. All the poets went there.” At a time when homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society were largely conciliatory to the police and to city officials, the Black Cat was noteworthy as a site of resistance. Bars, bathhouses, and other places of interaction allowed gays to be open sexually.
Gay shop owners and entrepreneurs empowered the community. Gay neighborhoods provided certain spatial freedom. The poet Allen Ginsburg, who knew it in the ’50s, described it as an enormous bar with a honky-tonk piano that “everyone” went to: “All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. Following his assassination, the gays of San Francisco politically organized in order to fight for gay rights. It wasn’t until after World War II, when gay men and lesbians swarmed San Francisco after service in the Pacific, that the Black Cat assumed a “gayer” personality.
