Black Cat Café Site

Long before the Castro, San Francisco's queer life ran through a bohemian bar at 710 Montgomery Street in the old Barbary Coast. The Black Cat Café (1933-1964) drew writers, sailors, North Beach eccentrics — and, increasingly, gay men, who made it the most famous gay gathering place on the West Coast at a time when serving them was legally dangerous. Its heart was José Sarria, hired as a waiter in 1951, whose satirical drag operas packed the house every Sunday. He ended each performance by having the whole room stand, link arms and sing "God Save Us Nelly Queens" — in earshot of the jail across the alley where men arrested in bar raids were held. In 1961 Sarria ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the first openly gay candidate for public office anywhere in the United States, drawing some 6,000 votes and proving a gay voting bloc existed; he later founded the Imperial Court System, one of the world's oldest LGBTQ charitable networks. The bar also won one of America's earliest gay-rights legal victories: in Stoumen v. Reilly (1951), the California Supreme Court ruled the state could not revoke a liquor license merely because homosexuals gathered there. Authorities kept up the pressure anyway, and after years of harassment the license was revoked in 1963; the Cat closed in February 1964. What you see today: a handsome Jackson Square historic-district building with a commemorative plaque installed in 2007. The space now houses Maison Nico, a French bakery-restaurant — there is nothing queer to see inside, and the visit is the plaque, the facade, and the knowledge of what a room full of linked arms once meant. Pairs well with a North Beach walk.