SAFE SPACE

GAY NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF VIOLENCE

Duke University Press

Contents

CHAPTER 1

"THE WHITE GHETTO"

Sexual Deviancy, Police Accountability,and the 1960s War on Poverty

Every great city has a dumping ground, a plot of land it allocates to thepeople it will not tolerate anywhere else. The Central City performs thisfunction for the city of San Francisco. Into the target area have beenmoved all the people and problems our society, at some time in the past,decided it would ignore; the older person, the homosexual, the alcoholic,the dope user, the black (and just about every other minority group), theimmigrant, the uneducated, the dislocated alienated youth.

—Tom Ramsay

The observation quoted in the epigraph was made by Tom Ramsay,a political organizer active in San Francisco's Western Additionneighborhood after he was asked in 1968 to assess the viability ofSan Francisco's downtown Central City area for mass communityaction. In turning to the Western Addition for advice, Central Cityactivists—many of whom were associated with homosexual advocacygroups then known as homophile organizations—hoped tobuild on a connection that they had already suggested existed betweenthe two areas. Two years earlier, the Central City activistshad won their fight for a piece of the meager benefits provided byPresident Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and its CommunityAction Program. The War on Poverty had been implemented as apart of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, passed the sameyear as the Civil Rights Act, and its approach reflected an increasingpublic recognition that people of color lived in disproportionatepoverty in U.S. cities. The San Francisco neighborhoods originallychosen for the program, such as the Western Addition, were areas so identified.Yet the demographics of the Central City hardly matched: the majorityof the Western Addition's residents were African American, but thedominant identity of the Central City, especially the section known as theTenderloin, was as a place of white homosexuals, sex workers, itinerants,and drug users.

Advocates for the Central City argued to the San Francisco Economic OpportunityCouncil (EOC), established as part of the federal War on Poverty,that the stigmatization of social deviancy, in particular nonnormative sexuality,might—like racial inequality—be implicated in producing urban poverty.At the core of their argument was the contention that it was the conditionsof the so-called ghetto—rampant poverty, inadequate infrastructureand services, and police misconduct—that promised this result: what theywould call a "white ghetto," to be exact. In addition to seeking funding to addresspoverty, homophile activists collaborated to found Citizens Alert, a citywidepolice watchdog organization. And during these same years, Vanguard,a group of youth active in downtown street economies, mobilized those wholived on the fringes of urban policy and homophile organizing. None of thesecampaigns took violence as their primary point of challenge. Yet their focusedcritiques of abusive policing and profit-oriented development—ratherthan street crime, a key target of gay activism in the following decades—meantthat accusations of violence were more consistently directed at whatthey called dominant society than at private individuals.

Focusing on the years 1965 through 1969, the years just prior to theStonewall rebellion in New York City and the avowed birth of a gay liberationmovement, this chapter looks at a moment in which homophile andaffiliated activists focused their aim at poverty and policing and, in doingso, found an opportunity to fight systematic forms of inequality faced bya variety of San Francisco's most marginalized. Multiple forces convergedto shape these campaigns. The first was an existing legacy of gay activismin the San Francisco Bay Area that had gained momentum in response topolice arrests following a 1965 New Year's dance in the Tenderloin. Theincident is credited with changing the tenor of activism by drawing morepointed attention to the problem of unjust policing and solidifying ties betweenreligious and homophile advocates.

In addition, 1965 was the year of the uprising in the Watts neighborhoodof Los Angeles—one of many confrontations between the police and AfricanAmerican residents in cities across the United States—an event thatsecured the place of police and interpersonal violence on activist and policyagendas. Three years later, in 1968, the concern about police abuse of AfricanAmericans would be both aired and contained with the publication ofthe Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, betterknown as the Kerner Report. Although the report noted the existence of"two societies, separate and unequal," it also narrated a crisis of violenceamong black residents and social movement actors. Also in 1968 the OmnibusCrime Control and Safe Streets Act was passed, establishing the LawEnforcement Assistance Administration. The bill expanded federal policingpowers while distributing funds for state-based antidisorder initiatives; italso further formalized the newly prioritized place of victims and social researchwithin police practice.

The third primary context for Central City activism in 1965 was providedby the aforementioned War on Poverty, which had started seeding programsin San Francisco by the start of that year. The Economic Opportunity Actmandated "maximum feasible participation" of the poor in economic developmentprograms. Local initiatives soon were engaged with a constellationof social movements dedicated to the varied goals of rights, redistribution,or, even, revolution: from civil rights to welfare rights, from the New Left toBlack Power. Indeed, the War on Poverty was the scene for many negotiationsbetween radicalism and liberalism in the late years of the civil rightsmovement, and Central City activists' efforts to analogize sexuality to racereflected many of the same contradictions—such as between calls for theend to an unjust market economy and the opportunity for greater participation;between an indictment of the police and a call for their protection;between the goal of freedom and that of equality; between claims for thegroup and those for the individual. Furthermore, the structure of the Waron Poverty provided an opportunity for state administrators and activiststo ground—and rework—abstract concepts about culture and identity diagnosedby social scientists affiliated with the lasting project of postwarliberalism. In sum, the mid-to late 1960s saw both the creeping expansionof the penal state and local calls for empowerment. The election of PresidentRichard Nixon in 1968 would extend the former and reroute the latter,casting the poor and their advocates as criminal and the white middle classas in need of and central to regimes of protection.

Centered on the seedy streets of the Central City, the campaigns for Waron Poverty funding and Citizens Alert each framed sexual oppression asa product of discrimination but also of unchecked profit motive enforcedthrough violent state forces. This analytic opening allowed for collaborationsbetween homosexuals (and, less so, trans people) and other social minorities;in forming these coalitions, activists did not always parse identitiesnor distill antigay sentiment from other expressions of social domination.Neither did this approach present an individual's place in the economicstructure as transcending exploitation based on race, gender, or sexuality.The approaches of these campaigns were therefore in contrast to themore privacy-oriented solution to entrapment that was most associatedwith homophile activism of the era. Yet in line with the prevailing liberalframework, activists ultimately sought explanation for nonconformity andexclusion in individual psyches and found remedy in the expanded role ofproper citizen: a mode of analysis and strategy that would prove durable inthe years to come.

1965: Central City

In order to understand these campaigns, it is essential to first place themin the history of U.S. homophile activism and on a map of San Francisco.The origins of the homophile movement are most associated with theMattachine Society, founded in Hollywood, California, in 1951. Modeledon the Communist Party USA—of which its founder, Harry Hay, was amember—the society initially adopted a secret cell structure for sponsoreddiscussions. Members also pursued a few high-profile campaigns, such aswhen Mattachine formed the Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapmentin 1952 in support of Dale Jennings, a member who had been arrested forindecency. In the years that followed, Mattachine members debated ideologyand strategy while focusing on the pursuit of legal reforms (such as thedecriminalization of sodomy and an end to police entrapment, vagrancycharges, workplace discrimination, and censorship) and a shift in popularvalues (via mass culture and the word of the expert). Chapters openedacross the country, and other homophile organizations were founded; inSan Francisco these included the Daughters of Bilitis (1955), League for CivilEducation (1961), and Society for Individual Rights (1964).

Notwithstanding its later centrality to the LGBT movement, the issueof street violence was not at the top of homophile organizations' agendas,even if it was a sustained concern of their members. To be sure, violencewas a structuring feature in the lives of many who lived outside dominantheterosexuality in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. Be it domestic,vigilante, or state-practiced, violence was common, especially forwomen and men who refused gender norms or those who lacked the privilegesthat came with wealth or whiteness. By the 1950s, white racial violencehad long been a mode of controlling sexuality; the targeting of blackmen in the name of protecting white women is but the most cited example.And although sexual entrapment in bars was less common for women thanfor men, women's bars were often targeted for antiprostitution raids. Yetthese kinds of violence fell outside the bounds of the homophile movement,which tended to target the disproportionate enforcement of laws againsthomosexuals specifically, or to challenge the inclusion of homosexuality inotherwise uncontested regulations. Those who might be charged with sodomy,lewdness, or vagrancy, or who experienced violence, for reasons thatwere not singularly perceptible as antihomosexual—such as for cross-racesexual contact, sexual commerce, or itinerancy linked to poverty—were notnecessarily included in homophile campaigns. This division was not onlyconceived by activist strategy; the separation of homosexuality from otherforms of urban disorder was also a new aspect of regulatory state administrationduring these years. Although it is difficult to determine whetherthe omission of violence as such from activist agendas was substantive ortactical, it is significant that violence per se was not primary. For homophileactivists, the main predicament was how to publicly acknowledge and protecthomosexual practice and identity (what would later become known ascoming out or becoming visible), rather than negotiating embodied displaysof difference or multiple marginalized identities.

Despite the lack of focus on antiviolence in their organizations' formalplans, lesbians, gay men, and trans people did act collectively to resist violence,especially in places considered less respectable by many homophileorganizations. Informal group dynamics were strongest in what ElizabethKennedy and Madeline Davis call "street bars" that catered to, in the wordsof one person they interviewed, "straights, colored, pimps, whores, and gaypeople." Bar patrons often responded to violence through everyday refusals,be it by fighting back, breaking a window, or boldly flouting a law. Barowners, too, organized to protect these spaces, forming business alliancesto safeguard their property interests from state interference. Nan AlamillaBoyd argues that one result in San Francisco is that lesbians and gay menoften depended more on each other and on bar owners for their safety thanthey did on homophile organizations, and thus bar culture—rather than incipientactivist groups—might be seen as the early foundation of unapologeticlesbian, gay, and transgender political communities.

Yet this profile of the homophile movement would change in San Franciscoafter the 1965 New Year's Day arrests at California Hall. A costumeball fund-raiser had been organized by the Council on Religion and theHomosexual, which had been founded in 1964 by homophile and religiousactivists hoping to build a broad coalition for local action. Police officersphotographed attendees, and the lawyers who challenged them were amongthose arrested. Homophile and religious leaders were outraged, and agroup of ministers, many associated with Glide Memorial Church in theTenderloin—a Methodist congregation that had been largely responsiblefor the founding of the council—spoke out, while the group further homedin on the problem of policing. The church's urban mission had been concretizedin the Glide Urban Center for community outreach, founded in 1962by Rev. Lewis Durham. Durham and the head of youth outreach, Rev. TedMcIlvenna, both played a central role in the council. In the years that followed,Glide ministers and homophile activists would continue to be keypartners in the Central City area, as the church's ministrations to the urbanpoor melded well with the homophile movement's dedication to providingsocial services. Phyllis Lyon, cofounder of the Daughters of Bilitis, workedfor years at Glide, first as McIlvenna's assistant and later helping to foundthe National Sex and Drug Forum, in 1968. Glide Publications released DelMartin and Phyllis Lyon's classic 1972 book Lesbian/Woman. In 1963 anAfrican American activist minister, Rev. Cecil Williams, joined the majority-whitecongregation and soon became head pastor. Under his leadership,Glide would sustain church and homophile cooperation and further cultivatecross-constituency organizing.

Glide's location in the Tenderloin put it at the literal crossroad of SanFrancisco politics and culture. Physically speaking (see appendix), the Tenderloinwas in the broad impact zone of some of the most sweeping urbanrenewal projects of the time, including the neighboring Yerba Buena Centerplan, a convention complex. As Chester Hartman describes in his history ofSan Francisco's growth machine, the groundwork to build the Yerba BuenaCenter had been laid in the 1950s, when corporate and city interests firstprepared to expand the city's central business district to serve a restructuringservice economy. (This would also include the building of the Bay AreaRapid Transit system in the 1960s, to link the suburbs with downtown.)The area chosen for the center was the Central City neighborhood knownas South of Market, which included, as Hartman explains, "hundreds ofacres of flat land with low-density use, low land prices, and, to the corporateeye, expendable people and businesses." The neighborhood was home toa growing number of Filipino families as well as many who depended onsingle room occupancy housing, such as elderly people and male dockworkers—ranging from longshoremen to merchant marines. South of Marketalso included Sixth Street, San Francisco's skid row, and South Park, anisolated, economically impoverished neighborhood with a sizable populationof African Americans and new immigrants. The other areas close todowntown were hilly and thus less amenable to office development. Thebroader Central City area was also affected by an ongoing renewal plan forthe Embarcadero area to the north and the so-called slum clearance of thenearby Western Addition. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency hadsponsored two major urban renewal projects in the Western Addition: theproject called a1 was approved in 1956 but did not go into effect until theearly 1960s; a2 followed in 1966. Together, they displaced thousands of residentsand businesses. As James Baldwin described it after touring SanFrancisco in 1963, it was, in essence, a program of pointed "Negro removal."

This made the Tenderloin section of the Central City in the North ofMarket area, like the nearby Chinatown, one of the few neighborhoodswith affordable housing near the demolition zones. (Chinatown had alsobeen designated as blighted, and the famous decade-long effort to evict theresidents of the International Hotel began in the late 1960s.) Althoughdealing with its own encroaching hotel development to service the upgradingdowntown, the Tenderloin was not (yet) considered prime real estate.This was due, in part, to its hills that proved a geographic block, but it wasalso because of its status as the area's red light district. The Tenderloin wasa neighborhood of prostitution, strip bars, and other forms of scandalousnightlife. As Susan Stryker observes in her defining analysis of the Tenderloinduring this period, the neighborhood was to absorb much of the"exodus" of socially and economically marginal people and activities forcedout of the surrounding areas.
(Continues...)Excerpted from SAFE SPACE by Christina B. Hanhardt. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.