Polk Street was San Franciscos premier gay male center in the 1960s and 1970s. Top Gay Clubs & Bars in Downtown San Francisco: See reviews and photos of Gay Clubs & Bars in Downtown San Francisco, San Francisco (California) on Tripadvisor. 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. Polk Streets history through the lens of neighborhood change in the mid-2000s. See the map below, and as Stabile writes for the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, the hand-drawn ads and matchbooks from this other era of gay bar culture reflects two generations of gay men. 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. Many of San Francisco’s legendary bars go way, way back-even before the Summer of Love-and are still thriving today. California and the rest of the US filtered by Black San Francisco gay bars and clubs are mapped in the gayborhood with an overview, tags, contact details, website, social media links, transit/walking.
You can almost feel the personal stories, the come-ons, the banter, and the longing for freedom seeping out of the nicked wood of the bar. Black Gay Bars and Black Gay Clubs in San Francisco near 94114 map by ClubFly - Gay Bar and Gay Club Maps. 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. There’s something magical about walking through the doors of a gay bar or club thats older than you are. 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. 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. Gay Bars in San Francisco International Airport on YP.com.