As 2024 draws near, LGBTQ+ activists are taking stock of a traumatic year for the queer community. Lawmakers across the country introduced hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, with particular emphasis on trans people. Now, as queer folks are looking toward hope and change in the New Year, they are reflecting on the past resilience of their community.
On New Year’s Day 1965, a group of drag queens and gay activists held a drag ball at California Hall in San Francisco. They strutted in, dressed in their finest, ready to dance and celebrate the promise of a new year. It was a historic evening: it would be the first time in American history that a group of Christian ministers would publicly sponsor and host an event for queer people. However, by the end of a night that would come to be known as San Francisco’s Stonewall, police would raid the ball, which had more than 600 people in attendance, make arrests, and inadvertently raise awareness of the plight of queer people and overpolicing.
“The perseverance and persistence to live and thrive within the LGBTQ+ community has been strong and alive for decades,” said Mark Bowman, executive director of the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. “The fearlessness shown by queer persons and their clergy allies in the California Hall Mardi Gras police raid in 1965 helped ignite campaigns for LGBTQ rights in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the US.”
The dance was organized by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, or the CRH, which was founded in December 1964 as “the first ecumenical organization to bring the problem of antigay discrimination to the attention of the liberal Protestant churches”, according to historian Susan Stryker. The group’s first major event would be a fundraiser: a Mardi Gras-themed New Year’s Day party. On the guest list were both straight clergy with their wives, and drag queens and gay activists from the community.
The ministers on the CRH publicized the event openly, using the word “homosexual” on their posters – a landmark move for the 1960s. In an era of police brutality and crackdowns against gay bars and any public gathering of queer people, the ministers tried to stave off any potential issues by proactively speaking with the San Francisco police. They hoped the authorities would allow the event to proceed with no issues.
“And they explained that there would be dancing and there would be costumes, and that they’d be thoroughly supervised and chaperoned by a dozen different leading denomination ministers,” said Bill Plath, a member of the Tavern Guild, an association of gay bar owners that co-sponsored the event, in a 1996 oral history interview that has been preserved by the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. The meeting went well, the ministers thought.
So the dance went on, with one important note in the publicization of the event: there would be no cameras. This was an important safety measure in an age when most of the gay, trans and drag queen attendees would not have been publicly “out” and would risked losing their jobs, homes and relationships if their queerness had become known.
Yet, on the night of 1 January 1965, when the police raided the party, they brought cameras.
“Dozens of police swarmed in and around California Hall,” reported famed lesbian newspaper the Ladder. “A line-up of police cars, one paddy wagon, plainclothes and uniformed officers, and police photographers greeted over 600 patrons of this supposedly gala event … Police dogged the assembly from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. in a blatant display of police power. Official police photographers snapped pictures of most of the 600 guests as they arrived.”
When the police tried to enter the dance at first, CRH attorneys and a woman taking tickets blocked the doors.
“Arrested were three attorneys and a housewife who challenged inspectors from the sex-crimes detail by insisting the police needed either a warrant, or information that a crime was being committed, in order to enter the hall,” reported the Ladder.
That’s when “all hell broke loose and the police blustered their way in”, remembered Plath.
The Rev Chuck Lewis, a minister on the CRH and one of the event organizers, was inside when the officers entered.
“At that point, the panic began,” he remembered. “Panic began to spread through the crowd … People would come up to the clergy and say, ‘You’ve got to get me out of here … If this gets in the papers or anything, I’ll lose my job.’”
He helped drag queens escape, even shielding them with his coat from the police photographers still waiting outside.
“The result was that I was suddenly just irate and filled with rage,” said Lewis. “I understood for the first time what the feelings were like … the rage that is felt against a police department, that it acts as a harasser and attempts to control people outside the law.”
The police raid on the party at California Hall was a turning point in queer history, a moment when straight community members could finally see how queer people were treated by the police at this time.
“This is the type of police activity that homosexuals know well, but heretofore the police had never played their hand before Mr Average Citizen,” Del Martin, a lesbian activist and member of the CRH, told the Ladder at the time. “It was always the testimony of the police officer versus the homosexual, and the homosexual, fearing publicity and knowing the odds were against him, succumbed. But in this instance the police overplayed their part.”
As leading LGBTQ+ scholar Martin Duberman put it: “The California Hall incident marked a turning point … Gay activists had learned the precious lesson that open, organized defiance could yield positive results.”
