The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts Page B

homosexual underground thrived in San Francisco. The early settlers dubbed the cosmopolitan city “Baghdad by the Bay,” but ministers throughout the West quickly gave the town another nickname, “Sodom by the Sea.”
    From the start San Francisco attracted an unlikely conglomeration of adventurers, vagabonds, bohemians, and assorted misfits. The city was a wild town that could challenge the world’s rowdiest ports. Among the whorehouses of the early Barbary Coast were the forerunners of gay bars, small elite restaurants with all-male staffs and very private booths.
    Necessity, if nothing else, forced a see-no-evil attitude toward homosexuality. Between 1848 and 1858, San Francisco leaped from being a backwater hamlet of one thousand to become a major metropolis of fifty thousand—and virtually all the gold-seeking newcomers were men. The late twentieth-century homophile vogue of denoting sexual inclinations by colored handkerchiefs, for example, dates back to those Forty-niner days when raucous miners used hankies to separate male and female roles for their all-male square dances.
    The scandal sheets of a more Victorian America fretted about the city’s unnatural vices in the 1880s. In England, Oscar Wilde noted, “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be last seen in San Francisco,” an observation that undoubtedly said as much about Wilde’s company as it did about the city’s magnetism.
    The Spanish-American War infused new excitement into the city’s gay scene when San Francisco became home port to the thousands of men bound for the Philippines. Helpful young soldiers learned they could make extra money if they escorted admiring older men around the Presidio military base—and earn more if they proved serviceable.
    The earthquake shattered San Francisco’s bawdier side when church leaders came forward to warn that the shaker obviously represented God’s wrath on Sodom West. A clean-up campaign swept away the Barbary Coast. Prohibition later closed any sub rosa gay bars that may have survived. Resourceful gays staked out Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, as a cruising zone and there shopped among the always numerous sailors for satisfaction.
    Dangers abounded. Some plucky navy men would dress in their tightest blues and memorize license numbers of cars that sputtered slowly by. From motor vehicle records, the voter registrar, or the city directory, the military men could trace the cruiser’s address. Before the week was out, many a hapless victim would receive an extortionist’s invoice, casually mentioning that if payment were not promptly received, both family and employer could expect revealing mail.
    Gays who escaped blackmailers had to run the gauntlet with “Lilly Law,” as police were known among gays in the 1930s. Police knew that one Market Street theater was a popular pit stop for wandering gay men, so authorities routinely assigned seats there to the most comely police cadets. Once a gay man sidled into the next seat, the cadets would wriggle their legs suggestively. After the preliminaries of fellatio, the plainclothesman would suggest that the pair meet outside for more fun. In the darkness of the theater, the gay cruiser would not know the policeman had painted mercurochrome on his penis. The artistry, however, was obvious to vice squaders who stood in the lobby, arresting any man who emerged with telltale red lips.
    The wealthy managed to stay above such trouble in this era. Templeton Crocker, the scion of the city’s prominent banking family, reportedly headed local gay royalty, throwing lavish parties and surrounding himself with pretty young men. Other famous characters fluttered in and out of the tea dances and private parties where each guest was carefully vouched for. A homosexual septuagenarian fondly recalled decades later how in his youth, no less than the Catholic archbishop had