Reading...

So, seized by I know not what Higher Impulse at the beautiful and gracious downtown Honolulu library day before yesterday, I summoned out of the stacks (where, these days, such things are kept) a double handful of the writings of H.L. Mencken--whom, for his deep appreciation of San Francisco (Urbs et Mens) I have long loved--and in among them I have found many and many a precious gem, including, particularly, Mencken's prose poem, idyll or ode, to the Democratic convention of 1920, "holden" (as Mencken Chaucerizes the past participle of hold) in the then new (built in 1915) Municipal Auditorium of San Francisco, and lubricated with a railroad carload of exquisite, delicious, and even healthful bourbon whiskey, gratis, courtesy of 'Sunny Jim' Rolph, San Francisco's longest serving, most popular, and most corrupt mayor, and purveyed to the delegates by His Honor's prettiest, politest, and best dressed hookers.  I had to go online to get the whole story, which even Mencken only gives glimpses of.  'Sunny Jim'--who went on, by the way, to become Governor--as I learn, was everything one could possibly desire in a Mayor of San Francisco:  With a few of his cronies, he organized the Panama Pacific Exposition (World's Fair) of 1915, built the fabulous civic center,  oversaw the building of the Oakland Bay bridge, engineered the Hetch Hetchy power and water supply, and constructed the West Side Trolley system; all the while declaring that he would enforce Prohibition "as little as possible," and, with tightly policed (so as not to scare off the tourists) gambling hells and whorehouses, turning San Francisco into about as Wide Open a city as it was ever possible for an American city to be--greatly to the approbation and the satisfaction of the inhabitants thereof.  "A not surprising alliance of populism and debauchery," is how one of the online chronicles of those times puts it.   And of course it does all lead on to the increase in the number of gay people who settled in San Francisco, because of the general climate of sinful tolerance, and who eventually created the Gay Liberation Sexual Revolution which I myself witnessed and participated in in the 1960's.  Yes.  And no thanks whatsoever to contemporary events on the East Coast or the riots at the Stonewall Inn.  Or to trannies or Lesbians.

The key, or crux, the single thing which made Gay Liberation  possible and inevitable, was the California Supreme Court's decision, Stoumen v. Reilly, 1951, which restored the Black Cat Café's liquor license, and incidentally affirmed that homosexuals were indeed human beings, and that the public assembly of homosexuals was not in itself illegal.