Image courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library Tables were pushed together to form a makeshift stage for live entertainment. The audience cheered "Carmen" on as she dodged the vice squad and made her escape. Sarria as Carmen would prowl through popular cruising area Union Square.
His specialty was a re-working of Bizet's opera Carmen, set in modern-day San Francisco.
Eventually he performed three to four shows a night, along with a regular Sunday afternoon show, with Sarria performing full arias. Sarria, who began as a waiter, wore drag and entertained the crowd by singing parodies of popular torch songs. The bar featured live entertainers, the best known of whom was José Sarria. All the poets went there." By 1951, the bar was placed on the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board's list of establishments which military personnel were forbidden to enter. It was totally open, bohemian, San Francisco.and everybody went there, heterosexual and homosexual.All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. The varied crowds mixed and gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg described the Black Cat as "the best gay bar in America.
While the Beats continued to congregate at the Black Cat into the 1950s, in the years following World War II, more and more gay people began patronizing it. William Saroyan and John Steinbeck were known to frequent the establishment, and part of Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel On the Road is set in the bar. In the early years of Stoumen's ownership, the Black Cat was a center for the bohemian and Beat crowd. With the repeal of Prohibition, the Black Cat re-opened in 1933 at 710 Montgomery Street, again under Ridley's proprietorship. In 1921, the bar lost its dance permit and closed down. Over the next several years, Ridley and the Black Cat came under increased police scrutiny as a possible center of prostitution. When entrepreneur Charles Ridley acquired the bar in 1911, he turned it into a showplace for vaudeville-style acts.
This building still stands today and is now the Bristol Hotel. In the early years, the bar was located in the basement of the Athens Hotel at 56 Mason Street in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. The Black Cat opened in 1906, shortly after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Despite this victory, continued pressure from law enforcement agencies eventually forced the bar's closure in 1964. The Black Cat was at the center of a legal fight that was one of the earliest court cases to establish legal protections for gay people in the United States. During its second run of operation, it was a hangout for Beats and bohemians but over time began attracting more and more of a gay clientele, and becoming a flashpoint for what was then known as the homophile movement, a precursor to the gay liberation movement that gained momentum in the 1960s. The Black Cat re-opened in 1933 and operated for another 30 years. It originally opened in 1906 and closed in 1921. The Black Cat Bar or Black Cat Café was a bar in San Francisco, California.