Gay Bar Casualties (1943)
By Aaron Eske
Jim Kepner was one of the first writers in history to publish his work and ideas in an openly Gay magazine. (He’d want us to capitalize “Gay” as he did in his own writing to signify a respected tribe of people. So this typo is for you, Jim.)
Kepner began his career as a staff writer and columnist in 1954 for the daring ONE Magazine, the first openly sold magazine by and for homosexuals in the United States. In 1958, the publication won its right to exist in the first-ever U.S. Supreme Court case about homosexuality. Kepner later wrote for The Advocate. For more than half a century he devoted his life to documenting the gay community, “who we are, why we are so, what we want, and how we might achieve it."
Three words – “where we are” – seem to be missing from Kepner’s mission. Page after page of his reporting explores some of the places that mattered the most to the gay community in his lifetime. Gay bars were the battleground for the movement. They offered a rare and fragile moment of belonging to the outcasts they sheltered.
Kepner’s first night going to a gay bar was also his first experience seeing a gay bar raid. It was 1943. He was 19 and new to San Francisco. A female coworker where he worked at the Southern Pacific railroad headquarters by the Ferry Building had tipped him off about a bar called the Black Cat Café in the Barbary Coast. The neighborhood is now known as North Beach and a decade later was home to Jack Kerouac and the Beats.
“I went up the street on a cloud of idealism, walking six inches above the sidewalk, skipping six inches above the sidewalk, going to join my brothers and sisters for the first time,” Kepner told Paul D. Cain of the Homosexual Information Center in 1994, describing his journey to the Black Cat that night.
The petite and brown-haired Kepner was steps away from the bar door when the police stormed past him and went in first. Patrols during the World War II years often raided San Francisco’s gay-friendly bars as part of their ‘Moral Drive’ to intimidate or catch off-duty servicemen who were young, gay, and seeking a night of freedom before they were deployed and faced death by U-boat rocket or beach grenade.
Kepner was a pacifist and avoided the war draft for true religious reasons. He proved his pacifism again outside the Black Cat. He hid in a doorway across the street while the police removed a dozen drag queens and a dozen “beautiful, hunky, macho types” from the bar and forced them into black paddy-wagons parked out front.
“I can still hear the one queen yelling at the officer, ‘Don’t shove me, you bastard, or I’ll bite your fuckin’ balls off!’” Kepner recalled. “And that queen paid dearly for that.” The more masculine men were more subdued and ashamed, walking “like sheep being led to the slaughter they expected.”
These were the first gay people Jim Kepner had ever seen. The guilt of watching silently while his peers were beat up and had their names printed in the paper for their relatives and employers to read got under Kepner’s skin. He wanted to be part of the movement. So despite the risk, he kept going to and fighting for gay bars. He often visited five or six in a single night. They were where he belonged. Plus let’s be real – social justice wasn’t his only motive. He was on the cusp of his 20s and there was a nightly rotation of sailors on land looking for company. Kepner said he had sex with two or three men a night, “although sometimes one was good enough to last all night.”
Through the good times, the raids stayed on his mind. Kepner complained about them to a pen pal from the Army later in 1943: “Why in the hell can’t they let us have at least a few places where we can be free?”
The pen pal replied: “Someday, I’m going to build a huge fortress with walls ten feet thick and five sets of steel gates. Then let anyone try to invade our party.”
Nearly 40 years after Kepner opened his friend’s letter and three years after the Stonewall riots in Manhattan, his vision for an open space for gays came true. A revolutionarily designed gay bar named Twin Peaks Tavern made history in the Castro. Instead of a fortress of concrete and steel, the gay bar’s walls were made of glass, free for all outside to see in. And finally, free for all inside to belong in the light of day and life of night.
Kepner began his career as a staff writer and columnist in 1954 for the daring ONE Magazine, the first openly sold magazine by and for homosexuals in the United States. In 1958, the publication won its right to exist in the first-ever U.S. Supreme Court case about homosexuality. Kepner later wrote for The Advocate. For more than half a century he devoted his life to documenting the gay community, “who we are, why we are so, what we want, and how we might achieve it."
Three words – “where we are” – seem to be missing from Kepner’s mission. Page after page of his reporting explores some of the places that mattered the most to the gay community in his lifetime. Gay bars were the battleground for the movement. They offered a rare and fragile moment of belonging to the outcasts they sheltered.
Kepner’s first night going to a gay bar was also his first experience seeing a gay bar raid. It was 1943. He was 19 and new to San Francisco. A female coworker where he worked at the Southern Pacific railroad headquarters by the Ferry Building had tipped him off about a bar called the Black Cat Café in the Barbary Coast. The neighborhood is now known as North Beach and a decade later was home to Jack Kerouac and the Beats.
“I went up the street on a cloud of idealism, walking six inches above the sidewalk, skipping six inches above the sidewalk, going to join my brothers and sisters for the first time,” Kepner told Paul D. Cain of the Homosexual Information Center in 1994, describing his journey to the Black Cat that night.
The petite and brown-haired Kepner was steps away from the bar door when the police stormed past him and went in first. Patrols during the World War II years often raided San Francisco’s gay-friendly bars as part of their ‘Moral Drive’ to intimidate or catch off-duty servicemen who were young, gay, and seeking a night of freedom before they were deployed and faced death by U-boat rocket or beach grenade.
Kepner was a pacifist and avoided the war draft for true religious reasons. He proved his pacifism again outside the Black Cat. He hid in a doorway across the street while the police removed a dozen drag queens and a dozen “beautiful, hunky, macho types” from the bar and forced them into black paddy-wagons parked out front.
“I can still hear the one queen yelling at the officer, ‘Don’t shove me, you bastard, or I’ll bite your fuckin’ balls off!’” Kepner recalled. “And that queen paid dearly for that.” The more masculine men were more subdued and ashamed, walking “like sheep being led to the slaughter they expected.”
These were the first gay people Jim Kepner had ever seen. The guilt of watching silently while his peers were beat up and had their names printed in the paper for their relatives and employers to read got under Kepner’s skin. He wanted to be part of the movement. So despite the risk, he kept going to and fighting for gay bars. He often visited five or six in a single night. They were where he belonged. Plus let’s be real – social justice wasn’t his only motive. He was on the cusp of his 20s and there was a nightly rotation of sailors on land looking for company. Kepner said he had sex with two or three men a night, “although sometimes one was good enough to last all night.”
Through the good times, the raids stayed on his mind. Kepner complained about them to a pen pal from the Army later in 1943: “Why in the hell can’t they let us have at least a few places where we can be free?”
The pen pal replied: “Someday, I’m going to build a huge fortress with walls ten feet thick and five sets of steel gates. Then let anyone try to invade our party.”
Nearly 40 years after Kepner opened his friend’s letter and three years after the Stonewall riots in Manhattan, his vision for an open space for gays came true. A revolutionarily designed gay bar named Twin Peaks Tavern made history in the Castro. Instead of a fortress of concrete and steel, the gay bar’s walls were made of glass, free for all outside to see in. And finally, free for all inside to belong in the light of day and life of night.