A New Year’s Raid in Polk Gulch

By Isaac Fellman

On New Year’s Day in 1965, San Francisco police raided a drag ball at California Hall. The Hall, half a mile from the current location of the society’s archives, was built in the 1910s by members of the German immigrant community who lived in Polk Gulch before it became San Francisco’s mid-century gayborhood. By 1965, the LGBTQ community was firmly established on Polk Street, and on New Year’s, California Hall must have felt like home territory — a place for drag queens and their escorts to whirl and ring in the New Year.

The event was a benefit for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, and ministers and their wives would share the queens’ dance floor in a celebration of allyship. Instead, the evening was dominated by police intimidation. Although the local homophile organizations that cosponsored the ball had worked with the city to secure permits, the police showed up in force, aiming bright lights at the doors, photographing the attendees as they entered and eventually forcing their way in to arrest several people, including lawyers who protested their entry.

The lawyers’ connections in their field, and the presence of straight people at the ball, drew sympathetic attention and advanced the straight public’s understanding of queer people’s rights. Police harassment in the city continued, especially among less affluent and privileged queer communities (who would have their own reckonings at events like the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in August 1966), but this high-profile case was a turning point.

The society’s new primary source set on policing and resistance chronicles this story and many more. San Francisco’s police have often set themselves against queer people. Documenting and telling these stories reminds us of the labor it took — and still takes — to make the city work for us, to make the city our home.

Isaac Fellman is the reference archivist at the GLBT Historical Society.