The night was a flash point of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history
New Year’s Eve in downtown San Francisco, Dec. 31, 1964.Barney Peterson/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
By Timothy Karoff, Culture ReporterJan 13, 2025 (SFGate.com)
A building on Polk Street has a problem. California Hall, which sits on the corner of Turk and Polk streets, blends in with the other boxy brick buildings that crowd the neighborhood. It looks ornate and vaguely historic, but so do most old Tenderloin buildings. It was built in the 1910s as a meeting hall for Polk Street’s German community; in the 1960s it served as a concert venue (the Grateful Dead played there in 1969); now, it’s part of the campus of Academy of Art University.
California Hall’s issue, according to local historians and activists, is that it’s missing a plaque.
The building was the site of a forgotten flash point of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history — a moment when a group of Protestant ministers struck up an unlikely but rock-solid alliance with San Francisco’s gay and lesbian communities. On New Year’s Eve, 1964, a dance and drag ball at the Hall ended with a police raid and arrests, which spun into a legal battle involving the ACLU. Before the Stonewall riot galvanized the gay liberation movement in 1969, and before the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966, the California Hall raid shone a light on police harassment of LGBTQ+ communities. In a 2023 article on the raid, the Guardian declared it “San Francisco’s Stonewall.”
Police arrested the lawyers who attempted to bar them from entering the ball.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
“It was one of the earliest instances of a police raid against the queer community,” Shawn Sprockett, who gives walking tours on San Francisco’s queer history, told SFGATE. Sprockett’s tour of the Tenderloin and Polk Gulch includes a stop at California Hall. Rarely, if ever, do participants know of the event’s pivotal role in the city’s LGBTQ+ history.
Before the Castro became San Francisco’s official unofficial gay capital, Polk Gulch and the Tenderloin were hot spots for the city’s LGBTQ+ subcultures. In the ’60s, gay bars lined the streets, and on weekends locals would gather to drink and dance. It was a time when discrimination was rampant, and the Polk/Tenderloin area was subject to frequent police harassment. Plainclothes officers attempted to entrap gay men at bars, or barge in and arrest couples dancing together. One Tenderloin bar hung up a sign advertising this discrimination as part of its weekly programming: “The Chuckkers famous for its unusual entertainment now presents police harassment! Every Fri & Sat.”
In that same period, Bay Area church leaders had a problem of their own. Protestant churches struggled to make inroads among young San Franciscans, and several churches sent ministers to the city to figure out why. Methodist Rev. Ted McIlvenna was one of them. He left his parish in Hayward and began doing outreach with Glide Church. There, he gained acquaintances in the city’s gay and lesbian communities, and even went barhopping through the Tenderloin to better understand the scene.
Rev. Ted McIlvenna is seen at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2013, in San Francisco.Lea Suzuki/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
“We got to be known in all the gay bars,” McIlvenna recalled in “Lewd and Lascivious,” a documentary about the California Hall raid. “They called me the gay priest of Fairyland for a while, which I got a kick out of.”
In 1964 McIlvenna, along with lesbian activists Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin and several other ministers, formalized their friendship by launching the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a group dedicated to facilitating understanding between the church and San Francisco’s gay and lesbian populations. Shortly after CRH was established, it did what any new group of friends would do: It planned to throw a party. The Mardi Gras-themed New Year’s Eve dance would be held in a beautiful old building with around 600 guests, serving as a fundraiser for the new group. Ministers could mingle with drag queens; clergy and their wives could dance next to pairs of lesbians and gay men.
There was only one snag: They needed a permit from the police department. CRH ministers marched to the police station to argue their case, but negotiations began poorly.
When attendees arrived at the ball, police photographers were stationed by the entrance.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
As McIlvenna recalled in the documentary: “The first thing they [the police] said to me when I walked into that meeting, the man said, ‘Do you believe that masturbation is a sin against God?’ And I said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding.’”
“At some point, one of them pounded on the desk … and said, ‘If you’re not going to uphold God’s law, we will,’” Phyllis Lyon, CRH member and co-founder of the lesbian activist group Daughters of Bilitis, recalled in the documentary.
In spite of the shaky start, CRH finally received its permit. (The group would have to meet with the police two more times.) Better yet, the police promised not to interfere with the ball. They did not honor this promise.
When the big night arrived, participants noticed a police van parked across the street and police cars stationed at the corners of the block. Police photographers by the Hall’s entrance snapped photos of attendees as they walked in, some of whom were in full drag.
“Imagine you’re in drag, you’re not out to your co-workers,” Sprockett said. “Now your photo’s getting taken by the police. You don’t know where that’s gonna end up. So it was definitely like an intimidation tactic to scare people from going inside.”
The intimidation didn’t stop participants from dancing.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
The intimidation didn’t stop celebrants from dancing. In “Lewd and Lascivious,” Jon Borset recalls meeting another man named Konrad Osterreich, from Los Angeles, and hitting it off: “We spent some time together, drinking and getting to know one another and dancing.” At its peak, around 600 attendees had gathered in the hall, making it one of the largest gatherings of LGBTQ+ community in San Francisco’s history up to that point.
Two lawyers, Herbert Donaldson and Evander Smith, were stationed at the entrance of the hall. When police came to the door asking to inspect the building’s entrances they acquiesced. When the officers asked to enter the ball, they refused them.
“Evander and I looked at each other and I remember saying, ‘God damn it, no. If you’re going to come in, you’re going to come in with a search warrant,’ Donaldson said in the documentary. “And then, all of a sudden, it seemed like the entryway filled up with police.”
The police entered the hall, some plainclothes and some uniformed. One man in street clothes interrupted Borset and Osterreich while they were dancing, and asked them to follow him outside. When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, he arrested them.
In court, an SFPD inspector claimed that he showed up at the ball with 15 officers and two police photographers “just to inspect the premises.”Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
As police raided the hall, attendees raced to leave. One minister walked drag queens to their limo, holding up his coat to block the views of police photographers. Another, Rev. Chuck Lewis, ran to his apartment in North Beach to retrieve his camera, then back to Polk Street to take flash photos of the police raiding the ball. To keep the photos from being confiscated, CRH member Joanne Chadwick stuffed them in her bra.
For John Brett of the San Francisco Night Ministry, this was an especially illuminating gesture. “Just as much as people attending the dance wouldn’t want their pictures to be published given the oppression … of the time, the police didn’t want their pictures taken either,” he told SFGATE. “Because then it would make their future raids and activities against the queer community and other communities more difficult.”
When the dust had settled, police had made six arrests: Conrad Osterreich, also reported as Konrad, and Jon Borset, who were arrested for dancing together; Nancy May, who took tickets; and attorneys Herbert Donaldson, Evander Smith and Elliott Leighton.
Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Methodist Church at press conference, Feb. 13, 1974.Dave Randolph/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
In the following days, the raid turned into a PR disaster for the San Francisco Police Department. None of the seven ministers at the event, among them Rev. Cecil Williams, was arrested, and the next day, they called a press conference in protest of what they described as “bad faith” on the part of SFPD.
SFPD’s legal efforts floundered as well. A lawyer from the ACLU represented Smith and Donaldson, who were tried for interfering with police. In the courtroom, Inspector Rudy Nieto of SFPD’s Sex Detail claimed that he showed up at the ball with 15 officers and two police photographers “just to inspect the premises,” prompting ministers and their wives who were present to break out into laughter. The next day, the judge presiding over the case asked the jury to rule not guilty: “It’s useless to waste everybody’s time following this to the finale.”
Later that year, Donaldson, Smith, Leighton and May filed a suit against the city of San Francisco and 20 members of the police department, including the chief, for $1,050,000 in damages for the violation of their civil rights.
Gay activists, drag queens and ministers and their wives intermingled at the ball.Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society
At the time, the raid made a splash. Although the fallout exposed police harassment, its legacy faded in the intervening years. In San Francisco’s historical memory, the California Hall raid underwent the reverse maneuver of the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. That incident, once nearly forgotten, now has reemerged as a canonical event in San Francisco’s trans history. The Tenderloin Museum even produces an interactive play inspired by the event. And, of course, there’s a plaque designating the building that once hosted the cafeteria.
All of which takes us back to California Hall’s problem. It’s missing a plaque.
Although the building doesn’t yet bear any historical distinction, locals are commemorating the raid on their own. On Jan. 1, 2025, Brett, Sprockett, and several others gathered outside the hall to mark the raid’s 60th anniversary. A small group stood together, reading stories from that night before holding a moment of silence.
Phyllis Lyons and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, outside their home in Noe Valley in San Francisco, March 3, 1989.Eric Luse/SF Chronicle via Getty Images
They plan to return next year on New Year’s Day, Brett said, and again every year from then on. He expects the next commemoration to be grander, with a parade of drag queens marching down Turk Street. In the meantime, they’ll keep lobbying for a plaque.
“The clergy members and their wives stood up and gave validation to the queer community as allies … so that the queer community could stand as pride in spaces where they were previously unwelcomed. It was a type of capacity building that everyone benefited from,” Brett said. “And we can take inspiration by keeping these stories alive.”
Jan 13, 2025
CULTURE REPORTER
Timothy Karoff is SFGATE’s culture reporter. He lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. You can contact him at timothy.karoff@sfgate.com.
