Photos courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.
drink me
for the Board of Supervisors in 1961.
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The hot spot for so-called “odd girls” was Mona’s 440 where, as the advertisements read, “girls will be boys.” Today, San Francisco has its share of drag queen luminaries, but in North Beach in the ’50s it was all about male impersonators such as Gladys Bentley and Kay Scott and their coterie of pin-up-worthy girlfriends filling the booths and ordering up stiff ones. Bentley dressed like a dapper dandy in a top hat and tux, flirting shamelessly to a smitten, all-women audience and “reinterpreting” popular tunes with highly sexualized lyrics. North Beach and Telegraph Hill are widely considered to be SF’s first lesbian neighborhoods, and during the ’50s there were several hot spots within spit-
ting distance that catered to “odd girls.” The original Tommy’s Joynt was owned by Tommy Vasu, the first known lesbian to legally run a bar in San Francisco. Dick Boyd, author of Broadway North Beach: The Golden Years, points out that, “men had to front for lesbians in bars and clubs in order to get the approval of the Board of Equalization for their liquor license,” which was the case with Mona’s in the late 1930s.
T
he drinking clientele for the bars and taverns had originally been blue collar, and as this population shrank, so did the profit. The Tavern Guild of San Francisco, formed in 1962, was the first gay business association in the country, protecting establishments