Exactly how wild was the Wild West in San Francisco? You may know Finocchio's opened as a speakeasy in 1929 and the Dash one of the first gay bars opened on 547 Pacific Street in 1908. But what was life like in California from the time of the Gold Rush until prohibition?
We are fortunate that both people of the era (in diaries and letters) and modern writers have had much to say on the subject. One thing which seems clear from paintings and drawings of the 19th century is that there was a lot of same-sex dancing going on.
Sometimes the participants didn't even wait to get to California. In Peter Boag's revealing book Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past, he tells the story of George Dornin, who attended a "Fancy Dress Ball" that took place on board the S.S. Panama on July 4, 1849 while bound for San Francisco. Of the 220 passengers and crew, only four were women and only one was interested in the dance. So the younger smooth-faced men donned gowns. Although Dornin was not a good dancer, he was apparently quite popular.
The party didn't end when the miners got on dry land and started digging. In Susan Lee Johnson's Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, you can read about Scottish artist and writer J.D. Borthwick's visit to a ball in Angel Camp in 1852. A fiddle and flute provided music for the dancers to perform "Ladies chain" and "Set to your partner."
Borthwick noted "the absence of ladies was a difficulty which was very easily overcome." Men "who had a patch on a certain part of his inexpressibles" became a woman for the evening for the purposes of the dance. Some of these buffalo gals seemed quite popular. Borthwick told of a fellow Scot, a boy who performed the Highland fling, much to the delight of his audience. "If he had drunk all the men who then sought the honor of 'treating' him, he would have never lived to tread another measure."
Not all of the men who enjoyed each other's company met in the mines, however. Johnson's book tells the story of Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee, who sailed together from Boston to California. When they landed in San Francisco in July, 1849, Chamberlain was 27 and Chaffee was 25.
Though they found work in San Francisco, they quickly caught gold fever and took off for the foothills within weeks. They settled in Groveland and lived together for over fifty years. Johnson tells us in the large amount of writing they left there is "no trace of intimate female companions."
John continued to dig for gold for the rest of his life, while Jason became a gardener. After the gold rush, their home became a way station on the route to Yosemite (established as a park in 1890). One visitor to their cabin referred to them as "wedded batchelors" (sic) and another forty-niner wrote in their guest book that "two characteristic '49ers' whose attachment to each other has the true 'Damon and Pythias' ring, that touches sentiments so welcome" and goes on to say "may their 'Golden Wedding' to be celebrated in 1899 be a crowning event to their long history of hospitality."
Johnson tells us that they did reach that goal, as Chaffee noted in his diary. "This is Jubilee Number or 50 years together." They remained together till Chaffee had to leave Chamberlain in 1903 for medical treatment in Oakland, where he died the same year. A guest book entry from the time says, "a love could not miss his sweetheart more."
Campfire, girls
Life in the city was not nearly as idyllic as the lives of Chamberlain and Chaffee in the foothills. Boag's book paints a rough and tumble world that had elements which we would identify as transgender today.
Ferdinand Haisch was a carpenter who was known for going out in women's clothing in the 1890s after work. He enjoyed passing as a woman on the cable cars, but his notoriety got out of hand. By 1895 crowds gathered at his home to catch a glimpse of him, causing him on one occasion when they were particularly unruly to get on his roof and throw wood at the crowd to get them to disperse (the book doesn't specify if he was in drag when he did this).
There were people who used drag in their work as well. Charles Harrington was a female impersonator at a San Francisco saloon who was arrested in 1907 for coming on to two purportedly unsuspecting sailors while not on duty. The judge in the case warned, "I'll let you go this time, but I warn you that in the future you must confine yourself strictly to the footlights and if you step down but for a brief space of a moment...I will go hard on you." Boag notes this was "probably what the sailors had promised, too."
Boag's book is also full of examples of women who dressed and lived as men during the era. One notorious example is Jeanne Bonnet, whose story is the inspiration for Emma Donoghue's recent novel Frog Music.
Bonnet was arrested repeatedly in the 1870s for dressing as a man, which she explained she did because she was a frog catcher and women's apparel did not work for that job. She befriended a sex worker, Blanche Beunon, and enticed her into leaving her lover (and pimp). Bonnet and Beunon were in bed together in 1876 when shots rang out and Bonnet was killed in what is to this day an unsolved crime, though the pimp is suspected.
Boag also recounts the story of another famous female to male cross-dresser, Jack Garland, also known as Babe Bean. Garland was born Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta in San Francisco in 1869, the daughter of the Mexican consul. Garland initially became known for dressing as a man in Stockton in 1897 and became a celebrity. He was hired by the Stockton Evening Mail as a writer and eventually stowed away on a steamer to the Philippines and became a male nurse in the Spanish-American War.
America's Frontier Past
Perhaps the most fascinating person in Boag's book is Alan Hart, born Alberta Lucille. Hart's father died when she was a child. From an early age he began to insist he was now the "man of the family." Hart fell in love with Eva Cushman and moved with her to attend Stanford in 1910. From Stanford, he began making regular trips to San Francisco, visiting the Tenderloin and developing a relationship with a dance hall girl. Hart became a doctor and received treatments, including a hysterectomy to change sexes during the first decade of the twentieth century. Hart went on to become a doctor at San Francisco City Hospital, wrote four novels and was married twice.
Similsexualism
Aside from current authors who write about the history of gender variance in California and the Bay Area, one author who was writing about it at the time was Edward Prime-Stevenson. He was best known as an author of children's books and a music critic for Harpers and The New York Independent, and wrote nonfiction about the gay world under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne.
The Intersexes: a History of Similsexualism as a Problem in Social Life was privately published in Naples in 1908. In it he writes San Francisco is one of the homosexual capitals of America and notes "a special factor in homosexual uses of vapour-bath establishments (in the larger cities) is the fact that these are kept open, and much patronized, during the night hours."
As Stevenson moved to Europe by 1900, we know from his book that the baths were active in the 19th century (a search of city directories from the 1890s reveals that there were more than 20 bathhouses at that time). Stevenson also let his reader know about soldiers and their sexual habits.
"A garrison noted for its homosexual contingent has been that of San Francisco, California, where especially during the time of the sudden Spanish-American war excitement (1898) soldier-prostitution was so active that the 'Presidio' quarter was the regular goal of the philostrats [soldier lovers] of San Francisco. Amiable young soldiers were to be 'had' so plentifully that their tariffs fell to nominal prices and the lodgings of popular amateurs were fairly invaded."
We can be rather sure that Stevenson was accurate in his descriptions of life in San Francisco, as his book was privately printed in a limited run of 125 copies, so he was not seeking sensationalism. This book was probably printed for his acquaintances.
Aside from histories like Peter Boag's and Susan Lee Johnson's, and narratives like Edward Prime-Stevenson's, stories of gay life in San Francisco and California have been inspiring writers since the era of the Gold Rush.
Ambrose Bierce's first story "The Haunted Valley," written in 1871, featured what the Ambrose Bierce Project describes as a "transgendered love triangle." Bret Harte's "Tennessee's Partner," written in 1869, is thought by many to be inspired by the story of Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee (who referred to one another as 'Tennessee' and 'Pard' after the story was published). The wide open nature of San Francisco has been well known since at least 1855, when the British adventure writer Frank Marryat referred to the city as "Sodom by the Sea" in his memoir.
Keep in this in mind when you are out in the city having fun. Raise a glass to your LGBT ancestors who, more than 150 years ago, made this place into the city we love.