Who knew Elliott Blackstone, the "naive kid" from Chinook, Montana, would become one of the most influential players in the Tenderloin's nascent 1960s transgender rights movement?
For most of his 26-year police career, and contrary to the prevailing attitude of many of his fellow officers, Blackstone, the San Francisco Police Department community relations officer who spearheaded a 1966 Central City Anti-Poverty Crime Abatement program, considered himself a social worker.
Accordingly, Blackstone, this year's Pride Parade lifetime achievement grand marshal, harnessed the brief availability of the Johnson administration's Great Society funds to create the first peer-run transgender support group.
"I'm thrilled somebody decided they ought to have me," said Blackstone of his lifetime achievement recognition.
Blackstone helped changed police department policies regarding cross dressing and restroom and bar entrapment; helped establish what today is called community policing; and helped start the gay versus SFPD softball games.
Blackstone, who left the Navy and started as a Potrero Hill beat cop in 1951, took a public relations class, then proposed to long-serving Police Chief Thomas J. Cahill his idea of applying what he learned to the department.
Shortly after the "Gayola" scandal – when officers essentially blackmailed owners of local gay bars in order for them to remain open, (inspiring the Tavern Guild's creation) – Blackstone was transferred from Potrero Station to the central city beat and in 1962 was assigned as the first liaison between the department and the seminal LGBT community.
Blackstone, now 81, described to historian and filmmaker Susan Stryker – in an interview transcript provided by the GLBT Historical Society – the day in the Central City Poverty office that his calling became clear.
"And so one day this tall, football-player type female came in to see me. I said 'Oh, you're a transvestite.' She said, 'No I'm a transsexual.' And I said, 'Well, pardon my ignorance but what in the hell is a transsexual?'"
After the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria riot, Blackstone relayed to the police department the anger of harassed patrons, mostly hustlers and transgender prostitutes.
In 1968 he oversaw Conversion Our Goal's [the first peer support group for transgender people] offspring, the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, later called the Transsexual Counseling Service, above the Rochester Big and Tall shop at Third and Mission streets across the corner from the Mattachine Society offices.
"The first thing transsexuals did was leave the Tenderloin after they started getting their lives together," Suzan Cooke, one of the counselors at the Transgender Counseling Service, said in an interview. Cooke added that trans women found refuge from the rough Tenderloin streets at places like the Turf Club, Frolic Room, Black Rose, Grubsteak, and Gene Compton's Cafeteria.
"Elliott helped a lot in setting this up and it really helped people with transsexualism to separate from the high crime, serious drug abuse, and cycle of street whoring and arrests," said Cooke. "Our goal was to assimilate into straight society."
The counselors guided the women through various social service programs, helping them "connect with the rapidly decaying War on Poverty, which Nixon had already gutted," said Cooke, 58.
The Transgender Counseling Services's counselors advised transgenders on how to obtain a medical ID from the newly created Center for Special Problems in the health department, where they received estrogen prescriptions. They could then use the ID card to obtain a City College library card, and finally, a Social Security card expressing the gender of one's choice.
"Our goal, modeled on a 12-step program, was to get people up and out of prostitution with hormones and surgery," said Cooke. "We didn't see ourselves as gender outlaws. Prior to that, drag queens' only source of employment was prostitution or drug dealer, not even a hairdresser because of licensing. You were down, by law, a criminal."
The Reed Erickson Educational Foundation covered the counselors' salaries and rent. Erickson, a trans man who inherited his family's profitable Baton Rouge folding chair company fortune, also supported Dr. Harry Benjamin's transsexual research.
Cooke explained how in 1973 a six-month SFPD frame-up and sting operation discredited Blackstone's transgender work, after they lost funding and moved to a glass-fronted office on Turk and Leavenworth in 1971.
A handsome undercover officer resembling Jim Morrison, according to Cooke, "came on to" counselor Jan Maxwell, a San Francisco State sociology student, flattering and sharing joints with Maxwell, eventually persuading her to arrange for him to purchase a pound of marijuana.
The officer "won her confidence," said Cooke. "She made the mistake of trusting him. He tried to run the same game on me but I was scared of him."
Maxwell and Cooke were scheduled to address a police academy class at 2 p.m. on the day of the raid.
"I looked over at Jan when a half dozen of them were coming through the door," said Cooke.
The department also claimed that officers found pot buds in a desk drawer, shared by Blackstone, though Cooke said he rarely visited the office.
"Elliott was Jan Maxwell's and my boss, ostensibly, but we were pretty much free to do what we thought was right," said Cooke. "We were pretty much on our own. Elliott dropped by once a week."
After a court hearing, Maxwell served almost six months in jail, according to Cooke.
The drug purchase and desk drawer evidence led the department to terminate Blackstone's community relations role, and reportedly demoted him to a Castro beat cop, where he befriended a camera store owner named Harvey Milk.
"The cops used that to screw with Elliott," said Cooke. "His fellow officers worked hard to set him up and they managed to."
"The vice squad just hated him," said the Reverend Dr. Robert Ted McIlvenna, 74, founder of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual and the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
"There were more Dan Whites in the police department that Elliotts," said Cooke, referring to the ex-police officer who became a San Francisco supervisor and murdered Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in 1978, "A lot more. The real homophobes really hated us. They wanted to get Elliott out of the office because he was a thorn in their side. They didn't like the fact of transsexuals moving into straight society."
Times have changed within the SFPD. Today, there are a number of out lesbian officers, but the department lags in hiring openly gay men. Theresa Sparks, a transgender woman, serves on the high-profile Police Commission, which oversees the department.
"Elliott Blackstone was one of the true innovators of community policing," Sparks said in an e-mail. "He really was the initiator of this kind of policing we see today. It is a much different police department because of it. Relationships are continuing to improve.
"What has happened, now there are specific protocols on how interaction should happen between officers and transgender people, including transporting them and use of pronouns. The department has embraced the concept that every individual has the right to self-identify. That is institutionalized by general orders," Sparks added.
"Elliot did his own thing," said Herb Donaldson, a lawyer at the time, and in 1978 the first gay man elevated to the municipal court bench. Donaldson was arrested at the 1965 California Hall New Year's dance, which Blackstone also attended with his first wife, who was rudely pushed by an officer who called her a drag queen.
Donaldson described police entrapment tactics of the day: Parking a squad car outside a gay bar to discourage patrons, or sending in good-looking cops to entice overtures.
"It was happening all the time," said Donaldson. "They'd go in and get solicited. Someone would say, 'I want to suck your cock.' They'd go outside and get arrested for lewd solicitation."
"Police in those early days raided the bars and arrested everybody in them, carted them off to jail, booked them. They paid $10 fines, and had an arrest record," said lesbian pioneer Phyllis Lyon. "Papers in those days listed the names and occupations, mostly of men."
Blackstone praised Police Chief Donald Scott's "great cooperation" to change department policy about cross dressers using opposite sex restrooms, and gathered members of the legal community to decriminalize ordinance 650.5 (the "impersonation," law), which prohibited the excessive wearing of opposite-sex apparel.
"He just slowly chipped away, by means of communicating with people in charge of enforcing those things," said Blackstone's current wife, JoAn, from their Pacifica home.
Blackstone also set up a daylong program of small-group discussions for police academy recruit classes at the Society for Individual Rights' Sixth Street headquarters.
Blackstone also had a small roll as liaison with the medical profession, explaining to the transgender community that doctors prescribing hormones, or performing gender reassignment surgery don't take orders, but rather help a patient get where he or she wants to go.
"That's teaching, where you're participating," Blackstone told Stryker in 1997. "Participation, in my book is at least half of teaching. There are no stupid questions so go ahead and ask your stupid question."