The history of LGBTQ residents in California, which includes centuries prior to the 20th, has become increasingly visible recently with the successes of the LGBTQ rights movement. In spite of the strong development of early LGBTQ villages in the state, pro-LGBTQ activists in California have campaigned against nearly 170 years of especially harsh prosecutions and punishments toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.
19th century
Prior to 1850, the 1821 independence of Mexico largely resulted in the end of the colonial Spanish Inquisition and its violent anti-LGBTQ persecution in the then-Mexican territory of California. However, economically driven settlement in the region by United States citizens resulted in the import of historically-English anti-sodomy laws from their home country, which was cemented by the U.S. annexation of California in 1848. In 1850, a common-law statute was installed in the territory of California, providing for the illegalization of sodomy and setting the penalty at five years to life. An 1855 law expanded the crime of sodomy to include "assault with an intent to commit" sodomy, penalizing the crime with 1–14 years imprisonment. A new criminal code, passed in 1872, retained the prior restrictions on sodomy without substantial change, but replaced common-law assumptions regarding "crimes against nature" with more explicit language regarding sodomy. Successful challenges to convictions for sodomy included People v. Hickey (1895), in which the Supreme Court struck down a sodomy conviction because the trial court did not inform the jury that an assault to commit sodomy could only be considered a simple assault, and People v. Boyle (1897), in which a court ruled that fellatio did not constitute a "crime against nature" (as per a prior case in Texas).
20th century
1900–1919 Between 1900 and 1902, 20 cases of sodomy were brought before the criminal courts in California, resulting in 16 convictions; 10 of these cases had taken place in the City and County of San Francisco, while 6 more had taken place in neighboring counties.Biennial Report of the Attorney General of the State of California 1900-1902, (Sacramento:A.J. Johnston, 1902), pages 73-88. This appears to be the only volume of such reports that contains the detailed information from each county as to prosecutions. In addition to the 10 San Francisco prosecutions, there were four from neighboring Alameda County and two from neighboring Marin County. The others were Amador County (1), Riverside County (1) and San Bernardino County (2). The three attempt prosecutions were one in Fresno County and two in San Joaquin County. In fall of 1914, some 500 gay men were arrested as "social vagrants", leading to the legislative passage of a unique law which prohibited "acts technically known as fellatio and cunnilingus." The law, which set a maximum of 15 years in prison for either act, was the only statute law in the United States which ever mentioned the words "fellatio" and "cunnilingus". The law against fellatio and cunnilingus would have interesting effects in the courts due to disputes regarding the exact medical definitions of both terms; the State Supreme Court rulings in In Re Application of Soady (1918) and Ex Parte Lockett (1919) would reveal the schism between the sitting justices, particularly Justices Henry A. Melvin and Curtis D. Wilbur, on those definitions.56 Cal.Dec. 247, decided August 29, 1918.
1920–1939 In 1921, the penalty of sodomy was lowered to 1–10 years imprisonment. The same year, a constitutional amendment prohibiting oral sex (namely "the act of copulating the mouth of one person with the sexual organ of another") was passed, retaining the 15-year imprisonment as a penalty without regard to sexual orientation. Finally, a third act gave free rein to the government to prohibit and restrict any sexual activity, stating that "any act...which openly outrages public decency" would be punished. As a result of these and prior laws, California became notorious for egregious invasions of privacy, with numerous cases of residential espionage by neighbors, family members, rivals or hired private investigators; the majority of these invasions (including the drilling of holes into walls) went unchallenged by defendants in court. In addition, beginning with a law in 1909 which allowed for the sterilization of convicted and imprisoned sex offenders if they showed recidivism in prison towards being a "moral or sexual pervert" (including those committed for sodomy, fellatio, or cunnilingus) the allowance for the sterilization of inmates became so extensive that by 1934, some 9,931 inmates had been sterilized. A psychopathic offender law, the first to be enacted outside of the Midwestern United States, was passed in 1939, and would also add a further, constantly amended layer to California's laws regarding "perverts".
1940s The 1940s and 1950s saw the initial coordinated forays into the provision of services for LGBTQ people in the state. In 1947, Vice Versa, the first North American lesbian publication, was first written and self-published by Lisa Ben in Los Angeles. However, the first sex offender registry law was enacted in 1947, requiring all persons convicted under California law for sexual crimes since 1944 to register as sex offenders. Louise Lawrence, a transgender woman who began living full-time as female in San Francisco in the 1940s, developed a widespread correspondence network with transgender people throughout Europe and the United States by the 1950s. She worked closely with Alfred Kinsey to bring the needs of transgender people to the attention of social scientists and sex reformers. She was also a mentor to Virginia Prince, who, in the 1950s and 1960s, founded some of the first peer support and advocacy groups for "male cross-dressers" in the United States. In 1952, using Louise Lawrence's correspondence network for its initial subscription list, Virginia Prince and a handful of other transgender people in Southern California launched Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress, which published two issues. The Society that launched the journal also only briefly existed in Southern California.
1950s
1950–1954 In 1950, The Mattachine Society, the first sustained American gay rights group, was founded in Los Angeles (November 11). In the spring of 1952, Dale Jennings was arrested for allegedly soliciting a police officer in a bathroom in Westlake Park, now known as MacArthur Park. His trial drew national attention to the Mattachine Society, and membership increased dramatically after Jennings contested the charges, resulting in a hung jury. However, the same year, Governor Earl Warren, who would become the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in a year and a half, signed a law which eliminated the maximum penalty for sodomy ("not less than one year"), thus allowing for potential life imprisonment. The most famous individual to be arrested under the oral copulation and vagrancy law was civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who received 60 days in jail in 1953 after pleading guilty in Pasadena to a lesser charge of "sex perversion" (as consensual sodomy was known in California at the time).
1955–1959 The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) was founded in San Francisco in 1955 by four lesbian couples (including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon) and was the first national lesbian political and social organization in the United States.social sciences - Daughters of Bilitis . glbtq (October 20, 2005). Retrieved on 2010-11-30. The 1956 appellate court case People v. Giani stood out against the majority of judicial cases which sent numerous people to prison or involuntary psychiatric incarceration for a wide variety of sexual offenses; Justice Fred V. Wood noted for a unanimous court that based on "the absence of expert medical testimony on the subject we hesitate to equate the word 'homosexual' with the term 'sexual psychopath,'" and called for a new trial for the defendant. The 1957 case People v. Goldstein, in which Edward Goldstein had been convicted by a prior court for performing fellatio on a brick layer, a sailor and "sailors from Moffett Field", resulted in an overturn of the conviction by an appellate court due to numerous discrepancies in the initial conviction. In 1958, psychiatrist Karl Bowman requested that the California legislature repeal all laws criminalizing homosexuality, although it would be some two decades before the legislature would act.
1960s
1960–1964 The first break in the regime of California sex laws took place in 1961, when the legislature replaced the vagrancy law with a "disorderly conduct" law. Also in 1961, José Sarria became the first openly gay candidate for public office in the United States when he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The Rejected, the first documentary on homosexuality, is broadcast on KQED TV in San Francisco on September 11, 1961. The first LGBTQ business association, the Tavern Guild, was established in 1962. In 1964, Life magazine named San Francisco the "Gay Capital of the U.S."
1965–1969 In 1965, José Sarria established the Imperial Court System, which is now one of the largest LGBTQ charity organizations in the world. In 1965 Vanguard was founded by Adrian Ravarour and San Francisco Tenderloin youth for gay rights. The following year, in 1966, one of the first recorded transgender riots in US history took place. The Compton's Cafeteria Riot occurred in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. The night after the riot, more transgender people, hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBTQ community joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow transgender people back in. The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate-glass windows being smashed again.
The momentum generated from the riot led to transgender activists establishing a social support network of various social, psychological, and medical support services. This culmination of these efforts was the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU), established in 1968, which is said to be the first support and advocacy organization for transgender people in the world. The NTCU was funded by the Erickson Educational Foundation and was staffed by two full time peer counselors who provided street outreach, walk-in counseling, and answered mail that was received from around the world. Elliot Blackstone, a San Francisco Police Department officer who served as a liaison to the LGBTQ+ community, helped manage the office as part of his outreach work. The NTCU served the community until 1974, when SFPD officers framed one of the peer counselors and arrested her for drug possession. Drugs were also planted in Blackstone's desk, which led to him being reassigned to no longer be working with the NTCU. This led to the EEF cutting funding in 1974, which ended the NTCU's short life.
On New Year's Eve 1967, a raid by undercover LAPD officers on the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles, California, a gay bar, ended in several beatings and the arrests of 16 people. The violence of the police raid caused push back from bar goers including those at another bar, New Faces, located down the street, where officers knocked down the owner, a woman, and beat two bartenders unconscious. This incident inspired a civil demonstration on February 11, 1967, of about 200 people to protest the raids. The demonstration was organized by a group called PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education) – founded by Steve Ginsberg – and the SCCRH (Southern California Council on Religion and Homophile). The protest was met by squadrons of armed policemen.