This story first appeared on ebar.com Oct. 18, 2023:
The 1979 police assault on San Francisco’s former Elephant Walk bar on Castro Street after the White Night riots was a defining moment for the LGBTQ neighborhood, helping to cement the solidarity of a new community while the whole world was watching.
Earlier that year, in February, there was another, less storied raid that helped connect another LGBTQ hamlet in California.
George Raya, 74, an LGBTQ activist who has lived in San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego, was in law school when he was visiting the Fourth Avenue Club, a gay bathhouse in San Diego’s Hillcrest LGBTQ neighborhood.
Police “sent in two teams of two people trying to get a gay person to solicit them,” Raya recalled to the Bay Area Reporter in a recent interview. “And I was watching them for a while that evening and they wanted you to make the first move. Right when I was going to tell the management, the lights went on. ‘Raid!'”
“They herded us all downstairs to a corner someplace,” Raya said. “Talk about being scared shitless.”
All told, 25 officers arrested 23 patrons, according to the San Diego LGBTQ Historic Context Statement, a 2016 document prepared for the city’s planning department.
“It ruined things for those people,” Raya said. “Some of them lost jobs.”
But Raya and others didn’t want to take the injustice lying down. They organized a meeting to address police harassment.
“The community really came together. Myself and the guy who was the head of the ACLU put together a community meeting, and out of that meeting the community went to the city council and lambasted the police department for wasting these resources on a victimless crime,” he said, referring to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The activists honed in on the issue of discrimination within the San Diego Police Department, and though an assistant police chief insisted that they didn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, tension between the department and the city’s LGBTQ community persisted for years, according to LGBTQ archives at San Diego State University.
The Fourth Avenue Club — now Club San Diego — is still standing, the last bathhouse in the city. But as the generation that created the heady days of gay liberation ages, it is stories like Raya’s that are at risk of being lost — the stories of how LGBTQ people found a home in the Golden State, and not just in the City-by-the-Bay.
Read more at ebar.com.
John Ferrannini 