The Queer Waterfront

Keywords: Urban geography, historical geography, maritime labor
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Urbanization and industrialization were deeply implicated in the historical geography of where and when urban sexual subcultures flourished in the past. Rapidly industrializing cities afforded growing numbers of wage laborers the anonymity and opportunities that came with living in a world of strangers. In larger cities, they created or coopted a diversity of settings to meet one another, act on their desires, and organize their lives and livelihoods around one another. This paper reconstructs how the reorganization of West Coast port operations during the height of the Red and Lavender Scares generated an influx of queer merchant marines and naval personnel on the San Francisco waterfront in the 1950s. As a national security measure, federal officials systematically expelled suspected subversives from working out of Pacific ports and military facilities, specifically singling out a racially-integrated, left-wing, queer-friendly labor union headquartered in San Francisco. As a local consequence of these anti-homosexual shake-ups in the shipping industry, the social character and significance of waterfront bars began to change. In the early 1950s, the transformation of these seamen’s hangouts into a circuit of gay bars was an unintended consequence of an intensive federal initiative to identify and isolate homosexuals from Pacific ports, shipping lanes, and naval facilities up and down the West Coast. By the decade’s end, these hangouts no longer functioned as informal social hubs for the city’s maritime labor force but had become a strip of gay bars and nightclubs controlled by local law enforcement and state liquor agents.