Four years before the 1969 uprising at NYC’s Stonewall Inn, a San Francisco confrontation between the police and that city’s LGBT community proved a turning point. Gay attorneys Herbert Donaldson and Evander Smith were among the night’s heroes.
Episode Notes:
The 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City has become such an iconic symbol of the LGBTQ civil rights movement that earlier turning points in the movement, including confrontations with the police, are often overlooked.
One of these turning points, as attorneys Herb Donaldson and Evander Smith explain in this episode, is the 1965 New Year’s Day Mardi Gras Ball in San Francisco, which was a fundraising costume ball for the newly formed Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH).
CRH brought together progressive ministers and local gay rights groups with the goal of educating the city’s religious communities about discrimination and anti-gay violence. Herb Donaldson and Evander Smith were among CRH’s founders and played a central role in planning the event. They met with the San Francisco police department to secure an agreement that police would allow the costume ball to take place even though cross-dressing had in the past only been permitted on Halloween. When the police reneged on their agreement, it was Herb and Evander who stood up to the police and wound up in jail.
To learn more about the Council on Religion and the Homosexual and the 1965 CRH Mardi Gras Ball, have a look at the information and links to resources that follow below, including an advertising flyer for the ball, a statement issued by the ball’s planning committee the day after the event, as well as archival photos that we’ve embedded in the transcript.
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The LGBT Religious Archives Network mounted an exhibit on the Council on Religion and the Homosexual that includes information and great photos from the January 1, 1965 Mardi Gras Ball.
Jallen Rix produced a documentary about the CRH Ball called “Lewd and Lascivious.” You can read about the film and see a trailer here.
The James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center of the San Francisco Public Library holds Evander’s case files related to the trial that followed the CRH Ball. You can read a description of the materials here and a brief overview of Evander’s involvement here.
In 2006, the ACLU honored Herb Donaldson. Read a Fog City Journal article about the event.
The San Francisco Chronicle, which published Herb Donaldson and Evander Smith’s names the morning after they were arrested at California Hall, published Herb’s obituary when he died in December 2008.
Herb Donaldson and his partner, James Hardcastle, opened one of the first specialty coffee roasters, Capricorn Coffees, in San Francisco in 1963. You can read about Capricorn Coffees here and here. The coffee company celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013 with a special blend in honor of the company’s founders.
For further reading on the subject of policing in San Francisco, we recommend The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee.
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