All the poets went there.” At a time when homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society were largely conciliatory to the police and to city officials, the Black Cat was noteworthy as a site of resistance. The poet Allen Ginsburg, who knew it in the ’50s, described it as an enormous bar with a honky-tonk piano that “everyone” went to: “All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. It wasn’t until after World War II, when gay men and lesbians swarmed San Francisco after service in the Pacific, that the Black Cat assumed a “gayer” personality.
