Today In History, 1964: The Haight Theater Begins Catering to Gay Audiences

Jim Burroway

July 18th, 2016

HaightThreaterClosedMay1964San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood started out as very prosperous upper middle class neighborhood, full of spacious multi-story single-family Victorian homes, those “painted ladies” which have become emblematic for the entire city. The neighborhood itself was hit hard during the Great Depression, and by the end of World War II, those prosperous residents had long since fled to the suburbs. Those “painted ladies” they left behind were subdivided into apartments, and, often, subdivided again. Many suffered from neglect, others were left vacant. By the 1950s, the neighborhood was solidly working-class, and even they were leaving as soon as they could afford to do so. But a core of longtime residents remained, and they mobilized to form the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) in 1959 to fight several threats to the neighborhood, including a planned freeway that would have destroyed the Panhandle greenbelt, and the growing influx of African-Americans who were being displaced by urban renewal elsewhere in the city and who found the rents in Haight-Ashbury attractive.

The Tenderloin’s Polk Street had long been San Francisco’s Castro before the Castro became a thing. But in the early 1960s, another longtime gayborhood in North Beach was being wiped out by the Embarcadero freeway. That area had preceded the Tenderloin as the center of gay action, but the redevelopment had decimated the gay bars in the area. So with the low rents in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood already attracting other refugees of urban renewal, it was only natural that gay men driven out of other parts of the city plagued by construction or higher rents would move in. By 1964, it looked as if Haight-Ashbury might become San Francisco’s newest gayborhood.

GlenOrGlendaThe Haight Theater, at 1700 Haight Street, had been entertaining Haight-Ashbury residents since it opened in 1910 as a nickelodeon. It became a movie theater in 1915, and was renovated into an Art Deco palace sometime in the 1930s. The Haight became the once-prosperous area’s premiere showplace, but as the neighborhood declined, so did the theater. It finally went belly-up in early 1964. Francis Rizzo and Bernie Meshioff bought the dilapidated theater and, on July 17, re-opened it with a showing of Glen or Glenda, a quasi-autobiographical Ed Wood picture about a cross-dressing man. The film’s poster — “What Am I…Male or Female! The Strange Case of a ‘Man’ who changed his SEX!” — hit a neighborhood that was already in a panic over change.

Richard D. Boyle, the editor of the weekly Haight-Ashbury Independent, immediately publish an editorial demanding the owners provide “family type entertainment or close the theater in the interest of this residential district.” At about the same time, The San Francisco Chronicle sent a reporter who wrote about “The Haight Transformed.” Rizzo and Meshioff gave the reporter a grand tour, which included a lobby renovated with murals of nude young men in classical poses, and a Ladies room where one man was applying makeup to another man who called himself “Cleopatra.” A drag show was going on in the theater itself. Rizzo told the reporter, “This used to be a family theater. It went broke. They tried everything, art films, foreign films, Spanish-speaking films—and it went bust!” He also explained:

Bernie and I were in the advertising business. We got this idea and decided to do it. It’s unique. I mean, where do these people have to go? Did you know that in a Gay bar they charge a homosexual double what anybody else pays for a drink? I mean these men are being gouged all the time. So, we opened this theater for their entertainment.

The Haight also got the attention of an un-named reporter for ONE magazine, the nation’s first gay magazine to be sold in newsstands across the country. Shortly after The Gaight screened  Glen or Glenda, it hosted a Mr. San Francisco physique contest:

This reporter saw some of the most glorious bodies in the contest that he has ever set eyes upon. The winner was a spectacular, young coal-black Negro who didn’t appear to have a single flaw in his physique. The lobby of the Haight is thickly coated with tantalizing, all-nude murals of the male body done in brilliant colors; an art show of drawings and paintings on the same theme was held on the mezzanine.

The manager, who took the stage at intermission, claimed that the theatre was a “bold, new experiment especially for you people.” He also said that the theatre had over 1,500 patrons during the first three days of its new career. He promised the audience that he would have new gay movies coming from Hollywood and Italy for them soon. …

Although appealing to the homosexual audience has been part of the program of most art movie houses for years, such public announcements as those made by the manager of the Haight have not been heard by us before. Of the more than 300 persons attending the evening we did, not one appeared to be heterophile. There were campy calls from the rear of the auditorium as the physique models did their best to please the audience. Each contestant in the show was loudly cheered.

HaightProtestNeighborhood residents weren’t so enthralled. Stirred on by what was now a full-on campaign by the Haight-Ashbury Independent, the HANC swung into action. They organized protests in front of the theater denouncing the “sex” shows being shown in a family neighborhood. Bereft of any sense of irony, they organized their own kids to march in front of the theater with sings reading “Down with Haight SEX” and “Down with the ‘Ladies’ We Want Walt Disney!” HANC also fired off letters to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Police and District Attorney, demanding the authorities shut down the theater. The Police Department responded that the theater itself was perfectly legal, but that they would keep an eye on it to make sure no one was breaking the law. In fact, Rizzo had complained to the Chronicle that police officers were stopping by “hourly” to harass employees and patrons.

The harassment worked, although the Meshioff’s own unrelated legal difficulties likely played a larger part in the Haight Theater’s demise. He was first arrested for, allegedly, falsely accusing a group of heckling youths of robbing the theater. He skipped bail and fled town, with a string of bad checks floating around San Francisco in his wake. The Haight closed down by August.

StraightTheaterJust a few weeks later, the theater reopened under new ownership with a double feature: Jerry Lewis in Who’s Minding the Store?, and Tony Randall and Burle Ives in The Brass Bottle. “Family films” were back at the Haight, now re-named “The Straight.” But the same kind of fare that had led to the Haight’s demise earlier that year produced precisely the same result again, and the Straight closed again two weeks later. Ironically, owners blamed “hoodlums” terrorizing patrons, quite possibly the same “heckling youths” who spurred the gay Haight’s closure.

Neither the Haight nor the Straight would again operate as a movie theater. The building served briefly as an Assembly of God church, and then, in 1967, music promoters proposed turning the building into a combination theater and 4,000 square foot dance floor. City officials refused the permits, so the theater opened as the “Straight School of Dance,” with such acts as the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish, Santana, and the Steve Miller Band providing “instruction.” The “school” closed in 1969, and the building sat vacant until it was demolished in 1979.

Haight-Ashbury never became the gayborhood that the Haight Theater’s presence appeared to herald. A few gay bars opened, but the influx of hippies just a couple of years later more or less pushed out the few gay men who had moved to the area. One of the great ironies of the 1960s was that those lefty-liberal if-it-feels-good-do-it Summer of Love practitioners with flowers in their hair were also every bit as homophobic as the rest of society. The gays of Haight decamped to Eureka Valley, another down-on-its-luck neighborhood just a few blocks away. Those new gay residents of Eureka Valley took the name of its main theater, The Castro, as the the name for their new home. And the rest of history.

[Sources: “Tangents.” ONE 12, no. 8 (August 1964): 14-15

Damon John Scott. Dissertation: “The City Aroused: Sexual Politics and the Transformation of San Francisco’s Urban Landscape, 1943-1964. (University of Texas at Austin, August 2008). Available online here. (PDF: 5.5MB/363 pages)]

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