SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco has long been known as a magnet for queer people. In Wide-Open Town, Boyd explains that although San Francisco’s licentiousness was periodically quashed by anti-vice campaigns, those very efforts ironically drove attention to the city’s anything-goes reputation, and “a wide range of adventure-seekers, homosexuals among them, made their way through the Golden Gate” in search of that freedom.
World War II had a major impact on queer communities in San Francisco, due to the arrival of thousands of service members—many of them gay or lesbian—who moved through the port city and were looking for nightlife and community. Minority communities in San Francisco changed during the war too, with Japanese Americans forced out into internment camps, and African Americans migrating to San Francisco to work at military bases and in the defense industries.
By the early 1950s, Chinatown was a well-known stop on the tourist circuit, and business owners leveraged white fascination with the Far East to sell them chop suey and souvenirs. The North Beach district, a traditionally Italian neighborhood that would become the heart of Beat culture in the late 1950s, was already home to multiple clubs that catered to gay men and lesbians. Sexually adventurous tourists could visit famous spots like Finocchio’s （advertised as the place “Where Boys Will Be Girls”）， or Mona’s （“Where Girls Will Be Boys”）。 The Telegraph Club is fictional, but it is inspired by bars like these. North Beach abuts Chinatown, sharing several blocks along Broadway and Columbus, so those who were interested in visiting Finocchio’s for a flamboyant queer-coded show could easily walk over to Chinatown afterward for late-night lo mein.
CHINATOWN AND CHINESE AMERICANS
The first Chinese landed in San Francisco in 1848, and soon afterward settled in the center of the city near Portsmouth Square in an area that would become known as Chinatown. For the next several decades, anti-Chinese bigotry tangled with demand for Chinese labor. White American entrepreneurs needed Chinese workers to build railroads and wash laundry, but white American workers resented the Chinese for taking those jobs. In 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration ban in the United States targeting a specific ethnic group. It remained in place until World War II.
The sixty years of Chinese Exclusion created a bachelor society among Chinese Americans, because most Chinese women were legally barred from immigration due to the racist belief that they were all prostitutes. The vast majority of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from southern China and spoke Cantonese and its related dialects, including Toishanese. Robbed of the ability to form stable families in America, Chinese Americans formed institutions to serve communities of bachelors, such as mutual-aid societies based on family surnames or home villages. Businessmen founded the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, or the Chinese Six Companies, to officially represent their interests and Chinatown.
World War II had a major impact on Chinese immigration. With Japan situated as the enemy, China—which had thrown off imperial rule in 1912 and formed a republic led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—became an American ally. Chiang’s wife, Soong May-ling, aka Madame Chiang Kai-shek, was a key part of persuading America to support China against Japanese aggression. Madame Chiang was a Wellesley College–educated woman who spoke English fluently and was so adored by the American media that she appeared on the cover of Time magazine three times. In 1943, she embarked on a national tour to raise money and goodwill for China and became the first woman to address a joint session of Congress. After Madame Chiang’s tour, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in December 1943 and established a quota that permitted 105 Chinese to immigrate each year.
Meanwhile, the war provided an additional route to citizenship for Chinese immigrants: the military. Previously, due to Exclusion, many Chinese Americans arrived under false pretenses. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed thousands of public documents, Chinese began to arrive with false documentation claiming that they were the children of American citizens of Chinese descent. These immigrants became known as “paper sons.” When the United States entered World War II, approximately one-third of all Chinese American men between ages fifteen and sixty enlisted, in comparison with about 11 percent of the general population. Military service is not traditionally valued in Chinese culture, but perhaps one reason so many Chinese American men enlisted was because it enabled them to become naturalized American citizens, regardless of their previous immigration history.