The Big Sleep and The Black Cat

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I was raised on old noir, the original post-war wave: Laura, The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Heat, Touch of Evil, to name a few. My parents were big fans and made me a big fan, too. Noir is a genre of hopelessness, of being trapped in a glass cage and fighting back against darkness that you know will defeat you in the end, but I love it. I love the new wave, too, neo-noirs like The Long Goodbye, Body Heat and Bound. But my favorite is The Big Sleep. What I love so much isn’t just all the classic noir stuff or the acting or chemistry—it’s the romance: Bogart and Bacall, two people who don’t quite trust each other—for good reason—who, despite their mutual wariness and the world being against them, fall in love. By the end, not only have they solved the crime, but they’ve also agreed to handle everything together:

After Bogart explains his plan to lie to the police to her in hurried breaths, she responds “you’ve forgotten one thing – what about me?”

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

“Nothing you can’t fix,” she says, smiling.

He pulls her close, by the arm, and they stare at each other as sirens swell in the distance. There’s nothing overtly romantic about the pose, it’s just their chemistry, the way they look at each other. Their connection. They may have kissed before, but in this moment, they don’t. They just look at each other.

It’s a moment that always makes me think of gay bars.

Let me explain with a little history: The Black Cat Bar in San Francisco opened in 1903 and continued through the years, pausing during prohibition, and changing owners from time to time. But by 1948 it was definitively a queer bar. And at the time, that was illegal—it fell under the “disorderly house” provision of the alcohol laws. Serving queer people was automatically classed as keeping a disorderly house. The police harassed the bar and eventually took away its liquor license indefinitely, forcing it to shut down. Sol Stouman, the straight owner, took the state to court—arguing that just because queer people congregated there didn’t mean it was a disorderly house. And in 1951, the California Supreme Court ruled in his favor. It was a huge victory, possibly the first time the American legal system had said that queer people themselves weren’t criminal, and they could gather, drink and be themselves without breaking the law just by existing.

That’s why I chose 1952 San Francisco as the setting for my queer historical mystery Lavender House –because that watershed moment led to a change in policing. San Francisco had always been a big queer town, but while before police could shut a gay bar down (or, as happened more frequently, demand payment to not shut them down) simply for hosting gay people, now the clientele wasn’t inherently criminalized.

Of course, their actions still were. Queer people might not have been legally actionable, but queer love certainly was. Patrons could be arrested for dancing, touching, and of course any kissing or sexual activity. Bars could be shut down if they were seen as allowing that kind of behavior. Police put together cases against bars—recurrent incidents of “disorderly conduct” (same-sex dancing) as well as accusations of prostitution and serving minors. In some cases, they even planted drugs during raids. But despite the hundred loopholes the cops could use to punish ‘queer behavior,’ the mere existence of queer people in bar wasn’t enough to shut it down anymore. It was, for its time, a golden age for gay bars in California.

In 1955, the state assembly created the new California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and granted them the authority to shut down bars which were “resorts for sexual perverts.” As intended, this resulted in the Black Cat again being shut down, along with several other bars gay bars. But again, this law was deemed unconstitutional – but still with the brutal provision that if there was same-sex dancing or kissing, then it would be legal to rescind the bar’s liquor license. Queer people were again told they were allowed to exist, as long as they didn’t do anything explicitly queer.

Of course, connection was the reason to go to a gay bar in the first place, so telling patrons to sit still and not look for love went about as well as you’d imagine. The constant harassment and raids continued, and by 1963, after spending more than $38,000 on legal fees (over $360,000 in today’s money), Stouman couldn’t afford to keep up the fight. The liquor license was revoked the night before The Black Cat’s annual Halloween party.

They threw it anyway. They served non-alcoholic drinks, and they flung open their doors so that those who had found connection there could return to celebrate one more time. The law could condemn, but the party went on.

That legislation against queer bodies continues even in the privacy of our own homes: sodomy laws weren’t repealed in California until 1976, and in much of the rest of the country, they weren’t repealed until 2003—in a Supreme Court case that certain members of the GOP today have said they would like to challenge. Because in the eyes of many, we’re still criminals. People will insist that what’s not true—we’re allowed to gather, after all. It’s just kissing, dancing, intimacy that are forbidden to us. We can exist—we just can’t be seen being queer. It’s a glass cage.

The Black Cat and other gay bars of that era were like that final shot of The Big Sleep. These little enclaves, where there was no dancing and no kissing and sirens blared outside, but where nonetheless there was hope. In that space we were allowed to gather—together—defiantly, joyously acknowledging love’s possibility. And while noir is often about hopelessness, about being trapped in that glass cage, The Big Sleep has that ending that pushes back: the world outside is hopeless but connection is what will make it survivable. Two people still manage to find each other and fall in love, and that’s how they live through it. And even if it doesn’t end with a kiss, even as they’re about to be overrun by police, they still have each other. It’s a warmer kind of noir—one that says love is a bright spot in the darkness of life.

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