May 19, 2019
The Raid on Tommy's Place - a case of Cold War anti-queer crackdowns
Michael Flanagan READ TIME: 1 MIN.
Paranoia, red-baiting and homophobia swept across the United States in the early 1950s like a cold fire, and San Francisco was not exempt from its reach. The vile Joseph McCarthy and his venomous toady Roy Cohn engaged the country in the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, the same year the hysteria broke out here.
On September 8, 1954 the San Francisco Police raided Tommy's Place for serving underage girls and arrested three people related to the raid. Two, Grace Miller and Joyce van der Veer, were owners of the bar (their names were on the liquor license, which allowed them to be bartenders) and a third, Jesse J. Winston, was charged with contributing to the delinquency of minors, giving narcotics to minors and possessing narcotics.
The case captured news headlines for months with the San Francisco Chronicle kicking off the coverage with a screaming headline "S. F. Teen-Age Girls Tell of 'Vice Academy'" on September 10. The trials of Miller, van der Veer and Winston captured headlines into 1955 and cast a chill across the gay and lesbian community that arguably lasted for years.
