José Sarria

José Sarria (born December 12, 1922, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 19, 2013, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico) was a Latino American drag performer and political activist who was the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States. (He ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors—the legislative body of the city and county—in 1961).

Sarria was the only child of a Colombian mother; his father was a San Franciscan who had no role in his life. As a young man, Sarria served in World War II, becoming a staff sergeant. When he returned to the United States, he trained to become a teacher, but a morals charge closed that career path to him. Eventually he took a job as a waiter at the Black Cat Cafe in the North Beach neighbourhood of San Francisco. There he began singing while waiting tables and shortly thereafter started his long career as a drag performer. Soon his campy one-man versions of notable operas, peppered with local references and humorous commentary, changed the Black Cat from a bohemian venue into a world-famous gay bar and a place of community for gay men. As the political remarks in his shows increased and became more pointed, Sarria was revealed as a pioneer in gay political theatre and a full-blown political activist, outdoors as well as indoors. During a time of significant police harassment of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) community, Sarria encouraged his followers to stand up for themselves and to reject second-class status. He was known for the slogan “United we stand, divided they arrest us one by one.” He encouraged his friends and admirers to fight back against police harassment—to demand a jury trial rather than seem to admit to guilt and pay a fine.

Sarria helped found a number of homophile organizations (use of the word homophile was intended to place emphasis on love, rather than on sexual pathology), including the League for Civil Education (1960; later, SIR, the Society for Individual Rights) and the Tavern Guild of San Francisco (1962). Although as a candidate Sarria did not win a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 1961, his quiet campaign drew attention to the potential political strength of the gay community. His activism paved the way for later successful campaigns by openly gay candidates such as Harvey Milk, who was elected to the Board of Supervisors 16 years after Sarria’s bid.

In the mid-1960s, at San Francisco’s first public drag ball, Sarria was named the Queen of the Ball, but, declaring himself “already a queen,” he preferred to claim the grander title “Empress” and the broader territory of San Francisco. He also appropriated the legend of the Emperor Joshua Abraham Norton, an eccentric 19th-century San Franciscan miner and rice baron who in 1858 had proclaimed himself the Emperor of the United States and Canada and Protector of Mexico.

In 1965 Sarria founded the Imperial Court of San Francisco (now the International Court System), an association of charitable organizations that raises money primarily for gay causes. With nearly 70 chapters in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, it is one of the largest LGBTQ organizations in the world.

Sarria appeared as a judge of the drag-queen ball in the opening sequence of the 1995 film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar. His legacy was honoured by the city of San Francisco with the renaming of a section of Castro Street (in the middle of San Francisco’s Castro District, one of the first largely gay neighbourhoods in the United States) as José Sarria Court. The city also placed a plaque that notes Sarria’s contributions in the sidewalk in front of the Harvey Milk Memorial Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, located at 1 José Sarria Court.