José Sarria’s Campaign, 1961

The second poster, shaded in orange to reference the second color down on the rainbow flag, is JOSE SARRIA’S CAMPAIGN, 1961.

José Sarria is without a doubt one of the most remarkable characters in San Francisco history. But the difficulty of narrowing the focus of this poster, given his remarkable achievements, meant that I had to leave out a large swathe of his story. I focused on his candidacy for SF Board of Supervisors in 1961, the first time an openly queer person ran for political office in the U.S., while touching on his work as drag queen hostess at the Black Cat bar and some of his later activism.

But I had to leave out his persona as the Widow Norton, the famous “I’m a boy” buttons that he made for drag queens to wear so they could avoid being arrested for cross-dressing with an “intent to deceive,” and more about his creation of the Imperial Court and his involvement with the Tavern Guild and the Society for Individual Rights (SIR). I hope to do all that in a graphic novel that expands upon this poster project.

I took care to capture Sarria’s voice in his narration. I read interviews with him (check out Nan Alamilla Boyd’s in her Wide Open Town: A Queer History of San Francisco to 1965 and pulled as many direct quotes and aphorisms (he had many!) as I could. Otherwise, it was fun to imagine what he would say.

The language we use to describe gender has evolved enormously since the 1960s, making it difficult to write about historical figures who expressed gender outside of the traditional binary. By having him tell his own story in the poster, I was able to avoid using gendered pronouns for Sarria. While he certainly used masculine pronouns, as well as feminine ones while in drag, he talked about feeling that sometimes he was a boy and sometimes a girl. If the language had been available at the time, Sarria could well have identified as a gender-nonconforming person.

Big thanks to Katie Gilmartin for looking at this poster and giving me notes. She included a José Sarria stand-in in her noir mystery book Blackmail, My Love, set in 1950s San Francisco , and is the creator of the Queer Ancestors Project.

Finally, I’m excited to see the recent documentary Nelly Queen: The Life and Times of José Sarria by Joe Castel. It seems that Sarria is finally getting some of the recognition that his contributions and his larger-than-life persona deserve.