# Black Cat Tavern Raid (1967) In the early-morning hours of **January 1, 1967**, plainclothes LAPD vice officers raided the Black Cat Tavern at 3909 Sunset Boulevard in the **Silver Lake** neighborhood of Los Angeles, beating and arresting patrons who were celebrating New Year's Eve. Several patrons were severely beaten, including a bartender who suffered a ruptured spleen. **Sixteen people were arrested**, including six on charges of "lewd conduct" for kissing at midnight — at the time a felony in California. ## The February Protest The post-raid demonstrations on **February 11, 1967** drew approximately **200 protesters** to a march down Sunset Boulevard, organized by the activist group **PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education)**. The Black Cat protest was **the largest American gay-rights demonstration to date** — more than two years before the [[Stonewall Riots]]. It also led directly to the founding of *The Advocate* magazine (originally as the PRIDE newsletter, *The Los Angeles Advocate*, in September 1967) — which became and remains one of the longest-running LGBTQ publications in U.S. history. ## Why It Matters The Black Cat protest is **the largest pre-Stonewall American gay-rights street demonstration on record**. Its scale and organizational sophistication — a sustained, organized protest with leafletting, press outreach, and follow-up publication infrastructure — represents a level of public LGBTQ political mobilization that the mainstream gay-rights narrative often locates only after 1969. The Black Cat protests demonstrate that the post-Stonewall organizing wave drew on at least two years of pre-existing West Coast organizational infrastructure. The Black Cat Tavern building was designated a **Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument** in 2008, and the site remains an operating bar (under a different name) today. ## Place in the Vault Black Cat is part of the **California pre-Stonewall resistance tradition** that, together with the [[Cooper Donuts Riot]] (1959) and [[Compton's Cafeteria Riot]] (1966), establishes that the trans-and-queer-led-uprising tradition that Stonewall canonicalized was already a decade old by 1969. The state-by-state historical-revision work that recovered these events in the 2000s and 2010s has reshaped the contemporary understanding of where the modern American queer-liberation movement began. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Stonewall Riots]] - [[Cooper Donuts Riot]]