In the 1930s, a ‘Most Unusual’ San Francisco Club Became a Haven for Trans Women

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

“The most interesting women are not women at all,” reads the back of a Finocchio’s souvenir magazine from the club’s early days. This, of course, was meant to be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the anatomy of many of its performers — mostly men dressed in colorful gowns and shiny heels. Though Finocchio’s marketed itself to a straight audience and treated drag as a curiosity, for some trans women the venue became a haven where they could express their true gender identity without fear.

Almost exactly 89 years ago, on June 15, 1936, the first “female impersonators” set foot on the stage at 506 Broadway, the building that housed Finocchio’s up until its closure in 1999. Before relocating to this address, the bar was more of a speakeasy that sometimes featured drag performers, though that was enough for the police to take notice and raid the place. At its new location, above Enrico’s Café, the club flourished as it quickly gained notoriety for being the best venue to see men in gowns and wigs on the West Coast.

Word even spread among the celebrities that were often being impersonated by Finocchio’s performers. “Bette Davis and Lana Turner came to sit ringside,” wrote Aleshia Brevard, who performed at Finocchio’s under her stage moniker “Lee Shaw,” in her memoir. Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and more Hollywood royalty are said to have paid a visit to the club in its heyday. 

“For me, Finocchio’s offered the first sense of true acceptance I’d ever known,” said Brevard of her time as a performer. A young trans woman, she appreciated the attention she was getting as a drag diva. “Several straight men wanted to date me; a few luckless female strippers wanted relationships; and more than a few intrigued military men were willing to dismiss the fact that I was a boy,” she wrote in The Woman I Was Not Born To Be: A Transsexual Journey. 

Brevard had the fortune of looking naturally feminine since her childhood, something she said “saved her” from having to “sell her ass on Turk Street” to make a living, since Finocchio’s was one of the very few spots in the city that were willing to employ trans women.

Still, Brevard’s first audition to perform at Finocchio’s was not without hurdles. Stormy Lee, a star burlesque performer at the club, interrogated her about whether she had a nose job and accused her of being on Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). HRT was not tolerated by all of the performers in the 1950s; some saw it as a cheat code for achieving a more feminine appearance. In a way, HRT to Finocchio’s performers was seen as what doping is to Olympians — except today, we know HRT is a life-saving medical treatment for trans people.

Finocchio’s was not explicitly advertised as an entertainment venue for the queer community, even though it employed numerous queer and trans performers. The shows at Finocchio’s were framed as being “exotic” and “comedic” to attract a wider array of patrons. Lori Shannon, a drag queen who went on to play a transgender woman on the CBS sitcom All in the Family, was described as being “no lady” and a “comedy star” in promotional materials. This kind of presentation, ironically, protected the performers from further police scrutiny at a time when local laws prohibited cross-dressing in public, while driving buses full of curious tourists to the venue.

In their book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco, San Francisco State University professor Clare Sears examined the emergence, operations and legacies of San Francisco’s cross-dressing law, which was enacted by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1863. Remaining in effect for over a century, the law criminalized the sheer act of appearing in public “in a dress not belonging to [one’s own] sex.” Hundreds of people were arrested and outed in newspaper crime reports until it was ultimately repealed in 1974 — when dressing beyond the gender binary had already become much less risqué in San Francisco.

Thus, as the years went on, Finocchio’s became less of a tourist hotspot and more of a local institution. Joe Finocchio, the owner of the club, died in 1986 and left it to his wife, Eve, who continued to run the show for another decade. Then, already in her 80’s, she decided to shut down the club before the turn of the century, citing dwindling crowds and a hefty rent hike — a tale as old as San Francisco itself.