The San Francisco LGBT Struggle for Freedom Revisited: Catholic Power and the Right to the City

Bill Issel, Professor of History Emeritus, San Francisco State University

The LGBT movement of the 20th century became one of the challenges to Catholic power that Walter Lippmann called "the acids of modernity." Bill Issel's new book, Church and State in the City, describes how, in San Francisco, the church and laypeople worked to make it a Catholic city. They wanted to make their city a place where residents would be secure against modernity's incursions. By the 1940s, Catholic power reached its zenith just as LGBT newcomers began demanding equal rights to the city. This story helps explain the city's robust opposition to LGBT activists' call for broader American freedoms in the 1950s and beyond.