The 1954 police raid on Tommy’s Place and 12 Adler, two San Francisco lesbian bars, was sensationalized in the local media, but also gave a glimpse into the secret lives of the city’s queer women.
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When I began the research for Last Night at the Telegraph Club in earnest, I knew that I needed to know more about those lesbians of color. More specifically, I needed to know what it was like to be a Chinese American lesbian in San Francisco in the 1950s, but they were nearly invisible in the historical record.
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Today we no longer use the term “male impersonator” to describe a woman who performs onstage as a man; today we’d use the term “drag king.” But male impersonation was once a popular and mainstream entertainment, and some male impersonators were famous enough to tour nationally.
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A major part of the background research for Last Night at the Telegraph Club involved learning how Lily’s Chinese American identity would have been experienced by her and how it would have been perceived by others—not only her family and community, but by whites and other non-Chinese.
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In the following maps, I've marked significant locations in Last Night at the Telegraph Club with numbers, and below the maps you'll see additional information about each site. If you're in San Francisco now or sometime in the future, you can visit most of these locations, or see where my fictional landmarks are set.
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Last Night at the Telegraph Club opens on July 4, 1950, at the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Independence Day Picnic, which featured a Miss Chinatown beauty pageant. The scene in the novel was inspired by the real-life beauty pageant that took place on that date in Los Altos, a suburban community south of San Francisco.
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