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On Sunday everyone arrested had to appear in court. Many refused to post collateral for release and chose to spend the night in jail instead. The wagons shuttled those arrested to the police station, totaling twenty-four trips. Everyone was arrested - the owners, the employees, every patron. Five police cars and six wagons responded. Back there we found several couples."īack-up was called. "in the rear of the place there was no light at all. "evidence of homosexuality" (me: the horror!) "the place was so crowded they could hardly get in." (me: well, it was Saturday night) The sergeant who led the vice squad sent two officers to check on the club who reported back to him. The sheer number of homosexuals in a bar must have opened some readers' eyes. The raid was reported to be the largest ever made on a club or bar in Baltimore. Okay, that is a lot of people, way more than were arrested at Stonewall (13). Go look.Ĭourt Outbursts Follow With 5 Convictions 23 Forfeit Collateral Mostly men, some women, but predictably in this era of Baltimore, all white. Everybody's dressed up, suit jackets, even a few fedoras. I don't dare post photos from The Sun but I can link. Here are three photographs of the Pepper Hill Club just a few weeks after the raid. If you've ever been to Baltimore, this is a few blocks north of the aquarium side of the Inner Harbor area. No, the street wasn't named for gay activity, some guy named named Nicholas Gay surveyed the area back in the 1700s. It was located at 200 North Gay Street, the northeastern corner of the downtown business district, only a block from the main police station, two blocks from City Hall and on the fringes of "The Block," Baltimore's infamous tawdry section of strip bars and peep shows. The Pepper Hill Club was raided at 11pm Saturday night, Oct, 1, 1955. They want to sell you access too although I was able to circumvent having to pay by going through the Johns Hopkins library online with a suburban Baltimore library card. The Sun is pretty pissy about sharing and reprinting so I will excerpt gingerly. The story truly has merit after all, there are elements of gay pride and support for those arrested came from the most unlikeliest places.Ī lot of the information, except for a more recent article and two friends who actually frequented the place, comes from the Baltimore Sun newspaper historical archives. Only recently did I decide to finally dig deeper. None of the people who told me the story had actually been there that night so I thought maybe some details had been lost. People spoke of it with reverence and as a victory. I attributed that to Stonewall but still, the story about the raid in Baltimore had such staying power. In fact, except for the one in the story nearly two decades earlier, I never heard of a gay bar in Baltimore ever getting raided.
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It didn't dawn on me until years later that I never lived in fear of a gay bar getting raided in Baltimore. I was too young, too post-Stonewall modern and optimistic to fully realize the constraints of 1955. "And then what? Protests at the police station? Picket signs? "A lot of people had to spend the night in jail, but the next day in court, most of the charges were dropped, except for a few people who got small fines." 'Beer bottles thrown? A fire? Any resistance?"