The policy, supported by no law and apparently unconstitutional because it precluded the right to free assembly, led to charades by gay men and lesbians. They would sometimes minimize their sexual identities by avoiding affectionate touching or dancing with one another or any other conduct that might be interpreted as “queer.” Bartenders looked the other way and poured the gin.

It was just another of the countless indignities and rights violations that gay men and lesbians endured in an age when vice squads raided bars frequented by gay clientele and entrapped men in homosexual “encounters.” Many publications, including The New York Times, referred to gay men and lesbians as “sexual deviates.”

Hypocrisy infected the era. Gay men and lesbians were widely regarded as sick by the medical establishment, sinners by the clergy and criminals by the law. Judges accepted the testimony of undercover officers who had solicited sex from gay men and then arrested them. For those with a name, job or family to protect, lewdness charges could carry fines, jail time and ruinous publicity.

Criminals also took their cut. There were scores of illegal bars in New York, many of them private clubs run by the Mafia, that catered to gays and lesbians. Drinks were watered, prices were steep, police raids were scheduled (with forewarnings), payoffs were routine and liquor licenses, if they existed at all, were rarely challenged by the liquor authority.

“For decades, gay bars were our most visible institutions,” Perry Brass recalled in 2015 in The Philadelphia Gay News. “Gay men and lesbians found their only home in them. In New York, bars were raided cyclically: usually before elections, before major events like the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. closed the bars to keep innocent tourists from wandering in, or when cops decided they wanted to squeeze out a bit more payola from Mafia barkeeps.”