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Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. "Polk Street History Project: The Tavern Guild and Imperial Court".
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Īs the organization developed from a small group of drinking buddies to a large non-profit charity, the Guild put on many fundraising events. They also set up a loan fund for Guild members that were left unemployed due to police raids and shutdowns, making sure good bartenders stayed employed. One of the first things the Tavern Guild set up was a phone networking system that kept track of police and Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control movements, warning bars that were about to be raided.
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Showing a unified front also helped keep the police and the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) off their backs, and helped relations between alcohol distributors and Guild bars. In order to bring business to the bars and protect its members, the Guild fixed drink prices so that bars wouldn't compete with each other, as well as monitored and eradicated unsafe business practices and rumormongering (straight bar owners had a habit of marketing themselves as a gay bar if their business was struggling and then turn away homosexuals once their bar was doing better ). The organization met weekly to discuss the various issues of the gay bar community, including the constant police raids and discrimination. Phil Doganiero, a popular bartender at Suzy Q, was elected the first president of the organization, succeeded by Bill Plath (owner of the D'Oak Room) and Darryl Glied (owner of the Jumpin' Frog) in the following years.
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The Tavern Guild was founded on a Tuesday night in 1962 at the Suzy-Q, a gay bar on Polk Street.