The Black Cat Café, a queer sanctuary and cultural revolution in postwar San Francisco, was a bohemian salon, a civil rights battleground, and the stage on which one of America’s earliest drag queens dared to sing opera in a floor-length gown—in public.

It was on a cold damp evening, 133 years ago that His Imperial Majesty, Joshua Abraham Norton I entered immortality on the steps of Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Chinatown. The city wept in great frenzy and many have kept his devotion in the many years since, one such devotee being