San Francisco Police Hold a Scandalous Orgy
Unfinished History
California Hall at 625 Polk in the mid-1990s.
Photo: Chris Carlsson
Das Deutsches Haus, a.k.a. California Hall, 625 Polk Street. In the early 1980's, this prime example of German Renaissance-style architecture was the scene of a notorious sex party celebrating the graduation of new San Francisco Police Department cadets. In one particularly celebrated incident, the cops handcuffed a cadet to a chair and forced him to submit to oral copulation by a female prostitute. The cadet, who was gay, felt humiliated, and the event became one of the landmark scandals of the Feinstein administration.
This building also hosted a New Years Eve party thrown by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in 1964, which led to a serious police scandal and helped shift gay-police relations in San Francisco.