Queer Places:
Greenlawn Memorial Park
Colma, San Mateo County, California, USA
Jeanne or Jean Bonnet (1849 - September 14, 1876) was born in Paris but moved to San Francisco with their family as part of a French theatrical troupe. In San Francisco in the 1870s, Jeanne Bonnet, who dressed as a man, visited the local brothels and won prostitutes away from their pimps. Bonnet had sworn to “step in between as many women” and the men who lived off them as possible. As a result, Bonnet met a violent death at the hands of an angry man, shot through the window while preparing to get into bed with a woman named Blanche Buneau.
By the time Bonnet was fifteen, he was in trouble for fighting and petty thievery, and was placed in the Industrial School, San Francisco’s first reform school.
As an adult, Bonnet was arrested dozens of times for wearing male clothing, an illegal act that got him frequently mentioned in the press. Bonnet “cursed the day she was born a female instead of a male,” according to newspaper accounts. Described as a “man-hater” with “short cropped hair, an unwomanly voice, and a masculine face which harmonized excellently with her customary suit of boys’ clothes, including a jaunty hat which she wore with all the grace of an experienced hoodlum,” he faced constant arrest for wearing male attire. Undaunted, he proclaimed that the police “might arrest me as often as they wish—I will never discard male attire as long as I live.”
Bonnet spent much of his time on Kearny Street and made a fairly good living by catching frogs and selling them to French restaurants in downtown San Francisco. In 1875 he began visiting brothels, convincing the women to leave prostitution and form an all-female gang. Together they supported themselves by shoplifting. One of these gang members was Blanche Buneau or Beunon, who had just arrived from Paris.
Bonnet and Blanche moved to McNamara’s Hotel in San Miguel, just outside of San Francisco, to keep Blanche safe from a threatening ex-lover. On the evening of September 14, 1876, Bonnet was lying in bed waiting for Blanche when a shotgun blast came through the window, killing him instantly. It was eventually determined that the shot was meant for Blanche and was the act of either a jealous lover or a pimp wanting to kill Blanche as “an example to the other girls.” Unfortunately, neither theory was ever proven. The women of San Francisco’s red-light district came out en masse for Bonnet’s funeral.
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