Queer Places:
Miss Smith's Tea Room, 1353 Grant Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133
Laveta Connie Smith (1928 - April 29, 1995) was a restaurateur and a flamboyant figure in North Beach during the 1950s. She was the proprietor of Miss Smith's Tea Room, at 1353 Grant Avenue, described in The Chronicle in 1957 as "a tavern that serves wine and beer, but no tea, to North Beach Bohemian types." The establishment was a pioneering gay bar, and its proprietor was unsuccessfully charged under the statutes then used to disrupt meeting places for homosexuals, including laws against serving liquor to minors and being "a hangout for perverts." Smith also operated a jazz record shop on Grant Avenue and briefly ran The Court of Liars, a bar near the city's old Hall of Justice on Montgomery Street. She was married in the 1950s to Henry Thomas, a Welsh-born dissident veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish civil war and a notable North Beach figure in his own right. He died in the 1980s. The couple divorced in 1958.
Laveta Connie Smith was found dead on April 29, 1995, in her home in San Francisco. She was 67 and died of natural causes, according to the medical examiner.
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