LGBT+ HISTORY MONTH / PHILADELPHIA

Before Stonewall, There Was Dewey’s

Philadelphia won the country’s first LGBT+ sit-in in a week flat, then spent sixty years forgetting about it.

October 2026  ·  Philly Gay History

The corner of 17th and Chancellor is a hotel now. Thirteen stories, a lot of glass, valet out front. There is a historical marker on the sidewalk a few steps away, and several thousand people a week walk right past it on their way to get a coffee that nobody is going to refuse them.

In the spring of 1965, that address was a coffee shop called Dewey’s. And in April of that year, management handed its staff a list of people not to serve.

Read it twice. Nothing on that list is a behavior. Every item is a look. You could be turned away from a hamburger counter in Center City for the cut of your slacks.

First things first: Dewey’s was already ours

The story usually gets told as though a homophobic restaurant was confronted by brave outside activists. It was almost exactly the reverse.

Dewey’s was a small chain of Philadelphia hamburger joints, and its two Center City locations, 219 S. 17th and 208 S. 13th, had quietly become the best queer real estate in the city, for the very unglamorous reason that they were open when nothing else was. Rittenhouse Square had been a gathering spot for gay Philadelphians since the 1930s. Dewey’s sat a block east of it, and it had coffee at 3 a.m.

Joan Fleishmann, who belonged to both the Philadelphia Mattachine Society and the Janus Society, remembered the two-in-the-morning crowd as sex workers, drag queens and absolutely everybody. She also met Liberace there one night, which is either the least or the most surprising sentence in Philadelphia gay history, depending on how closely you followed Liberace’s touring schedule.

The crowd was racially mixed, too, which in 1965 Philadelphia almost nothing was.

For a sense of the competition: a bar down the block called The Beanery kept a sign up telling gay customers to stay away. It used a slur, and it managed to misspell it. Against that, a diner that would sell you eggs and mind its own business was not a small thing.

Then, early in 1965, management decided a crowd of gender-nonconforming teenagers had gotten out of hand and told the staff to stop serving them. Staff took that broadly. Anyone who read as gay, by any measure at all, got turned away.

So the fight did not start over getting into a restaurant. It started over getting thrown out of one of the only rooms in town that had been yours.

April 25, 1965

On that Sunday, roughly 150 people were refused service at the 17th Street Dewey’s. One afternoon. One coffee shop.

Three teenagers would not leave. They sat down.

It is worth appreciating how sharp a move that was. Lunch-counter sit-ins were not history in 1965, they were the news. Greensboro was five years back, the Civil Rights Act was ten months old, Selma had been that March. Three gay kids in a Philadelphia diner picked up the most recognizable protest tool in America and aimed it at their own front door.

A manager called the police. All three were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

Clark Polak, president of the Janus Society and editor of its magazine Drum, turned up to help them find a lawyer. He got arrested too. All four were later found guilty.

The Janus Society recorded that the three were two young men and one young woman. That is close to everything anyone knows about them.

Their names were never published, and have never been recovered

Sixty-one years later, the people who started the first successful LGBT+ sit-in in the United States are anonymous. Not pseudonymous. Not disputed. Simply unrecorded.

The five days that actually won it

Getting arrested is not a strategy. What happened next was.

Janus Society members and their supporters, led by Robert L. Sitko, planted themselves outside the restaurant for five straight days and put roughly 1,500 fliers into the hands of people walking down 17th Street. The leaflets laid out what Dewey’s was doing and, usefully, what your rights were if you protested and got picked up for it.

Now consider who was doing that.

The Janus Society was a homophile organization, which meant its entire theory of change was respectability. Be presentable. Be unobjectionable. Give them nothing to point at. And the people getting refused at Dewey’s were teenagers being punished precisely for declining to look presentable.

Janus backed them anyway, and its president caught a disorderly conduct conviction doing it. Whatever the organization’s instincts were, that week it picked a side.

May 2, and the shortest victory in movement history

One week after the first sit-in, Dewey’s refused three more customers. They sat down.

Police came back. This time the officers talked to the protesters and then simply left, without arresting anyone. Polak reported afterward that the police told him they had no authority to make anybody get up.

So the group stayed about four more hours, purely because they could, and then walked out on their own schedule.

Dewey’s dropped the policy. Drum called it the first sit-in of its kind in the history of the United States.

Total elapsed time from first arrest to won: one week.

Ten weeks later, eleven blocks east

This is the part worth sitting with, because 1965 in Philadelphia ran two completely different experiments in how to win gay rights, and it ran them ten weeks apart.

On July 4, Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny led the first Annual Reminder in front of Independence Hall. It became the longest-running gay rights demonstration in the country before Stonewall, and it is the honest reason Philadelphia can claim it started organized Pride.

It also had a dress code. Jackets and ties for the men, dresses for the women. That was not fussiness, it was doctrine: look employable, so a country convinced you were sick and criminal had nothing to photograph.

And it worked on its own terms. It built the scaffolding that Pride grew out of.

But hold the two side by side. In April, people won by being conspicuously nonconforming and refusing to move. In July, eleven blocks east, the movement won attention by dressing to blend into the Fourth of July crowd.

Both of those are Philadelphia. Only one of them ended up on a T-shirt.

So why has nobody heard of it?

Stonewall got a riot, a mythology and eventually a whole month. San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria riot got a documentary. Dewey’s got a plaque, and not until 2018.

Part of that is just narrative physics. Nothing burned. A tidy one-week win with no injuries and no footage does not become a legend, it becomes a footnote.

But part of it is uglier and simpler. The people at the center of it were teenagers, gender-nonconforming, and, in a movement about to spend a decade insisting it was respectable, exactly the wrong faces for the brochure. The historian Marc Stein has written about how much about the sit-in is still unknown, and that blank space is its own kind of evidence.

The strange afterlife of 219 S. 17th Street

Here is the thing about that address. It has been quietly interesting for about 130 years.

• 1890s
  Dr. Solomon Solis-Cohen keeps his medical office here and writes letters on 219 South Seventeenth Street letterhead. A Jefferson professor and a founder of the National Tuberculosis Association, he is one of the more prominent physicians in the city.
• 1915
  The brand-new Print Club of Philadelphia, founded by Mr. and Mrs. Jasper Yeates Brinton and now known as The Print Center, opens its first home here. Quarters are so cramped there is barely wall space for a gallery. Members discuss printmaking over white-gloved afternoon tea.
• 1918
  The Print Club moves to a carriage house on Latimer Street, where it still is. Rittenhouse keeps its art gallery. The 17th Street address goes looking for a new life.
• SOMETIME AFTER THAT
  The old building comes down and a three-story parking garage goes up in its place, with retail at street level. Nobody seems to have pinned down exactly when. If you know, we would love to hear from you.
• BY THE 1950s
  Dewey’s is operating at street level and has become one of the city’s late-night institutions.
• APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 1965
  The sit-ins. Four arrests, 1,500 leaflets, one reversed policy, seven days.
• 1978
  Pete Koutroubas, a 20-year-old Greek immigrant who picked up the nickname by being the shortest of three Petes at a previous job, signs a lease on the former Dewey’s and renames it Little Pete’s. Rent: $800 a month.
• MAY 29, 2017
  Little Pete’s serves its last cup of coffee at 9 p.m. on Memorial Day, after 39 years. Rent at the end: $10,000 a month.
• DEC 2017 – MARCH 2018
  Fences go up around the block and the old garage is flattened.
• TODAY
  A 13-story Hyatt Centric, 330 rooms, addressed on Chancellor Street.

The Little Pete’s stretch is the quiet joke in all of this. For 39 years it was the 24-hour diner in Center City, and it did the exact same job Dewey’s had done: the place you ended up after the bars let out, the gay crowd very much included, at a counter where nobody asked you anything. Same corner, same 3 a.m., same clientele. No policy.

A doctor’s office, an art gallery, a parking garage, a civil rights landmark, the best cheap eggs in Center City, and now a hotel. All of it stacked on one Philadelphia lot, and only one chapter got a plaque.

Philadelphia City Council approved the marker in December 2017. It went up the following year, on the first day of LGBT History Month, a few steps from where three teenagers sat down and would not get up.

It does not carry their names. Nobody wrote them down.