LGBTQ culture in San Francisco

[1] LGBT culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the southern San Francisco Bay Area.

Cross-gender dress and same-sex dancing were prevalent at city masquerade balls where some men assumed the traditional role of women going so far as to wear female attire.

[4] In her study "Arresting dress, cross-dressing in 19th-century San Francisco", Clare Sears also describes numerous cases of women who donned men's clothing in public spaces for increased social and economic freedom, safety, and gender-progressive experimentation.

This political shift resulted in San Francisco's queer culture reemerging in bars, nightclubs, and entertainment of the Barbary Coast, removed from policing and control.

[3] Through the 1890s to 1907, the Barbary Coast, San Francisco's early red-light district located on Pacific Avenue, featured same-sex prostitution and female impersonators who served male clientele.

[8] Mona's, San Francisco's first lesbian bar, opened on Union Street in 1934, and featured cross-dressing waitresses as well as entertainer Gladys Bentley.

For example, In 1943, the police raided the gay bar, Rickshaw in Chinatown, and arrested 24 patrons and two dozen customers, including a couple of lesbians who tried to fight back and triggered a small riot.

[15][16] Police raids on The Black Cat bar, which had a bohemian and LGBT clientele and featured entertainer and activist José Sarria, sparked an important legal fight for homosexual protections in the 1950s.

[23] The June 1964 Paul Welch Life article entitled "Homosexuality In America" marked the first time a national publication reported on gay issues.

[26][28] The Society for Individual Rights (SIR), founded in San Francisco in 1964, published the magazine Vector and became within two years the largest homophile organization in the United States.

[31] This event has been called "San Francisco's Stonewall" by some historians;[31] the participation of such prominent litigators in the defense of Smith, Donaldson and the other two lawyers marked a turning point in gay rights on the West Coast of the United States.

[35] One of the earliest organizations for bisexuals, the Sexual Freedom League in San Francisco, was facilitated by Margo Rila and Frank Esposito beginning in 1967.

[36] Two years later, during a staff meeting at a San Francisco mental health facility serving LGBT people, nurse Maggi Rubenstein came out as bisexual.

[6] The term "Castro clone" originated in this neighborhood when some gay men began to adopt a masculine clothing style which included denim jeans and a plaid shirt.

He passed rent control ordinances, was the highest elected gay official in the city during the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and later became a Vice Chair of Democratic Socialists of America.

San Francisco lesbian bar Peg's Place[55][56] was the site of an assault in 1979 by off-duty members of the San Francisco vice squad,[57] an event which drew national attention to other incidents of anti-gay violence and police harassment of the LGBT community[58] and helped propel a (unsuccessful[59]) citywide proposition to ban the city's vice squad altogether.

[66] In the early 1980s,[67] AIDS began affecting the male LGBT population of San Francisco, with the disease continuing to have a fatal effect through the 1990s.

[74] The first Eagle Creek Saloon, that opened on the 1800 block of Market Street in San Francisco in 1990 and closed in 1993, was the first black-owned gay bar in the city.

[77] The first decade of the new century saw a new awareness of transgender identity in San Francisco, with the establishment of the first Trans pride march in 2004[78] and heralded several important legal events in the movement towards Same-sex marriage in California, sparked by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom's move in 2004 to permit city hall to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

[86] In 2016, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law, authored by Scott Wiener, barring the city from doing business with companies that have a home base in states such as North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, that forbid civil rights protections for LGBT people[87] In 2017, the Compton's Transgender Cultural District in the Tenderloin became the first legally recognized transgender district in the country.

[102] One of its founders, Diane Felix, also co-founded various different queer organizations including Community United in Response to AIDS/SIDA (CURAS) in 1981 and Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida in 1993.

[103] Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida is a community based, grass roots HIV prevention organization in the Mission district.

[113] A 2015 Gallup poll found that 6.2% of San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward inhabitants identified as LGBT, the highest of any metropolitan area in the United States.

[126] In 2014 Pete Kane stated that as same-sex rights and culture became mainstream, some gay bars in the city had closed due to gentrification[126][127] or became "post-gay".

[128][129][130] Despite being known as one of the LGBTQ "meccas" of America, San Francisco has a severe lack of designated gathering spaces for lesbians compared to gay men.

[133][134] In the 1970s, softball games became a popular form of recreation for gay men and lesbians, with bar-sponsored teams competing against each other, as well as against the San Francisco police.

He successfully passed rent control ordinances, was the highest elected gay official in the city during the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and later became a Vice Chair of Democratic Socialists of America.

[151] Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC; Chinese: 華裔選民教育委員會; pinyin: Huáyì Xuǎnmín Jiàoyùwěiyuánhuì) director David Lee (李志威; Lǐ Zhìwēi[152][153]) stated that immigrants who had been in San Francisco for longer than ten years largely voted against the proposition while those who had been in the city for fewer than 10 years largely voted for it.

[154] Areas voting over 50% in favor of Proposition 8 included portions of Bayview-Hunters Point, the Excelsior, communities around Lake Merced, and Visitacion Valley.

The parts of Downtown included the condominiums of the Four Seasons Hotel, San Francisco and the St. Regis Museum Tower as well as other city blocks around Bloomingdale's.