San Francisco is the city ruled by love and celebration of diversity. Which helps explain why the city has come to be known as the epicenter of the worldwide LGBTQ community.
Here are nine ways San Francisco became the world’s gay mecca…
Military
1942: WWII Stronghold
San Francisco became a military stronghold during WWII, establishing bases like Fort Funston and Fort Mason. It was a symbol of freedom for 1,650,000 men, as the last part of the States that they glimpsed before they saw combat on foreign lands, and the first thing that they saw when they returned. Thousands of young male enlistees descended on city looking for love, sometimes with each other, sometimes with locals who were their fans.
2015: Demilitarized Fleet Week
Today, the military has markedly little presence and most of the bases have turned into tourist attractions, housing developments, or local hangouts. Fleet Week, when military guys and, increasingly, gals, descend on the city, is a highly celebrated occasion for the LGBT community where sexy men in uniform can be spotted in every corner of the city from the Marina to Castro letting freedom reign in the post-Don’t Ask, Don’t tell world.
Pride
1970: First Pride March
Thirty courageous people risked it all to to march down Polk Street to City Hall in a time when any association with homosexuality risked discrimination and worse. The following day a “gay-in” takes place in Golden Gate Park drawing hundreds more. Combined, these mark the Gay Freedom Day Parade.
2015: 45th Annual Pride
Nearly 2 million people descend on San Francisco from every corner of the world. This is the largest gathering of LGBT people in the nation and takes place over ten action-packed days. The day before Pride, Pink Saturday, is one of the the biggest public parties of the year. Pride is now enjoyed by millions worldwide–gay, straight and everything in between
Politics
1977: Harvey Milk
Harvey Milk is elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay elected official in California history, only to be gunned down, along with beloved pro-gay mayor George Moscone, by fellow supervisor Dan White, on Nov. 27, 1978.
2015: Harvey Milk Democratic Club
Openly gay Assemblyman Mark Leno serves his 13th year. San Francisco is full of openly gay city, county, and state officials including Bevan Dufty and the rising, astute Scott Wiener. Two of the city’s most prominent political clubs include LGBT-centric Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas. It is impossible to get elected to citywide office without LGBTQ support.
Changing The World For the Better
1964: Gay Capital of America
San Francisco is toted as the “Gay Capital of America” in Life magazine. Activists of all stripes flock to San Francisco to start the fight we know today as the gay rights movement, and to take it first to the rest of American and then the world.
2015: Marriage Mecca of the US
After a series of victories and defeats for California’s Proposition 8, the U.S. Supreme Court makes same-sex marriage legal across the United States, invalidating every last ban. San Francisco first issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2004 and was recently voted LGBTQ “Marriage Mecca” by GayCities members.
Drag
1933: Female Impersonation
Finocchio’s was a nightclub and bar in the sexually liberal San Francisco Barbary Coast. In 1933, with the repeal of prohibition, the club offered female impersonation shows, the early name for drag queens, that drew an enormous crowds that quickly spread across the city like glitter.
2015: Drag Club Oasis
One of SF’s ruling drag queens, Heklina, opens Oasis, a popular drag club. Drag shows take place at more than 20 venues per week including Trannyshack and Sunday’s a Drag. San Francisco is also headquarters to the legendary Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the largest charitable drag organization in the country.
Into The Night
1908: First Gay Bar
Among the first “notorious” gay bar in San Francisco was a dark, secretive place known The Dash, known only to insiders. Waiters cross-dressed and for $1 would perform sex acts in private booths. In 1972, Twin Peaks Tavern opened its door and windows to the public. Gay bars in the Castro now often boast as many non-gay and gay patrons, with people of all sorts enjoying the open, nonjudgmental atmosphere.
2015: Best Gaybourhood In The World
Castro was named the world’s best Gaybourhood by GayCities members in 2014. Any given night, you can find bars packed and clubs hopping with a mix of locals and tourists who come to gay it up in the city. The gay center was Polk Street and parts of the Tenderloin, both of which still boast gay bars, but transitioned to make The Castro the gayest neighborhood anywhere, with at least a dozen gay bars within a few blocks of each other on Castro, Market and 18th Street. The South of Market Area is the new hot spot.
Leather & Fetish
1938: Sailor Boy Tavern
The first proto-leather bar in San Francisco was the Sailor Boy Tavern, which opened in 1938 and was primarily for visiting navy men looking for action. In the 1960’s, the leather scene established itself in SOMA with bars such as the Toolbox.
2015: 21st Annual Folsom Street Fair
The leather subculture attracted people from near and far, leaving a legacy that has boomed into what is the leather event of all leather events–Folsom Street Fair. Hundreds of thousands of leatherman and leatherwomen revel in the biggest BDSM event, preceded by its sister leather event, Dore Alley.
HIV/AIDS
1981: First cases of GRID
Young men in San Francisco were among the first diagnosed with GRID (the incorrectly named Gay Related Immuno Deficiency). HIV would soon afflict millions. It quickly became a worldwide pandemic.
2015: HIV/AIDS Endemic
San Francisco leads the world in cutting-edge treatment, meaning that few die of HIV any more, and in prevention, with the goal of zero new infections by the year 2020.
Cinema
1920: Castro Theatre movie palace
The Castro Theatre gets its chandelier and becomes a renowned movie palace. LGBTQ film are financed and set in San Francisco, and increasingly shown in art houses there.
2015: 40th Annual Frameline Film Festival
Frameline Film Festival is the largest queer film festival in the world. Running for nearly two weeks, it features films from the best screenwriters, directors, actors. The Castro Theatre is its primary home.
Chris Tan
And yet there were gay bashing in SF?
Chris
HUH!?!?! Many of these are hardly the things that I think of as constituting a GAY mecca.
Try that the San Francisco area is one of the most creative spots in the world to the point where, some years back, many Hindu yogis claimed that San Francisco had become the spiritual center of the world.
Or if you want to trade in stereotypes: San Francisco has great theater, opera and ballet.
Or that, within shorts drives, can be found giant redwoods, the largest and oldest living beings in this world.
Realitycheck
@Chris: What ever the reason, San Francisco has been synonymous world wide for decades with Gay.
Yes, New York , London, Berlin etc are all Gay cities, but for what ever reason
San Francisco got the crown.
Ask any non american tourist about San Francisco and the first thing they will tell you is……”Gay”.
o.codone
It appears that it was the Hep B vaccine trials that introduced HIV into the gay communities in the big cities across the nation. Epidemiologically the emergence of AIDS fits this pattern. Sad. Tragic. It was the arrogance of science that signed so many gay men’s death certificates.
jerry_pritikin
I left a long well thought out response and it never registered,yet my link to FB did… I”m very disappointed…
dwes09
@o.codone: Perhaps you have been taking too much of the drug that you use as your moniker? That tired old conspiracy is right up there with the faked moon landing, the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 “truthers”. Given the easily verifiable incubation period of HIV, a host of epidemiological studies over the past 30 some odd years, examination of tissue samples dating back to the 1940’s, as well as the exemplary sanitary techniques used in the hep vaccine trials, you are easily shown to be wrong. Beyond that, the vaccine was repeatedly shown to be free of HIV particles after the virus was discovered. To sustain your belief you have to refuse to accept the germ theory of disease, which requires serious lapses in intelligence.
Kind of like those north Africans who let their kids die because they think the polio vaccine is going to give them AIDS!
It is the arrogance of science deniers that spreads false beliefs that the gullible like you latch on to, to make the world seem a simpler place.
Brian
It took a very short time for San Francisco to go from pride to promiscuity. There ain’t no pride in promiscuity.
mike51295
I lived in San Francisco from 1973 until 1982. I was denied housing because “we dont rent to two single gentlemen.” I am a nurse and worked with AIDs patients long before we knew what it was. I have great memories of the leather scene and Castro.
greenchemical
Obviously whoever wrote this doesn’t live in San Francisco or kept up with current events happening with all the gayness in SF going away.
o.codone
@dwes09: I DO love drugs.
1EqualityUSA
I love the light here. It’s like nowhere else. Even in films or dumb-ass detective shows on TV the light is different. I love this city.
scotshot
@Brian:
(yawn)
Tommy Martin-Edwards
Coming from rural NC, when I made it to SF, I was taken aback by the number of rainbow flags. I knew about the Castro, and I figured companies would have them out to attract gay customers, but the whole city had them lined on every streetlight. I remember crying so hard as I walked down Market St. towards the Castro. When you see this, coming from the deep south, it is honestly moving.
Rick K. Fulcher
Go Home you bunch of freaks !
Joshua Jacobs
They love it in the butt down south?
Thomas Niel
headline should read, Police defend themselves after a black criminal pulls deadly weapon on police ! Police Lives matter !
David Neil Brown
because sf is the anus of the world.
Richard Hall
WAS. Until straight tech money bought it and pushed us out.
Scott DaMan
Let the gays live in a Sodom and Gomorrah setting again, maybe it will take twice for them to figure out how sinful homosexuality and adultery are. God loves you and all of us, but he will not tolerate deliberate disobedience forever. We all sin now and then, but to make sin a lifestyle and promote it as acceptable is just pure defiance to God. Be careful what you do.
Juanjo
San Francisco has been home to me for almost 50 years. The Castro is still gay but not what it once was simply because the A Gays are the only ones who can live there now. But people still go and party there. AIDS killed off a lot of people here in their prime, people who had been fighting the fight and starting to reap the rewards. Virtually everyone I knew from that time period is gone.
But San Francisco is a city that constantly remakes itself, over and again. Being gay is a common thing here now. Of the 800,000+ people living here, roughly 100,000 are gay men and women. That is a big chunk of the population and it affects the politics, the society and the culture here. So just about anywhere one works there are out gay man and women, anywhere you shop, party or eat there are gay men and women. And they live all over the City now, not just in one neighborhood. There are some bigots and jerks but for the most part people do not bat an eye if they see two men walking down the street holding hands or two women giving each other a kiss as they hop off the MUNI to go to their respective jobs.
And as for comment about Sodom and Gomorrah and sin, well too bad for you. The sin of Sodom was not homosexuality – it was oppression of the poor and less powerful as well as the stranger who visits you. Read your own bible – Ezekiel 16:49-50.
BadSeed
. . . Suddenly my rather long comment disappeared. Well, I’ll just cut to the chase: the gay men of SF have been brainwashed into thinking they live in a gay Mecca. SF cannot claim to have even one traditional gay bathhouse. If I were young today, I think I’d head for Berlin, which has far deeper gay roots and has elected a gay mayor as has Paris.
martinbakman
@jerry_pritikin: So disappointing, as it is when my post got dumped by QuearTee for posting too fast, even though it was my only post of the day.
Realitycheck
Where are all this anti gay bigot coming from with their laughable bible thumping morals? And on Christmas day? This is exactly why young people are running away from religion, this “I am better then you” delusional mentally is truly repulsive and evil.
Even more laughable is their lack of basic understanding…..
To others, your God is a fairy tale, when you say sin and hell, people hear Unicorns and Harry Potter, laughable….
onthemark
@greenchemical: “Obviously whoever wrote this doesn’t live in San Francisco or kept up with current events happening with all the gayness in SF going away.”
Well, it’s actually sponsored content from a SF tourist board. Designed to get outsiders to come there for a few days & spend money. But I see your point, it would be funny if the person who wrote it really lives in Oakland or Vallejo or something because they can’t afford to live in SF.
Brian
San Francisco was great in the early days when it offered promise. It was the go-to place for freedom-loving hippies. It represented an escape from orthodoxy. It was a fun place for everybody regardless of sexuality.
Then it was taken over by promiscuous, indulgent gay-identifiers who covered their hedonism with the gay rights banner. As a result, hedonism went unchecked. In the closed, segregated spaces of the gay community, pathogens multiplied like wild-fire and STD’s raged.
Compare it to a vessel. If you put two bacteria in a cup, they will pollute the whole cup in no time. Put the same two bacteria in a large swimming pool and it will take much longer – and be much less likely – that the whole pool will become polluted. Bacteria thrive on proximity.
When you build small, segregated enclaves like Castro St, you are basically giving the green light to STD’s to ravage the people within that enclave.
1EqualityUSA
Brian, I know there’s a snappy, somewhat mean, slightly obnoxious comment that could follow this verbal effluvium you just spewed. God knows, I’ve been racking my post-xmas-hazed brain and nothing’s happening. Rendered impotent, I’m leaving it up to you to come up with your own remark about your dissertation above. String together some words representative of your mind’s capability, as I’m tapped out right now, thready pulse, slitty eyed, ‘neath my new, plush, fake-shearling John Deere throw, dog lying on his back with head supported by my thigh, waiting for my favorite day of the year, January 2nd. Peet’s coffee just isn’t cutting it this morning. The vessel with two bacteria…..oh, why won’t my mind work. There’s got to be a zinger in there somewhere. Whole pools of bacteria…please let the words ring…Green light to STD, traffic, sores that won’t heal…enclave…so many ways to go. I need my brothers for this one. Wild-fire STDs, what? Did you overdo the See’s candy? Ever notice how they never show Mary Sees from the waist down? No legs….or green-light STDs raging inferno-like across her woo-woo. Oh, sorry, you can’t handle lady parts, well Mary can handle her own, easy to do when legless. My dog is barking in his sleep. He must be picking up on what I’m feeling. January 2nd cannot come too soon. Please consider giving up See’s candy for the new year. Have a nice day, Brian.
1EqualityUSA
Now I’m spooning my dog. Something I learned at the “enclave.” See what happens when you legalize gay marriage? Dog spooning.