The bar featured cross-dressing waiters who would perform sex acts in nearby booths for a $1, a huge sum back in those days. San Francisco may have had gay bars before the The Dash, but none were as notorious. Below are some seminal SF bars that not only helped turn a city queer, but helped launch a revolution. They may not have the respectability of PAC or a the picket fence, but bars were often at the frontlines of our struggles. I was struck by how many of the battles we fought - and won - started in these bars, and how often bars served as a launching pad for our claims, places where activities became an identity.
The project, part of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, shows a lost world of piano bars and bathhouses, butch-femme discos and beachside hustlers. After several prominent bars in San Francisco started shuttering - victims of Manhunt and Grindr and time - I started mapping a city's worth of shuttered gay bars. We don't give gay bars the respect they deserve. When we otherwise had to fight so hard to be seen in the straight world, the frisky affirmations validated all of us right down to our jack-booted (or stiletto’d) toes.(Above: A scene from The Tool Box depicted in a Life magazine story called "Homosexuality in America.")
I learned there that flattery was as much an instrument of friendship-building as it was of cruising. In such a space, compliments were the coin of the realm, and everyone was rich as hell on them. With such a diverse clientele, everyone could (and would) offer everyone else a kind word and a wink. And it was where the legs-for-days, drag-tactic local talent Pussy Tourette went toe-to-toe with international disco divas on the turntables.īut perhaps what made The Stud so much fun was the flirting. You’d be just as likely to be recommended Geoff Mains’ introduction to leathersex philosophy and practice "Urban Aboriginals” as you would "The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual." It was where the emerging aesthetics being explored in lesbian feminist porn magazine “On Our Backs” met up with classic male homoerotic styling of Tom of Finland. Opinion 'A Secret Love' inspires tears with its look at two lives lived in the closetĪnd in such a diverse crowd, you’d receive a veritable queer culture primer, regardless of your own gender, orientation or expression. Online homes for queer communities are plentiful nowadays - unfortunately, it's physical places like The Stud that are increasingly hard to come by. In 2016, after the existing location's building was sold - and the bar’s then-owner was informed that rent would vault from $3,800 to $9,500 a month - a cooperative group assembled, and 18 owners bought the bar to keep it up and running.īut now, the bar's best option is to cease operation and hope The Stud's culture can sustain it in some other, virtual form for the time being. This isn’t the first time the harsh realities of San Francisco real estate and operating costs caused The Stud problems: It was on Folsom Street until moving to its current location on Harrison and 9th streets in 1987. Pedestrians in front of The Stud bar in San Francisco on July 6, 2016. "Everyone who is an owner feels strongly this is not the end of The Stud," she told KQED last week - even as they announced an online-only drag funeral for the venue on May 31. The owners of San Francisco’s oldest gay bar said in a collective release that the venue is a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic, though co-owner Honey Mahogany (who appeared on season five of "RuPaul's Drag Race"), added they are seeking another location in which to reopen.