The San Francisco LGBT Community Center, also known as the SF LGBT Center, is a nonprofit organization serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community of San Francisco, California, and nearby communities, located at 1800 Market Street in San Francisco. The mission of the SF LGBT Center is "to connect the diverse LGBTQ+ community to opportunities, resources, and each other to achieve a stronger, healthier, and more equitable world for LGBTQ+ people and our allies."
Queer Nation is an LGBTQ activist organization founded in March 1990 in New York City, by HIV/AIDS activists from ACT UP. The four founders were outraged at the escalation of anti-gay violence on the streets and prejudice in the arts and media. The group is known for its confrontational tactics, its slogans, and the practice of outing.
Arthur Brown Jr. was an American architect, based in San Francisco and designer of many of its landmarks. He is known for his work with John Bakewell Jr. as Bakewell and Brown, along with later works after the partnership dissolved in 1927.
LGBT tourism is a form of tourism marketed to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. People might be open about their sexual orientation and gender identity at times, but less so in areas known for violence against LGBT people.
The San Francisco Public Library is the public library system of the city and county of San Francisco. The Main Library is located at Civic Center, at 100 Larkin Street. The library system has won several awards, such as Library Journal's Library of the Year award in 2018. The library is well-funded due to the city's dedicated Library Preservation Fund that was established by a 1994 ballot measure. The Preservation Fund was renewed twice, by ballot measures in 2007 and 2022.
Over the course of its history, the LGBT community has adopted certain symbols for self-identification to demonstrate unity, pride, shared values, and allegiance to one another. These symbols communicate ideas, concepts, and identity both within their communities and to mainstream culture. The two symbols most recognized internationally are the pink triangle and the rainbow flag.
Theatre Rhinoceros, Theatre Rhino, or The Rhino is a gay and lesbian theatre in San Francisco. Theatre Rhinoceros claims to be the world's longest-running professional queer theatre company. It was founded in the spring of 1977 by Lanny Baugniet and his late partner Allan B. Estes, Jr.. The name is based on the lavender rhinoceros, a symbol popularized by the Boston gay community in the mid-1970s. It is a non-profit theater company dedicated to the production of plays by and about gay and lesbian people.
Timothy Ludwig Pflueger was an architect, interior designer and architectural lighting designer in the San Francisco Bay Area in the first half of the 20th century. Together with James R. Miller, Pflueger designed some of the leading skyscrapers and movie theaters in San Francisco in the 1920s, and his works featured art by challenging new artists such as Ralph Stackpole and Diego Rivera. Rather than breaking new ground with his designs, Pflueger captured the spirit of the times and refined it, adding a distinct personal flair. His work influenced later architects such as Pietro Belluschi.
Allan Bérubé was a gay American historian, activist, independent scholar, self-described "community-based" researcher and college drop-out, and award-winning author, best known for his research and writing about homosexual members of the American Armed Forces during World War II. He also wrote essays about the intersection of class and race in gay culture, and about growing up in a poor, working-class family, his French-Canadian roots, and about his experience of anti-AIDS activism.
The GLBT Historical Society maintains an extensive collection of archival materials, artifacts and graphic arts relating to the history of LGBT people in the United States, with a focus on the LGBT communities of San Francisco and Northern California.
Charles "Chuck" Arnett was an American artist and dancer. His best-known work is the Tool Box mural (1962).
The Women's Building is a women-led non-profit arts and education community center located in San Francisco, California. The center advocates self-determination, gender equality and social justice. The four-story building rents to multiple tenants and serves more than 20,000 women a year. The building has served as an event and meeting space since 1979, when it was purchased by the San Francisco Women's Center. The Center is shielded from rising real estate costs in the Mission District because it owns the building free and clear, having paid off the mortgage in 1995.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent LGBT communities in the United States, and is one of the most important in the history of American LGBT rights and activism alongside New York City. The city itself has been described as "the original 'gay-friendly city'". LGBT culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the southern San Francisco Bay Area.
The Castro District, commonly referred to as the Castro, is a neighborhood in Eureka Valley in San Francisco. The Castro was one of the first gay neighborhoods in the United States. Having transformed from a working-class neighborhood through the 1960s and 1970s, the Castro remains one of the most prominent symbols of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activism and events in the world.
The Lexington Club, often referred to as The Lex, was a dive bar, primarily catered towards queer women, in the Mission District in the American city of San Francisco, California. It was recognized as one of the central landmarks for LGBTQ culture, especially for lesbians and queer women, in San Francisco. The club was founded in 1997 and closed at the end of April 2015.
Rupert Kinnard also credited as Prof. I.B. Gittendowne, is an American cartoonist who created the first ongoing gay/lesbian-identified African-American comic-strip characters: the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé. Kinnard is gay and African American.
Rev. Trinity Ordoña is a lesbian Filipino-American college teacher, activist, community organizer, and ordained minister currently residing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is notable for her grassroots work on intersectional social justice. Her activism includes issues of voice and visibility for Asian/Pacific gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals and their families, Lesbians of color, and survivors of sexual abuse. Her works include her dissertation Coming Out Together: an ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander queer women's and transgendered people's movement of San Francisco, as well as various interviews and articles published in anthologies like Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity and Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology. She co-founded Asian and Pacific Islander Family Pride (APIFP), which "[sustains] support networks for API families with members who are LGBTQ," founded Healing for Change, "a CCSF student organization that sponsors campus-community healing events directed to survivors of violence and abuse," and is currently an instructor in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Department at City College of San Francisco.
Ping Yuen and North Ping Yuen form a four-building public housing complex in the north end of Chinatown, San Francisco along Pacific Avenue. In total, there are 434 apartments. The three Pings on the south side of Pacific were dedicated in 1951, and the North Ping Yuen building followed a decade later in 1961. Some of the largest murals in Chinatown are painted on Ping Yuen, which are prominent landmark buildings taller than the typical two- or three-story Chinatown buildings that date back to the early 1900s.
The Tool Box was a leather bar for gay men in San Francisco that operated from 1962 to 1971 on the east corner of 4th Street and Harrison Street. It was the first leather bar in the South of Market, and a meeting spot where influential personalities of the early San Francisco leather scene gathered. After a prominent feature in Life magazine in 1964, it was considered the archetypal leather bar, helping to cement San Francisco's reputation as the “gay capital” of the US. The bar's history was short-lived: from 1965 onwards, the epicenter of the leather scene shifted towards Folsom Street, which ultimately led to its closing in 1971. The Tool Box is commemorated at the San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley.
