The GLBT Historical Society

Join us for the inaugural event of Queeriosity Corner a new quarterly program series led by Ramón Silvestre, Museum Registrar & Curatorial Specialist at the GLBT Historical Society, showcasing treasured items from within the archives. Dive into GLBT Historical Society’s Art and Artifact special collection and discover some of its several hundred pieces of artwork- paintings, sculptures, objects, costumes, drawings on paper, posters, photographs and ephemera, many of which hav...Continue reading

Join the Queer Culture Club each month online as GLBT Historical Society Executive Director Terry Beswick interviews queer culture-makers one-on-one - authors and playwrights, historians and activists, artists and archivists - the folks who are defining the queer culture of yesterday, today and the future. Broadcast live on the second Tuesday of each month, we’ll talk about each culture-makers work, their process, their inspirations, hopes and dreams. SPEAKERS: Natalia M. V...igil is a queer Xicana writer with native heritage, multimedia curator, and big sister of six, born and raised in San Francisco. She is an arts administrator passionate about community-driven creativity and cultural preservation through artist sustainability. She is the Executive Director of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco and the co-founder of Still Here San Francisco for which she was honored as a Local Hero by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. See more

The April theme of the #ArchivesHashtagParty, no doubt inspired by the reemergence of the Brood X cicadas on the East Coast following a 17-year slumber, is bugs (formally #archivesbugs)! This super-fun virtual hashtag party is taking place on Twitter and is organized by the US National Archives in Washington, D.C. Each month, the National Archives shares a theme and archives around the world respond to that theme with an item from their collections. Since we don’t want t...hose of you who aren’t on that platform to miss out on the fun, we’ll be sharing our entries with you right here! Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly: shown here is the program cover for the 1972 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day celebration. Blending glamour and protest into one image, this program cover is also featured in our online exhibition on the first decade of San Francisco Pride, Labor of Love: The Birth of San Francisco Pride. Experience the show here: www.glbthistory.org/labor-of-love. (And yes, your correspondent admits to preferring butterflies over cicadas, as he lived in DC during the last Brood X invasion and isn’t eager to repeat the experience.) Image: San Francisco Gay Pride program, 1972; Ephemera Collection, GLBT Historical Society.

The GLBT Historical Society is thrilled to have loaned two artworks by Jerome Caja (19581995) from our Art and Archives Collection to a new exhibition, Found: The Lost Art of Jerome Caja, which opened May 1 and runs through June 26. This jewel-box exhibition of Caja’s artwork is on display at the Anglim/Trimble Gallery at the Minnesota Street Project galleries. Caja was a San Franciscobased visual artist and drag performer. Best known for his mixed-media paintings using ...everyday materialsoften those associated with femininity such as nail polish, lace and glitterCaja’s artwork frequently incorporates Greco-Roman and Catholic iconography. Found: The Lost Art of Jerome Caja is curated by Anthony Cianciolo of The Jerome Project. For more information on the exhibition, click below. Also click here for the Jerome Project's webpage: http://www.thejeromeproject.com/blog Due to COVID-19 restrictions, reservations are required to enter the galleries at the Minnesota Street Project, and can be made here: https://bit.ly/3tnultZ. http://minnesotastreetproject.com//jerome-caja-anna-van-de

It’s hard to believe how fast time flies. Ten years ago yesterday, on December 10, 2010, we swung open the doors of the GLBT Historical Society Museum for our soft opening. (Our grand opening took place in January.) Here’s a photo of that evening, courtesy of founding member Gerard Koskovich. It was quite an experience: the museum was previewed by our Castro neighbors and the media, even as we were still installing the last of the reception-area furnishings! Ten years late...r, the museum remains firmly anchored in the Castro district. While we’re closed right now due to San Francisco’s placement in the state’s most restrictive purple COVID-19 tier, we promise you this: we’ll be back. In the meantime, we’ve shifted our exhibitions online. And our show 50 Years of Pride has just been nominated by San Francisco culture magazine The Bold Italic in the category Best Virtual Art Gallery/Exhibit" for its 2020 Bold Italic Awards. To view the exhibition, navigate to https://www.glbthistory.org/50-years-of-pride. And please cast your vote for us on the awards voting site here: https://bit.ly/33Z9Aew. Voting is open through December 14. Image: View of the GLBT Historical Society Museum on December 10, 2010; photo courtesy of Gerard Koskovich.

We’re thrilled and honored and humbled (and gushing!) that our online exhibition 50 Years of Pride has been nominated by San Francisco culture magazine "The Bold Italic" in the category of Virtual Art Gallery/Exhibit" for its 2020 Bold Italic Awards! The magazine’s first-ever annual awards recognize people and small businesses that have pivoted, hustled, and gotten creative to make it work during this dumpster fire of a year. Originally planned as an exhibition at City H...all, 50 Years of Pride, presented with the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, opened as our first online exhibition in May. Curated by artists Lenore Chinn and Pamela Peniston, the show documents the evolution of San Francisco Pride, the event that most powerfully represents and celebrates the Bay Area's LGBTQ community, over the past half century. It features nearly 100 photographs spanning five decades of Pride celebrations, from the event’s humble origins in the 1970s to the massive gatherings of recent years. Images drawn from the GLBT Historical Society’s archives are joined by photographs held by other institutions, as well as works by over a dozen independent photographers. To view the exhibition, click below. And please cast your vote for us on the awards voting site here: https://bit.ly/33Z9Aew. Voting is open through December 14. We appreciate your support so very, very much.

Pictured here is an Easter bonnet created by Lynn Jordan of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. The bonnet features in an upcoming episode of independent researcher Lynne Gerber’s new podcast, A Church Alive. I rely on the GLBT Historical Society’s archives to inform my work on queer spiritual communities, HIV and LGBTQ struggles with institutional religious power, says Gerber. "The talk of reopening churches on Easter this year made me think about how dif...ferently the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco celebrated Easter during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. Lynne’s podcast is one of countless projects created this year with research in our archives. Read about it here: https://www.heavenpodcast.org/. Help researchers like Lynne continue to uncover and share these stories by making your year-end donation to the GLBT Historical Society at glbthistory.org/donate. And read more about the people who used our archives this year, and their projects, at glbthistory.org/making-history-together. Image: Easter bonnet created by Lynn Jordan; photo courtesy of Lynne Gerber and the Metropolitan Community Church.

With the advent of more digital media than ever before, people are finding more ways to learn and hear stories about LGBTQ history and culture. In the last several years, an explosion of queer voices in podcasting has occurred, and the podcast has become a useful tool and medium for teaching LGBTQ history through an accessible, intimate format and lens. In the second of a two-part conversation, some prominent podcasters whose shows cover the broad spectrum of LGBTQ history w...Continue reading

Bomp-chicka-wa-wa! Our board member Kylie Minono certainly is a convincing saleswoman. Here she is last Saturday in the Castro with her waresa gorgeous 2021 drag calendar! A collaboration between 12 beautiful individuals, including Kylie, this year’s calendar is the fourth iteration since the San Francisco Drag Calendar Group began issuing one annually. The sale of each calendar goes directly to support the GLBT Historical Society. Enjoy a new drag artist each month and supp...ort us at the same time! Quantities are limited, so order now. The calendar ships free to anywhere in the US. Click here to purchase: https://calendar-queens.myshopify.com/. Photo by Andrew Shaffer.

In this month’s issue of our newsletter History Happens, poet Eric Sneathen introduces the GLBT Historical Society’s San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project. We’ve just made publicly available the first tranche of interviews for this project: 23 conversations with activists involved with ACT UP/San Francisco, ACT UP/Golden Gate, Stop AIDS Now Or Else, AIDS Action Pledge, Citizens for Medical Justice, Enola Gay and related groups. Click below for the article, which provides a nice overview of the scope of this major project we’ve been working on for multiple years. After you’ve read the article, head to this page on the Internet Archive, which hosts the footage, to watch the interviews: https://bit.ly/2VVdU9W.

We wrote about drag-queen Joan Jett Blakk’s 1992 run for president two weeks ago, and here’s a nice overview by the Bay Area Reporter of JJB’s multiple election campaigns of the 1990s in Chicago, San Francisco, and nationally. With campaign promises to make the White House the Lavender House and have Dykes on Bikes provide national security, Blakk also had prescient notions like enacting national healthcare and a drug policy of, ‘Legalize everything, tax the fu*k out of it, ...and erase the national debt.’ We have examples of several of these graphic campaign posters in our archival collections. Click below to read more:

Don’t forget to grab your tix for tomorrow’s lunch-hour sequel to our popular panel discussion about LGBTQ history and culture podcasts, Podcasting LGBTQ History, Part II! With the advent of more digital media than ever before, there has been an explosion in the number of queer voices in podcasting, a powerful tool and medium for teaching LGBTQ history in an accessible, intimate way. In the second of our two-part conversation, prominent queer podcasters whose shows cover a broad spectrum of LGBTQ history will share their experiences, perspectives and tips on how queer history can be shared beyond the classroom through podcasts that potentially reach a global audience. Click below for more information and to register, or register directly here: https://bit.ly/362s13A.

Every vote matters, and every voter deserves to be heard. Here we see Harvey Milk (19301978) listening to a voter while canvassing in the Castro in 1973, one of multiple unsuccessful political campaigns he waged before winning his historic seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. If you are eligible to vote and haven’t yet cast your ballot, visit Vote.org's polling-place locator to look up your local polling place and let your voice be heard: https://www.vote.org/polling-place-locator/. Image: Harvey Milk campaigning in 1973; photo by Crawford Wayne Barton, Crawford Wayne Barton Papers (1993-11), GLBT Historical Society.

This coming Friday, November 6, block out your lunch hour from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. for the second part of our popular panel discussion about LGBTQ history and culture podcasts, Podcasting LGBTQ History, Part II! With the advent of more digital media than ever before, there has been an explosion in the number of queer voices in podcasting, a powerful tool and medium for teaching LGBTQ history in an accessible, intimate way. In the second of our two-part conversation, prominent queer podcasters whose shows cover a broad spectrum of LGBTQ history will share their experiences, perspectives and tips on how queer history can be shared beyond the classroom through podcasts that potentially reach a global audience. Click below for more information and to register, or register directly here: https://bit.ly/362s13A.

#LGBTQHistoryMonth may be over, but we celebrate our history year-round! Our final illustration in this year's series is of Phyllis Lyon (19242020) and Del Martin (1921-2008), lesbian pioneers and activists. They co-founded the first lesbian rights organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, in 1955 and served as editors of its nationally distributed publication, The Ladder. Lyon and Martin were involved in numerous other organizations dedicated to fighting ...for LGBTQ rights throughout their lives, including the struggle for marriage equality. In 2008, they became the first same-sex couple legally married in San Francisco. The GLBT Historical Society preserves a vast collection from this groundbreaking couple. Explore a small selection at https://www.glbthistory.org/primary-source-set-lyon-and-mar. Learn more about the effort to recognize and preserve their longtime home by visiting https://www.friends-of-the-lyon-martin-house.com. The Friends of the Lyon Martin House is fiscally sponsored by the GLBT Historical Society. Illustration by Andy Chiang.

As Dan Gentile's fun article in SFGATE outlines, San Franciscans really do take their costumes seriously, even though this year's Halloween was necessarily a low-key affair. Gentile notes that costumes have long had a special resonance for members of the LGBTQ community. Queerness is a language. It’s sometimes a non-verbal language. It can be a language of gesture, also certainly a language of costume, says GLBT Historical Society reference archivist Isaac Fellman, who has worked with the many costumes in our archives.

Happy Halloween from all of us at the GLBT Historical Society! Here we have José Sarria (19222013), a celebrated San Francisco drag performer, politician and community leader, in one of his most famous personas: Empress José I, the Widow Norton. Sarria became a cocktail waiter at the Black Cat, a bohemian bar with a largely gay clientele, in the 1950s. There, he became locally famous for his opera parodies and his outspoken gay pride. He ended each performance with a song ca...lled God Save Us Nelly Queens. In 1961, Sarria ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors the first LGBTQ person to run for office in the United States and in 1965, he founded the Imperial Court System, a queer charitable organization known for the elaborate courtly titles and pageantry adopted by its members. Sarria's Widow Norton persona referenced the beloved, nineteenth-century San Francisco eccentric Joshua Norton, who proclaimed himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States in 1859. Image: José Sarria as Empress José I, the Widow Norton, ca. 1990s; photo by Robert Pruzan, Robert Pruzan Collection (1998-36), GLBT Historical Society.

This eight-minute video, composed by John Raines for the GLBT Historical Society, is a tribute to activist Tom Taylor (19432020), who passed away on October 20. As Taylor explains in the archival footage, over four decades he was a close friend and ally of the late Gilbert Baker (19512017), the creator of the now-universal rainbow flag. Taylor was often behind the scenes in his workshop helping Gilbert to bring his creative visions to reality, and with his husband Dr. Jerry... Goldstein, took responsibility for maintaining the oversized, iconic rainbow flag at Castro and Market Streets. Tomorrow morning we'll begin showing the video (with subtitles) on the street-facing video wall at the GLBT Historical Society Museum in the Castro, where our exhibition on Gilbert Baker is also on display. Stop by and have a look, or view on our website at www.glbthistory.org/museum. Let’s keep Tom in our thoughts this weekend as we remember and celebrate his extraordinary life. https://youtu.be/L7NZlwxLPF8

In a lovely review of historian David J. Skal’s 2002 book Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween, Justin Lockwood of the blog Bloody Disgusting gave a shout-out to the GLBT Historical Society Museum. [Skal] details the last night of legendary San Francisco bar the Black Cat on Halloween 1963, when José Sarria, a drag queen and gay activist, lost his long feud with the local police. When I visited the Castro’s GLBT History Museum and saw photos and artifact...s of Sarria, it was thrilling to see evidence of the man and moment Skal had so vividly described. Thank you for sharing your bewitching experience with us, Justin! We are happy that our museum has reopened this month so everyone can go visit these artifacts (get your tickets at glbthistory.org/museum). To read Lockwood's review, click below:

October is LGBTQ history month! We’ve commissioned a number of illustrations of queer history-makers to celebrate the occasion, and here’s our rendering of Harvey Milk (19301978). The first openly gay elected official in California, Milk won election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled fellow city supervisor. White was sentenced to seven years in prison for mansla...ughter, which was later reduced to five years. Mass uprisings in the gay community, known as the White Night Riots, followed the sentencing. The GLBT Historical Society preserves a number of photos and personal effects belonging to Milk. Learn more about his life and impact at www.glbthistory.org/primary-source-set-harvey-milk, where you can access our primary-source set about him. Illustration by Andy Chiang.