the newsletter of the GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco) www.glbthistory.org

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Curating With the Community in the New Year

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For over ten years, the GLBT Historical Society Museum has been a showcase for LGBTQ history, art and culture. Among our most beloved initiatives has been our Community Curator Program. This program invites members of the public, historians and curators to develop exhibitions under the guidance of GLBT Historical Society curatorial staff. As the society’s director of exhibitions and museum experience, I’m pleased to announce that after temporarily suspending the program in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have now launched a new format for our Community Curator Program!

Varied Approaches

Interest in community-curation models has grown dramatically in the museum and curatorial world over the past decade. Since we first swung open the doors to the GLBT Historical Society Museum in the Castro in 2011, about half of our temporary exhibitions have been conceived and curated by members of the public. Community curation has enabled us to mount unique exhibitions that reflect a wider variety of interests, approaches and topics than would otherwise have been possible.

In 2016, for instance, Julián Delgado Lopera and Ángel Rafael Vázquez-Concepción curated an exhibition exploring the concept of ambiente(“environment”)  in the LGBTQ Latinx community. In 2017, artist and professor E.G. Crichton invited LGBTQ artists to create new artworks inspired by past issues of OUT/LOOK, a historic periodical of the late 1980s and early 1990s held in the society’s archives. And in 2019 Melissa Hawkins’s thirty-year-old photographs depicting bars and parties in the SoMa neighborhood formed the core of an exhibition about culture and resilience in the nightlife world during the worst years of the AIDS crisis.

A More Structured Process

While we temporarily paused new in-person exhibition proposals in 2020 and 2021, the break provided an opportunity for us to evaluate the program, identifying both strengths and areas for improvement. We have now updated and relaunched the program, providing a more structured application process, a revised set of timelines, clearer expectations and better support. These changes are designed to assist prospective curators in crafting strong proposals and further developing their professional skills in the process.

In line with the society’s Five Year Strategic Plan, adopted in 2021, we are especially looking forward to receiving exhibition proposals that focus on people with disabilities; people and communities of color; Native American/Indigenous people and communities; lesbians and women; and bisexual, transgender and gender-nonconforming or nonbinary people and communities. To support this goal, the new exhibition application form will be available year round. We welcome and will consider all proposals that demonstrate alignment with our mission.

Since 1985, the GLBT Historical Society has been a labor of love rooted in the LGBTQ community, and our museum has likewise sought to embody the society’s community-centered roots. This is your museum. We hope you’ll participate in the curatorial process.

To learn more about the Community Curator Program,please visit our new webpage, where you will find extensive information. The application form is available on that page and will be accepting proposals from January 10. And finally, I’m always available to answer your questions!

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Brewing a Boycott: How LGBTQ and Labor Activism Intersect


Author Talk
Friday, January 21
6:00–7:30 p.m. PT
Online program
$5 | Free for members
Historians Miriam Frank and Allyson Brantley will discuss the long and interwoven history of LGBTQ and labor activism through the lens of Brantley’s new book, Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). Drawing on oral histories and archival collections, including those held by the GLBT Historical Society, Brantley details how activists across the nation, from gay liberationists to Chicano activists and union members, built supportive, vibrant coalitions. Over decades of organizing and coalition-building from the 1950s to the 1990s, they molded the boycott into a powerful means of political protest, challenging the Coors Brewing Company’s antiunion, discriminatory, anti-LGBTQ practices and conservative political ties. This talk will examine the particular success of the boycott in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and consider its impact in light of contemporary ongoing conversations about consumer power and corporate buyouts. 

Tickets are available online here.

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Bridging the Lesbian Past and Present

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Over 30 years ago, Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve, the most successful lesbian magazine in the world, connecting lesbian community, changing the way lesbians are seen by the mainstream, highlighting the transgender experience, raising awareness of attacks on LGBTQ rights and amplifying the work of lesbian activists. One of the three 2021 recipients of the GLBT Historical Society’s History Maker Awards, Stevens reacquired Curve and co-founded the Curve Foundation last year to empower the Curve community — lesbians, queer women, trans women and nonbinary people of all races, ages and abilities.

The Foundation’s mission is to spur storytelling and cross-generational dialogue by supporting journalism inspired by the tradition of Curve magazine, investing in the next generation of intersectional leaders and bolstering community archives to ensure LGBTQ women’s culture and history are known. In addition to a fellowship to support emerging journalists, the foundation is establishing its own digital archives to preserve the living legacy of Curve magazine and inspire future writers. The foundation is currently hiring an archivist to oversee the launch of this initiative. We sat down for a chat with Stevens and Jasmine Sudarkasa, the Curve Foundation’s executive director.

The GLBT Historical Society’s archives enable people to learn about the LGBTQ past. Likewise, how are the new Curve Foundation’s activities inspired by the past 30 years of Curve magazine?

Jasmine: The work of the foundation is rooted in the magazine’s legacy: we resource stories and storytellers that embody authenticity, cultivate a sense of belonging and support intergenerational trust and resilience. These values are inspired by lesbian legacies of community building and culture work, particularly as embodied in Curve magazine. Putting these values into practice, then, we maintain two programs: The Curve Award, to resource LGBTQ storytellers, and The Curve Archive, which curates, activates and preserves lesbian stories well into the future.

Franco: There is no other organization that bridges our past and our present so directly. By preserving and making the Curve Archive available, we are honoring our history and making it visible and accessible today. By supporting today’s journalists and inviting them to find inspiration in the archives, we are fostering an intergenerational dialogue. All of the foundation’s programming is rooted in our history as a way of not only preserving our past, but also informing how we carve out our future.

The Curve Award is designed to foreground the voices of those who have been marginalized or censored. What kind of support do recipients receive?

The five winners of the Curve Award receive a $5,000 cash award, one-on-one mentoring through the National LGBTQ+ Journalists Association (NLGJA), cohort-based professional development and opportunities for outward-facing visibility. This might include conference presentations at NLGJA, writing opportunities for Curve, and so on. We are incredibly proud of the 2021 cohort—they are an incredible cadre of emerging journalists and have been published everywhere from the New York Times to Them. Applications for the 2022 cohort will go live in April, and we hope to hear from many more journalists this year. 

The Curve Archive will make the entire run of Curve magazine available to the public in 2022; how has the GLBT Historical Society’s work helped with this project?

The GLBT Historical Society has been an invaluable partner to us in our first year of operations. The archival and development teams have been incredibly gracious, helping us to understand what it really takes to orchestrate and operate a compelling archive. We have a lot of gratitude for the leadership of the society in both setting the standard for efficacy and creating space to teach new partners in the field. It’s a very generous way to steward LGBTQ history, and very much in line with our approach to the work.

Frances “Franco” Stevens founded Curve in 1990. She has served on the board of GLAAD, was a founding board member of the San Francisco LGBT Center, and has worked extensively to promote lesbian visibility and educate media professionals on the lesbian market. Franco is the subject of the documentary Ahead of the Curve (dir. Jen Rainin and Rivkah Beth Medow, 2020).

Jasmine Surdakasa is the executive director of the Curve Foundation. She learned philanthropic practice while serving as the program fellow for the Effective Philanthropy Group at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, exploring equitable methods and power-sharing. Before philanthropy, she served as the senior trainer on behalf of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (GEMS), subject agency of the film Very Young Girls.

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Making Space for Other Voices: An ACT UP Veteran Looks Back

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n honor of World AIDS Day, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s. Mason, whose current project is an art, care and community-expanding network called Queering Dreams that they recently cofounded with Jason Wyman, also worked with the San Francisco AIDS Project as a case worker in the 1990s.

Mason was one of 23 ACT UP veterans who sat for an oral history as part of the GLBT Historical Society’s ACT UP Oral History Project, which was completed last year and is available here. In their oral history, Mason offered their thoughts on the importance of intersectional identity and why ACT UP had limited success integrating those perspectives as an activist organization. We invited Mason to discuss some of the issues they raised in their oral history and reflect on what they learned as an activist of color thirty years ago.

In your oral history, you mention that even from attending your first ACT UP protests, you were living in Washington D.C., before you came to San Francisco, you were interested in how AIDS was affecting poor people, marginalized people and people of color.  

CM: Yes, and in fact shortly after I moved to San Francisco I accidentally wandered into the Castro Sweep [a brutal police crackdown on AIDS activists in the Castro in October 1989] on my way home from work! I was taken by how physical it was. People were really willing to put their bodies, their physical selves, on the line, against police brutality. So right there, you’ve got the intersection of AIDS with policing and incarceration. That interested me, and I started attending ACT UP meetings. And I feel like part of my role during my work with ACT UP was to keep bringing up the fact that HIV was affecting other populations beyond what was commonly seen in the media and understood by the American public, which was largely gay white men.

I remember being in a meeting, trying to reach consensus, and I can’t remember what we were discussing—perhaps homelessness, and one guy got impatient and snapped, “While we’re sitting here discussing this, dozens of people have died.” And I said, “In my community people have been dying all this time—and for a hell of a lot longer.” So there was always that tension. It is true that there were some activists from earlier political movements who had been involved with larger social issues. There were also people who began their ACT UP work with a pretty narrow focus. And there were those who did eventually came to appreciate and align themselves with a larger worldview. But it was always a bit of a struggle.

In your oral history, you really insist on the fact that intersectionality informs priorities and that over time, ACT UP/SF deemphasized these. You mention specifically women and people of color.

CM: I did spend a lot of time on women’s issues, which many of the men were receptive to. AIDS did not affect women the same way, and for a long time that just wasn’t accounted for. Women who clearly had the disease couldn’t get a diagnosis, which meant they couldn’t access Medical, social security, treatment studies, and so on. But ACT UP was not successful in terms of issues that affected people of color and the most marginalized. There was a time, for example, when we focused on universal access to healthcare and health insurance, which would have made treatment more available to marginalized people, such as the homeless, people with mental-health problems, or low-income people. Ultimately when the focus became centered narrowly around “let’s get drugs into bodies,” these larger issues were deprioritized, and it turns out that they weren’t necessarily talking about poor bodies, brown bodies, Black bodies, homeless bodies…

And I really wonder how different things might be if we had centered intersectionality and been more strident about equity issues. Today many white gay people see HIV as a manageable disease, but it is still booming in the Black community. And it’s not just people of color; when I was a case worker at the SF AIDS Foundation, it was poor people and people with drug problems. Having mental-health problems or being homeless would automatically disqualify you from access to treatment and coverage. I’ve realized that over and over—in the women’s suffrage movement or the labor movement and today with voting rights—the notion of “urgency” has ended up deprioritizing marginalized communities. And this is going to keep happening until we create movements where the goal is really to create a better life for the most marginalized, including Black people, transgender folks, incarcerated people and sex workers.

What advice would you have for students, historians and members of the public who are interested in learning about ACT UP and AIDS activism today?

CM: I think that ACT UP in some ways was very successful and remains worth emulating. We were strident, even when we didn’t have social support. We were just one in a long line of movements that were more vilified than celebrated at the time. There’s such a thing as “respectability politics,” and a lot of LGBTQ people were not happy when we were out there protesting during Pride parades. But I’d also say to folks, be willing to look at what fell by the wayside. Yes there is a moral arc of history, and yes, it does bend. But that arc doesn’t bend without us. And when I say “us,” I mean all of us, we have to stop creating movements for change with this addiction to centering whiteness.

Black people and poor people and trans people are still fighting for a place at the table. Those who are at the table can’t speak for those who aren’t. What we can do is make space for other voices. And hand the microphone over from time to time. When we get in certain rooms, we have to demand that other people also get into that room. Not to see ourselves as singular, but realize our connections to the whole.

Photo by William Beverly

 Crystal Mason (they/them) is an activist who recently cofounded “Queering Dreams,” an art, care, and community-expanding network that uses the power of art to envision liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression.

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SF Mayor Unveils Long-Lost 1978 Rainbow Flag & Calls for New Museum

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This photograph shows the priceless queer artifact that the GLBT Historical Society acquired in April: a segment of one of the two original rainbow flags first hoisted in San Francisco on June 25, 1978, for Gay Freedom Day. The flag was created by Gilbert Baker and hand-stitched and dyed with the help of volunteers and friends, including Lynn Segerblom (Faerie Argyle Rainbow), James McNamara, Glenne McElhinney, Joe Duran, Paul Langlotz and others.

The society formally unveiled the flag to the public at a press event in San Francisco on June 4. Mayor London Breed; District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman; State Senator Scott Weiner; GLBT Historical Society Executive Director Terry Beswick; Gilbert Baker Foundation President Charles Beal; GLBT Historical Society Board Member Tina Valentin Aguirre; and Board Chair Maria Powers all made remarks.

Mayor London Breed also announced that she is requesting $12 million in the city budget to establish a new LGBTQ museum in San Francisco.

The flag takes pride of place in our museum, which reopened to the public on June 4. It is the centerpiece of our exhibition about the rainbow flag design’s creator, “Performance, Protest and Poltiics: The Art of Gilbert Baker.”  Click here to learn more about the flag, and click here to reserve tickets to the museum!

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Upcoming Events at San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society Museum

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The Daring Life & Dangerous Times of Eve Adams
Author Talk

Friday, May 21
6:00–7:30 p.m. PDT
Online program
Free | $5 suggested donation
Author, historian and OutHistory.org founder Jonathan Ned Katz will discuss his new book, The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams (Chicago Review Press, 2021) the story of the daring Jewish lesbian activist Eve Adams. Drawing on startling evidence while carefully distinguishing fact from fiction, Katz presents the first biography of Adams. Born into a Jewish family in Poland, Adams emigrated to the United States in 1912 and befriended anarchists, sold radical publications, and ran lesbian-and-gay-friendly speakeasies in Chicago and New York. In 1925 she risked it all to write and publish a book entitled Lesbian Love, presenting brief portraits of two dozen women (Katz’s book also reprints the long-lost-text of Lesbian Love). Adams’s bold activism caught the attention of the young J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI), leading to her surveillance and arrest. In a case that pitted immigration officials, the New York City police, and a biased informer against her, Adams was convicted of publishing an obscene work and of attempting sex with a policewoman deployed to entrap her. Jailed and deported back to Europe, Adams was ultimately murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Register online here.
Let the Record Show:
Author Sarah Schulman in Conversation With Marc Stein

Author Talk

Monday, May 24
6:00–8:00 p.m. PDT
Online program
Free
In this event organized by City Lights Booksellers, author Sarah Schulman will discuss her new book Let the Record Show (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) with Marc Stein, a historian of LGBTQ history at San Francisco State University. Twenty years in the making, Let the Record Show is the most comprehensive political history ever assembled of ACT UP New York and American AIDS activism. Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today’s activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration—and long-overdue reassessment—of the coalition’s inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining with her characteristic rigor and bite how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world. Register online here.
Pride Footage Through the Years

Mighty Reels

Friday, June 4
6:00–7:30 p.m. PDT
Online program
Free | $5 suggested donation
In the first event of our new program series “Mighty Reels,” we’ll be screening a selection of video footage of San Francisco Pride celebrations from years past, drawn from the GLBT Historical Society’s archives. The footage allows us to trace the evolution of Pride over the past half-century, bearing witness to the annual display of joy, performance art, social commentary and community-building. Historian and GLBT Historical Society founding member Gerard Koskovich will lead a conversation interpreting and exploring the clips after the screening. Koskovich was also the co-curator of the society’s 2020 exhibition about the first decade of Pride, Labor of Love: The Birth of San Francisco Pride.
 
Highlighting home movies, drag performances, amateur documentaries, and interviews with queer history-makers, “Mighty Reels” is a quarterly program series that provides an intimate look at the LGBTQ past straight from the camera lens. Each program in the series features a screening of footage from the archives, followed by a discussion with historians, community members and activists on the significance of these images. Register online here.

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A Queer Quinquagenary: 50 Years of Change at the Bay Area Reporter

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A half century is a long time in the history of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, encompassing more change than could have been imagined in the early 1970s. Nowhere is this better reflected than in the archives of the Bay Area Reporter (BAR), “America’s longest continuously published and highest-circulation LGBTQ newspaper,” which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with special coverage, events and a new online exhibition with the GLBT Historical Society. The exhibition, “Stories of Our Movement: The BAR at 50” is made possible by generous support of the Bob Ross Foudation, and will debut on the society’s website on April 26; information is available here.

“Back in 1971, the mainstream media wasn’t really covering gay and lesbian people, much less bi and trans people,” said Cynthia Laird, the BAR’s news editor for the last 22 years, who joined the paper as assistant editor in 1996.

From its first issue, published April 1, 1971, the BAR laid out its independent but unifying mission: “This publication is in no way connected with any organization and will publish the views and thoughts of all groups. This paper will also try to help bridge the communication gap that seems to exist between groups in our own community.”

A RELIABLE WORKHORSE

Surely, this goal is still a work in progress, but over the intervening decades, the Bay Area Reporter became a reliable workhorse of original LGBTQ political and cultural reporting and, like many alternative weeklies around the country, an advocacy paper, influencing elections and helping to advance a civil rights movement that changed the world. Bob Ross, who founded and published the paper until his death in 2003, “had a real keen vision and foresight to see that a newspaper could bring the community together,” said Laird, one of a very few women news editors in LGBTQ media.

As the LGBTQ community and the broader culture have evolved, so has the BAR, said Michael Yamashita, who began working with the paper as an assistant editor in 1989. Now the publisher and perhaps the first LGBTQ Asian man to publish a legacy LGBTQ newspaper, he notes a more inclusive trend in the paper’s coverage and intended audience. “During Bob’s time … the focus really was on the, how would you say it? The power brokers in the gay community, which was really a lot of men,” Yamashita said in a recent interview. “White men who were heading up the agencies and running businesses and attempting to run for office. And increasingly women became part of that, (especially) in terms of the [San Francisco] board of supervisors. And so the focus really did have to enlarge, but I don’t think he would have ever imagined that it would enlarge and change as much as it has in the last, maybe 10 years.”

In 2018, with funding from the Bob Ross Foundation, the GLBT Historical Society completed a project to digitize the entire run of the BAR, from 1971 to 2005, when the paper went online. Since then, the key-word searchable version at the California Digital Newspaper Collection has proven a treasure trove for historians, and provides ample evidence of the breadth and depth of the BAR’s coverage. Laird notes in particular the paper’s reporting on HIV/AIDS, and now COVID, which continues to be critically important to the community’s survival. Nowadays, of course, LGBTQ issues are frequently covered in print and online outlets serving the general public, a fact Yamashita acknowledges, but he thinks there is still a clear need for the LGBTQ press. “I mean, [the mainstream press] just doesn’t have the bandwidth. They don’t have enough people to cover all the subjects that they should be covering and so one of the first things to go are minority and LGBTQ in any kind of reporting.”

EXPANDING THE FOCUS

“The BAR still plays an extremely critical role because we do publish stories that you won’t really find anywhere else. A lot of our content is original. Or if it’s something that everyone else is covering like a major event or major news or something, we will often speak to other voices that the mainstream media don’t speak to,” said Laird. “I think you see that especially in transgender coverage today, and trans women of color in particular. What I’ve tried to do in my story assignments in our coverage is really focus on other communities within the LGBT umbrella.”

Both Laird and Yamashita also spoke of their efforts to be more fully representative of all races and classes within the LGBTQ community. “After the George Floyd killing and all the Black Lives Matter actions and activity,” said Laird, “we’ve worked hard to feature people of color, queer people of color, in our stories, and photos of queer people of color with our stories even before that. But I have been really more aware of it in that context.”

Like many community newspapers and businesses, the BAR faces many challenges, particularly in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Last year, the paper was forced to lay off two long-time employees as print advertising revenue plummeted and online advertising has not made up the difference, despite an increase in online traffic. But Laird and Yamashita expressed confidence that, with the community’s support, the BAR will persevere. “Part of survival, I think, is paying attention to meeting your readers where they are and giving them what they want. So we’ve tried to stay away from sensational, quick clickbait things which work, but we’re hoping to cultivate a more consistent and loyal readership, “said Yamashita. “We hope to provide a steady diet of the kind of news coverage that local people here are looking for.”

Regardless of what comes next, 50 years — or some 2,600 weeks — of writing the first draft of LGBTQ history is an extraordinary contribution . “It’s really amazing,” commented Laird on the BAR’s quinquagenary. “It’s really a milestone and I’m really proud of the paper. I’m proud of everyone that’s contributed to it over the years to make it this great resource. I think the Bay Area is really lucky to have it.”

Terry Beswick 2020 (new).jpg

Terry Beswick is the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society. He spearheaded a successful campaign to preserve the Castro Country Club for the queer recovery community in San Francisco, co-founded the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District and co-chaired the LGBTQ Cultural Heritage Strategy.

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Landmarking A Historic Lesbian Space in SF

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The LGBTQ community lost a pioneer in April, when LGBTQ activist Phyllis Lyon (1924–2020) passed away at her house in San Francisco. Together with her partner and later wife of over 50 years, Del Martin (1921–2008), Lyon cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, the first lesbian-rights organization in the United States. Just a few months after Lyon’s death, the Noe Valley house that Lyon and Martin shared for over five decades was sold and is now threatened with demolition. Community members are organizing to attempt to save this historic structure from erasure, establishing the group Friends of the Lyon-Martin House, for which the GLBT Historical Society, whose archives hold Lyon and Martin’s papers, is serving as fiscal sponsor. On October 19, District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman initiated the process to name the Lyon-Martin House a San Francisco Landmark. With Mayor London Breed’s approval on October 30, the nomination moves to the San Francisco Planning Department and from there to the Historic Preservation Commission. Success in naming the house a landmark will require major support from the LGBTQ community during the series of hearings that accompany the landmarking process. History Happens interviewed architectural historian and preservation planner Shayne Watson, who is spearheading the preservation efforts with Friends of the Lyon-Martin House. 

Why is it important to preserve the Lyon-Martin house as a queer historic space in San Francisco? 

Connecting our history to the physical places where that history unfolded makes the stories really come to life. Imagine trying to convey the significance of Stonewall without the actual Stonewall Inn, or the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot without that now-iconic building at the corner of Turk and Taylor. A bronze sidewalk plaque just doesn’t cut it. The Lyon-Martin House is a landmark with or without formal designation. Just as Americans claim Independence Hall as a birthplace of American democracy, queer people throughout the world can claim the Lyon-Martin House as a place instrumental in the development and advancement of our fundamental rights — it’s part of our collective experience. 

With our Executive Director Terry Beswick, you served as the co-chair of the Arts, Culture and Heritage Committee for the LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage Strategy, which went to the Board of Supervisors last year. Does it provide guidance on saving sites such as the Lyon-Martin House?  

The LGBTQ+ Cultural Heritage Strategy was published in 2020 after three years of engagement with LGBTQ communities in San Francisco. Feedback from queer San Franciscans was clear: as current stewards of our history, we have a responsibility to ensure that San Francisco’s LGBTQ heritage — in all its colorful diversity — is preserved for future generations to experience and celebrate. Our committee developed actions to realize this goal, including the development of a Historic Preservation Advocacy Group composed of experts in the areas of LGBTQ history, historic preservation and related fields. A primary goal of this group would be to fulfill the recommendations outlined in the Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History, adopted by the Historic Preservation Commission in 2015, which serves as a guide for the treatment of historic properties associated with LGBTQ history. One of the first recommendations is to landmark sites of significance. 

If the Board of Supervisors designates the Lyon-Martin House as a landmark, what protections does this status offer? 

The current reality is that the Lyon-Martin House is private property and the new owners have a right to propose demolition. But if the Lyon-Martin House is designated a San Francisco Landmark, any proposed project that would result in demolition or substantive alterations to the building would need to be reviewed and approved by the Historic Preservation Commission at a public hearing. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the person at the hearing trying to demolish or muck up the longtime home of one of the most significant lesbian couples in history. Those who are interested in supporting our efforts to preserve this historic building can join the Friends of Lyon-Martin House by signing the letter of support. And participate in the webinar on January 19 (check the Friends website for information) on the future of the house cohosted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the California Preservation Foundation, and the GLBT Historical Society. Finally, you can write a letter or speak in support when the Lyon-Martin House Landmark designation is heard by the Historic Preservation Commission (in late February) and the Board of Supervisors (TBD).

Mark Sawchuk is communications manager at the GLBT Historical Society.
Shayne Watson is the owner of Watson Heritage Consulting, a Bay Area-based consultancy for architectural history and historic preservation planning.

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Action = Life: New Oral History Collection Documents Work of ACT UP in San Francisco

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The San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project at the GLBT Historical Society collects and documents the unique and diverse history of Bay Area direct-action movements that protested social and governmental inaction in the face of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s. 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 were part of a nationwide ACT UP movement that would go on to change the very practice of medicine and speed up the transformation of cultural attitudes about gender and sexuality.

After four years of efforts, I am pleased to share that the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project has been completed in time for World AIDS Day this December 1. Composed of interviews with 23 Bay Area activists, this new collection in the society’s Oral History Collection is among the most extensive histories of local AIDS activism in the United States. The interviews, available here, paint a communal portrait of the unique challenges, debates and triumphs of this remarkable movement. 

Determined Activism

Historian Joey Plaster launched the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project to document the determination and kinds of activism that had defined queer politics during the AIDS crisis. While the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP/New York had already been documented in films such as How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, the history of the Bay Area’s response to the epidemic had received relatively little attention until the publication of Emily Hobson’s Lavender and Red. In her monograph, Hobson argues that Bay Area activists were the first to confront the epidemic using direct-action tactics — even before Larry Kramer gave the speech that is often regarded as the catalyst for ACT UP in New York.  

The San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project provides new information and context to ACT UP’s work in the Bay Area. Plaster’s conversation with Jack Davis is a prime example. Davis planned the “Blood and Money” ritual protest that Enola Gay performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1984, during which protestors poured blood on the road at the entrance to the nuclear-weapons laboratory to decry government research priorities emphasizing weaponry over AIDS research. Most accounts suggest that the blood was fake, but Jack clarifies — the blood was real. It was his own. “This was also the period when we didn’t know — we knew that AIDS was transmitted by body fluids, so this blood was dangerous,” Davis explains. “And most of the people watching us knew that as well.”  It has been an honor to play a part in bringing these interviews to the public. I want to thank Joey for getting the project off the ground, the volunteers who supported this work over the years, and the interviewees. But the lion’s share of my thanks must go to all those activists who have fought and continue to fight the battle against AIDS.  

Eric Sneathe

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This Month at the SF GLBT Historical Society

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FundraiserThe Edge Cares: A Benefit for the GLBT Historical Society
Tuesday, February 188:00–11:00 p.m.The Edge4149 18th St., San FranciscoFree The Edge is a longstanding bar in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro district, right down the street from the GLBT Historical Society Museum. With a long history of supporting local charities and bringing communities together, the Edge has recently established the Edge Cares, a weekly initiative that earmarks a percentage of Tuesday night proceeds to local LGBTQ nonprofits. The GLBT Historical Society is honored to have been selected as the Edge’s beneficiary on February 18. Join us for an evening of throwback music videos, vintage 1990s hits and two-for-one drinks.
Panel Discussion“The Rainbow Did That”: Remembering Gilbert Baker
Thursday, February 207:00–9:00 p.m.The GLBT Historical Society Museum4127 18th St., San Francisco$5 | Free for members A panel of contemporaries and friends of the late Gilbert Baker, the creator of the iconic rainbow flag, will discuss Baker’s artistic output, activism and legacy. Panelists will include activist Charley Beal, the manager of the Gilbert Baker Estate; Baker’s friend Vincent Guzzone; community activist Ken Jones; and Cass Brayton, better known as Sister Mary Media, a longtime member of the LGBTQ activist and fundraising group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Swapping stories, spilling secrets and sharing memories, the speakers will recall the life and times of a complex and deeply passionate man. This program is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Performance, Protest and Politics: The Art of Gilbert Baker,” on display at the GLBT Historical Society Museum through April 5. Tickets are available online here.
Book LaunchFollowing Lou: Searching the Archives for Our Queer Past
Thursday, February 277:00–9:00 p.m.The GLBT Historical Society Museum4127 18th St., San Francisco$5 | Free for members Louis Sullivan (1951–1991) was a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society and a transgender gay man whose pioneering activism on behalf of trans men in the 1970s and 1980s helped shape the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity. The society’s archives hold Sullivan’s extensive diaries, written between the 1960s and the 1990s, which chronicle his coming of age, coming-out as a gay trans man and work as a historian. Researcher Ellis Martin and poet and artist Zach Ozma have compiled selections from the diaries into a new book, We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan (Nightboat Books, 2019). In this discussion, Martin, Ozma and the society’s reference archivist, Isaac Fellman, will read excerpts from Sullivan’s diaries and will discuss the complex issues involved in queer historical storytelling. Copies of We Both Laughed in Pleasure will be available for purchase and signing. Tickets are available online here.
Community EventA March to Remember & Reclaim Queer Space
Saturday, February 292:00–4:00 p.m.Harvey Milk PlazaMarket and Castro Streets, San FranciscoFree A group of LGBTQ leaders, neighborhood organizations, activists and community members will gather at Harvey Milk Plaza and march through the Castro district, laying black wreaths at the sites of former queer spaces in this historic LGBTQ neighborhood. Join drag queen Juanita MORE!, activists Ken Jones and Cleve Jones, and San Francisco District Eight Supervisor Rafael Mandelman at this event cohosted by the GLBT Historical Society, the San Francisco LGBT Center and the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District. Participants will call on elected officials, foundations and philanthropists, as well as residents and lovers of San Francisco, to both commemorate the city’s LGBTQ past and take active steps to sustain the city’s living queer heritage and culture.
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