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.
History
19th century
San Francisco's LGBT culture has its roots in the city's own origin as a frontier town, what San Francisco State University professor Alamilla Boyd characterized as "San Francisco's history of sexual permissiveness and its function as a wide-open town – a town where anything goes". The discovery of gold saw a boom in population from 800 to 35,000 residents between 1848 and 1850. These migrants were composed of miners and fortune seekers from a variety of nationalities and cultures, over 95% of whom were young men.
These transient and diverse populations thrust into a relatively anarchic environment were less likely to conform to social conventions. For example, with an unbalanced gender ratio, men often assumed roles conventionally assigned to women in social and domestic settings. Cross-gender dress and same-sex dancing were prevalent at city masquerade balls where some men assumed the traditional role of women going so far as to wear female attire. In her study "Arresting dress, cross-dressing in 19th-century San Francisco", Clare Sears also describes numerous cases of women who donned men's clothing in public spaces for increased social and economic freedom, safety, and gender-progressive experimentation. Cross-dressing is still an important part of LGBT culture in the city today.
The late 1800s saw a shift in the demographics of the city along with new social and political attitudes. Anti-vice campaigns emerged to target prostitution along with the criminalization of perceived gender transgressions including outlawing cross-dressing in 1863. Cross-dressing laws and public decency laws continued to influence LGBT culture and its interactions with law enforcement well into the 20th century. This political shift resulted in San Francisco's queer culture reemerging in bars, nightclubs, and entertainment of the Barbary Coast, removed from policing and control. Through the 1890s to 1907, the Barbary Coast, San Francisco's early red-light district located on Pacific Avenue, featured same-sex prostitution and female impersonators who served male clientele.
20th century
Through WWII - in the shadows
Michael Stabile of Out stated that the first "notorious" gay bar in San Francisco was The Dash, which opened in 1908. During World War I, the U.S. Navy began the "Blue discharge" practice, which discharged known homosexuals in port cities, helping to create a community of identified (blue discharge was not confidential) gays in San Francisco. The San Francisco LGBT community first fully formed in the 1920s and 1930s. The most prominent LGBT area then was North Beach. Mona's, San Francisco's first lesbian bar, opened on Union Street in 1934, and featured cross-dressing waitresses as well as entertainer Gladys Bentley. Nightclubs with drag shows drew both gay and straight audiences.
During World War II, US military started to systematically identify and exclude homosexuals, and those discharged on the Pacific theater ended up in the West Coast ports, mostly in the principal Pacific troop transport port of Fort Mason. Gay night life in San Francisco also went through several waves of crackdown and reorganization. From 1942 to 1943, the San Francisco Moral Drive—consisting of military patrols—carried out a series of raids targeting the gay bars in San Francisco, with the stated aim of protecting servicemen from homosexuals. Chinatown, as one of places where gay visitors gathered, had also been searched several times. For example, In 1943, the police raided the gay bar, Rickshaw in Chinatown, and arrested 24 patrons and two dozen customers, including a couple of lesbians who tried to fight back and triggered a small riot.
Todd J. Ormsbee, an American studies professor at San Jose State University who wrote The Meaning of Gay: Interaction, Publicity, and Community among Homosexual Men in 1960s San Francisco, stated that a "somewhat more open gay male culture" appeared in San Francisco due to the city's "relative safety" compared to other American cities and due to a "permissiveness" in the city's culture.