5 Historic San Francisco Gay Bars We Wish Still Existed

For a lot of us in the Bay Area, where to party for Pride is an annual debate. As we sit down this year to figure out where to dance the weekend away, let’s take a moment to remember the San Francisco gay bars of yore — the foundations on which our current venues were built, and the places that went to battle with the city so future generations wouldn’t have to.

Here are five of the most crucial.

Sailor Boy Tavern

One of the first leather bars in San Francisco, this joint at 24 Howard St. stayed open between 1936 and 1953, though its ownership changed hands in 1938. In its earliest days, the tavern garnered a reputation for entertaining naval men who were on leave and looking for a good (and very gay!) time in San Francisco. Later, it was also frequented by residents of the nearby Army Navy YMCA on Steuart St. — a hotbed of gay socializing.

In Justin Spring’s Secret Historian, The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Sexual Renegade, Steward’s diary describes the scene at the time. “Saw a fantastic thing down by the piers,” he wrote. “Two sailors standing watch for passersby while a third went down on a fourth.”

Pier 16 was demolished in the early 1970s and today, there’s no sign of the building that once housed Sailor Boy. Its influence and spirit, however, live on in SoMa, with the plethora of leather bars that followed Sailor Boy’s lead.

The Silver Rail

By the time the Silver Rail opened on June 18, 1941, the area around 974 Market St. was, on a nightly basis, awash with gay men looking to party. The cruising and hustling that had been happening in the streets for at least a decade started moving inside when the first gay bars — the College Inn and the Pirates’ Cave —arrived in 1933 with the end of prohibition.

Despite being a relative latecomer to the downtown gay scene (which was nicknamed “the Meat Rack,” incidentally), the Silver Rail was a notorious dive from day one. It was a far cry from how one newspaper ad described the bar right before it first opened, claiming that the Silver Rail would “add new lustre to the town’s old traditions of the finest in foods, drinks and merriment … and a sparkling atmosphere to match.”

What the Silver Rail actually excelled at was providing a dark, fun place for men to pick each other up. Handily, it was also designed specifically to try and keep them safe from police intervention — the bar had entry doors on both Market and Turk to give customers escape routes in the event of a raid.

In 1949, the Silver Rail was officially classed by local authorities as a “disorderly premises.” At that point, one of the bar’s three owners, Louis E. Wolcher, filed for dissolution of partnership because his partners, Sidney Wolfe and Jack Rushin, were allowing “unlawful practices to be indulged in on the premises to such an extent that the military and naval authorities have denounced the manner in which the business was conducted.”

Every time legal action was taken against the Silver Rail, “venereal disease” was mentioned as the reason for the clampdown — but the bar had all sorts of other problems. In 1950, the Silver Rail burned down, causing $35,000 worth of damage (almost $400,000 in 2023 money). In 1952, a man named Jimmie Tarantino successfully extorted money from the bar manager in exchange for not reporting the rampant homosexual activity taking place in the joint. In 1953, it was raided at 3:30 a.m. and 14 people were arrested. (Bartender Charles Smith was charged with selling liquor to a minor, 10 customers were taken in on charges relating to drunkenness, and three others were taken in for apparent draft card violation.)

That was the same year the Silver Rail finally went out of business. But boy, oh boy, what glorious, hedonistic chaos it brought to the city in its time here.

Fe-Be’s Bar

Folsom St.’s first-ever leather bar opened on July 26, 1966, courtesy of owners Don Geist and John Kissinger, a couple who had met while serving in the Navy in the 1940s. The city would come to realize that, in many ways, Geist and Kissinger were nightlife visionaries.

First, the duo garnered a faithful crowd by frequenting biker gang meetings and handing out free drink tickets. Second, Geist and Kissinger were consistently involved with the Imperial Council of San Francisco — the oldest LGBTQ+ non-profit in the world — thereby making themselves part of the wider community. (The couple is also said to have donated a lot of money to charity.) Third, the couple incorporated A Taste of Leather into Fe-Be’s — an on-site fetish store, run by a man named Nick O’Demus, that was situated upstairs from the bar. There, patrons could fulfill all their leather- and poppers-related needs on the spot. Fourth, Geist and Kissinger started “Mr. Fe-Be’s” — an annual leather daddy contest that brought in crowds of non-regulars.

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for authorities to start surveilling goings on at Fe-Be’s. Starting in 1967, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) held multiple meetings about the activities of staff and patrons at Fe-Be’s. In 1969, the ABC accused the bar of “behavior contrary to public morals,” including close physical contact amongst men, below the waist. At another hearing, when accused of having sex toys on the premises, Geist (somewhat comedically) claimed that they were merely being used as novelty drink stirrers.

In 1970, when the bar was closed down for a year, the community that Geist and Kissinger had so lovingly built rallied around Fe-Be’s, with fellow venues holding fundraisers and offering vocal support. In December 1971, the bar roared back to life and stayed put until 1986. In the end, it wasn’t legal scrutiny that put an end to Fe-Be’s; it was the toll of the AIDs epidemic on San Francisco’s gay community. Kissinger died in 1988, Geist in 1998.

Fe-Be’s lives on today via the Leather David. When Geist and Kissinger first opened the bar, they hired artist Mike Caffee to make them a version of Michaelangelo’s famous sculpture, transformed into a gay biker. Caffee’s vision went on to adorn a range of merch. When Fe-Be’s closed down and the Paradise Lounge moved in, Leather David stayed behind. Versions of Caffee’s kitsch masterpiece sit in bars today as far away as Melbourne, Australia.

Black Cat Café

Once described by Allen Ginsberg as the “greatest gay bar in America,” the Black Cat Café started life in 1933 as a hangout for bohemians, just doors away from where the Transamerica Pyramid currently stands.

In the early ’40s, when the venue was taken over by Sol Stouman, the Black Cat began fearlessly embracing all things gay. Stouman was a straight man but, having survived the Holocaust, knew the importance of safe spaces. That was something the already subversive crowd in the bar wholeheartedly embraced. Ginsberg once commented: “It was totally open … Everybody went there, heterosexual and homosexual … All the gay screaming queens would come, the heterosexual gray flannel suit types, longshoremen. All the poets went there.”

No one was under any illusions about the ethos of the Black Cat and those that frequented it. Legendary LGBTQ+ rights activist José Sarria regularly performed in drag there in his younger years, having started out as a Black Cat waiter. Sarria was fond of belting out a rendition of “God Save the Queen” with revised lyrics — he sang “God save us nellie queens” instead. He also performed a version of the opera Carmen, in which he outran pursuing cops.

Like the Silver Rail, the Black Cat was subject to major legal scrutiny starting in the late 1940s, and was labeled “disorderly.” When Stouman had his liquor license indefinitely revoked in 1949 because “persons of known homosexual tendencies patronized said premises and used said premises as a meeting place,” Stouman fought back — all the way to California’s Supreme Court. And in 1951, he won.

The court concluded:

A number of people were arrested [at the Black Cat], some for vagrancy and some because they ‘demonstrated homosexual actions,’ but there was no showing that any of those arrested were convicted. There was no evidence of any illegal or immoral conduct on the premises … The patronage of a public restaurant and bar by homosexuals … without proof of the commission of illegal or immoral acts on the premises … is not sufficient to show a violation.

The Black Cat Café stayed in operation for another decade, though harassment by local police remained a problem for the venue for the rest of its days.

The Gangway

If ever there was a gay bar that should have lived forever, it’s the Gangway, first founded in 1910. What was, until 2018, San Francisco’s oldest continuously surviving gay bar had made it through Prohibition, anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and the AIDs crisis — an astonishing run that ended unceremoniously after a simple liquor license transfer.

The nautical bar at 841 Larkin St. made it through an entire century by being both a magnificent Tenderloin watering hole, a wedding venue before marriage equality was the law and an LGBTQ+ museum. (The bar was equipped with a history wall, historic gay ephemera and an entryway that paid tribute to 1969’s Friday of the Purple Hand protest.)

Beyond that, the Gangway also acted as a sort of community center. Starting in the 1970s, it consistently raised money for LGBTQ+ charities, whether through auctions, a charitable bar crawl known as Bar Wars, or other means. The Gangway kept itself concerned with giving back to both its own community and those that lived around the venue. (During Thanksgiving 1977, the bar gave cash and turkeys to local seniors in need.)

No wonder Harvey Milk was a regular.