Special Tour: Tenderloin LGBTQ History

This Event is Made Possible in Part Through the Generous Partnership of the Tenderloin Museum

San Francisco is internationally recognized as a magnet and place of pilgrimage for LGBTQ people and a critical proving ground for advancements in queer culture, politics, and civil rights. The city has also pioneered efforts to identify, document, and preserve LGBTQ historic sites. In November 2015, the City of San Francisco adopted a citywide historic context statement for LGBTQ history—the most comprehensive research yet conducted on LGBTQ historic sites in an American city. One of the most important and complex chapters in San Francisco’s LGBTQ history unfolded in the Tenderloin—a neighborhood rife with properties that tell the story of nearly 80 years of police oppression, community development, activism, and civil rights. Highlights of the Tenderloin LGBTQ history tour include: Glide Memorial Methodist Church, one of the first churches in the country to support LGBTQ rights; Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, one of the few remaining LGBTQ bars in the neighborhood; the Club Turkish Baths, one of the city’s first exclusively gay bathhouses; and Compton’s Cafeteria, the site of a 1966 riot against police oppression—three years before New York’s Stonewall uprising. We will meet at the Tenderloin Museum and take some time to view the exhibits.

Tour Leader

Shayne Watson is an architectural historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She began specializing in LGBTQ heritage preservation with the completion of her graduate thesis for the University of Southern California in 2009, which developed a preservation plan for San Francisco's post-Prohibition lesbian community in North Beach. In 2013, Shayne, along with public historian Donna Graves, was awarded a grant from the City of San Francisco to author the Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History in San Francisco. In June 2014, she participated in the National Park Service's LGBTQ Heritage Initiative Roundtable in Washington, DC. Shayne is the co-author of the San Francisco chapter of the National Park Service's LGBTQ Theme Study, published in October 2016. Shayne is a founding board member of the Rainbow Heritage Network, a national organization for the recognition and preservation of LGBTQ sites and heritage. She has presented on LGBTQ heritage preservation at conferences hosted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, California Preservation Foundation, American Planning Association, and San Francisco Heritage.

Posted in: Tours & Special Events