About the GLBT History Museum

Located in San Francisco's Castro District, the GLBT History Museum is the first full-scale, stand-alone museum of its kind in the United States. The museum celebrates 100 years of the city's vast queer past through dynamic and surprising exhibitions and programming. To support the museum by becoming a member or donor, click here.

MAIN GALLERY

Our Vast Queer Past:
Celebrating San Francisco's GLBT History

To honor the GLBT Historical Society's 25th anniversary, the curators of "Our Vast Queer Past" burrowed into every corner of the society's extraordinary archives. To spark the topics for the show, we picked an inspirational object from virtually every year the society has been acquiring collections. Our objectives: raising new questions about familiar gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender stories and evoking largely untold stories that speak eloquently about our diversity.

The resulting exhibition offers a kaleidoscopic view of nearly a century of queer experience in San Francisco and the Bay Area. It does not form a single narrative; our history is too varied and unruly to be limited in that way. Instead, we bring together multiple stories, sometimes interlinking, sometimes isolated, sometimes in conflict.

All of them reflect deeply human themes: the search for companionship and pleasure; the struggle for self-determination and respect in an often-hostile society; the value of individual and collective expression; and the spirit, ingenuity and wit that have been keys to our survival

The exhibition is divided into the following thematic and biographical sections:

• Finding Our Hidden Histories
• Consuming Queers: The GLBT Marketplace
• The Strategy of Equality
• Body Politics: Questioning the Ideal
• Adrienne Fuzee: Queer Arts Visionary
• Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon: Progressive Pioneers
• Drag: Fashioning Our Existence
• On the Margin: Queers & Poverty
• Queers of Color Organizing
• Lou Sullivan: A Life Transformed
• Jiro Onuma: Undocumented/Documented
• Bar Life: Going Out
• Bathhouses: Coming Together or Waiting Outside?
• Lesbian Sex Wars
• Leather: Dark Desires, Public Pleasures
• Erotica: Drawn Out
• Sex Toys: Implementing Erotic Expression
• Out of the Closets & Into the Streets
• Military Matters: Divergent Duties
• Bois Burk: Under Surveillance
• Bearing the Scars: Violence & Trauma
• HIV/AIDS: Grief, Solidarity, Determination
• Tales of Our City

CURATORS

Gerard Koskovich, independent scholar, editor and antiquarian book dealer; founding member of the GLBT Historical Society.

Don Romesburg, assistant professor of women's and gender studies at Sonoma State University, Sonoma, Calif.

Amy Sueyoshi, associate professor of race and resistance studies and sexuality studies at San Francisco State University.

FRONT GALLERY

Life and Death in Black and White:
AIDS Direct Action in San Francisco
1985-1990

“Life and Death in Black and White” focuses on the work of five queer photographers who documented the emergence of militant AIDS activism in San Francisco through the medium of black-and-white film. With sharp focus and deep compassion, they turned their lenses on their own community, capturing sorrow and outrage, courage and wit, a fierce will to live and a deep commitment to honor the dying and remember the dead.

“No More Words, We Want Action”; Closing Session of the Sixth International Conference on AIDS, San Francisco, June 24, 1990.
Photograph by Patrick Clifton (reproduced with permission)

The featured photographers are Jane Philomen Cleland, Patrick Clifton, Marc Geller, Rick Gerharter and Daniel Nicoletta. Some of their images of AIDS activism have become iconic; others have never before been publicly displayed. All of them portray civil disobedience as a response to discrimination, indifference and official neglect in the face of a fatal epidemic. All bear forceful witness to a time when San Francisco experienced both some of its darkest hours and one of its most inspiring movements for
social justice.

"Life and Death and Black and White" has received rave reviews from the national and local media. The Huffington Post notes that "the exhibition highlights the pain, the rage and the bravery involved in the fight for AIDS awareness. The crisp and clean black and white photos bring a feeling of control and simplicity to a time of chaos, when an unnamed disease targeted half of the city's gay men and government agencies seemed incapable of listening." The Bay Area Reporter calls the show "a concise, laser-focused
exhibition” that “distills the tenor of those times.”

The exhibition runs from March 4 through July 1, 2012. A cellphone audio tour of the exhibition with lead curator Gerard Koskovich is included with admission to the museum. For more information on the show and the featured photographers, click here.

Mini-Exhibits

The front gallery of the museum also features regularly changing mini-exhibits displayed for two weeks to one month. Consisting of a single display case, these exhibits are mounted in conjunction with programs at the museum and often mark the anniversary of an organization or event that has played a significant role in the history of the GLBT community in San Francisco and Northern California.

Online Exhibitions

The GLBT Historical Society and The GLBT History Museum have mounted or sponsored several exhibitions available for viewing on an ongoing basis on the Web:

Passionate Struggle: Dynamics of San Francisco's GLBT History. An overview of the exhibition at our pop-up museum in 2008–2009. Tracing elements of our communities’ affinities and differences, the show took visitors from the bedrooms and back rooms to the bookstores and bars, from Harvey Milk’s victories to transgender sex workers’ riots, from social movements to secret fantasies. View here.

Lineage: Matchmaking in the Archives. GLBT Historical Society artist-in-residence E. G. Crichton has been matching living artists to the archives of the dead, asking each artist to invent a response in any medium. To see all work created so far, visit the Queer Cultural Center online gallery.

Dykes on Bikes: 30 Years at the Forefront. Cocurator Glenne McElhinney leads a fast and informative video tour of exhibition shown at the GLBT Historical Society in 2008. Watch it now.

OutRanks: GLBT Military Service From World War II to the Iraq War. An overview of the 2007 exhibition created by guest curator Steve Estes — the first museum show in the U.S. to focus on the experience of GLBT servicemembers and the American military policy on homosexuality. View here.

Capturing the Moment: The Photojournalism of Rick Gerharter. View the inaugural exhibit on our Flickr site: “Capturing the Moment: The Photojournalism of Rick Gerharter,” an encore version of a gallery exhibition shown at the GLBT Historical Society in 2006. View here.

Council on Religion and the Homosexual. The LGBT Religious Archives Network and the GLBT Historical Society present this special exhibit, which portrays the early years of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, a ground-breaking coalition of religious and homosexual activists in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. View here.