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. For
the latest news on all our activities, sign up for our monthly e-mail
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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

Great Collections From the
GLBT Historical Society Archives

Often referred to as the "queer Smithsonian," the GLBT Historical Society maintains one of the largest archives of GLBT historical materials anywhere in the world. This exhibition offers an introduction to the collections by displaying examples from a number of classes of materials the society has gathered during its first quarter-century. The exhibition also highlights the history of the institution itself, the ways in which researchers have used its archives, and their meaning for GLBT people and for society as a whole.

Personal belongings of Harvey Milk on display in the "Great Collections" exhibition.

CURATOR
Paul Boneberg, executive director, GLBT Historical Society.

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.