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

"Our Vast Queer Past" offers a kaleidoscopic view of queer experience in San Francisco and the Bay Area, raising new questions about familiar gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender histories and evoking previously untold stories that speak eloquently about our diversity.

The exhibition doesn’t form a single narrative; our history is too varied and unruly to be limited in that way. Instead, it brings 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
• Faith: Inside/Outside/Against
• 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
• Bois Burk: Under Surveillance
• Premarital Bonds: Creating Family Before Marriage Equality
• Out of the Closets & Into the Streets
• Military Matters: Divergent Duties
• Bearing the Scars: Violence & Trauma
• HIV/AIDS: Grief, Solidarity, Determination

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 dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University.

FRONT GALLERY

“Migrating Archives” features archives from nine countries, including Belgium (left), South Africa (upper right) and Italy (lower right).

Migrating Archives: LGBT Delegates
From Collections Around the World

Conceived by E. G. Crichton, artist-in-residence at the GLBT Historical Society, “Migrating Archives” includes poignant and evocative archival material from collections in Australia, Belgium, England, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Scotland, South Africa and the United States.

Each participating organization provided photographs of artifacts that portray the experiences of one or two queer individuals from the past. Graphic banners and videos bring the images together to tell vivid stories of both LGBT lives and the archival collections that honor them.

“My idea is to put materials that are precious to each collection into motion as they become guests and hosts, sometimes crossing national borders more easily than individuals can,” notes Crichton. “For people whose traces are so often erased even by our biological families, omitted from official histories, or just lost, archives are a way of creating our own lineage. ‘Migrating Archives’ is designed to both demonstrate and inspire this vital process of historical self-creation.”

Read an interview with the curator here. For more information about the participating archives, click on the links below.

Corner Gallery

The Corner Gallery space features regularly changing shows displayed for one to four months. These small, focused exhibits often are mounted in conjunction with programs at the museum and frequently mark the anniversary of an organization or event that has played a significant role in the history of the GLBT community in Northern California.

Running through May 31: "Legendary: African American GLBT Past Meets Present,” a multimedia mosaic of words, images and sounds that connect inspirational commentary by local queer community leaders with historic artifacts reflecting themes of art, belonging, justice and sexuality.

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.