From leather bars to a vibrant drag scene, there's a documentary that will tell you all about gay life in 1960s San Francisco.
From 1965 to 1970, Jonathan Raymond, a gay filmmaker who lived in San Francisco, created a documentary titled Gay San Francisco. In this film, which was made over 50 years ago, he documented LGBTQ+ life in the city, capturing stories from the nightlife, filming bars, events, and other important venues for the community.
Raymond interviewed drag queens, trans women, gay men and lesbians about their time in San Francisco. The result was an hour-long documentary that is free to watch through the Internet Archive, and California Revealed, which both split the film into two different videos.
The documentary was never screened in its entirety and was thought to be lost for decades, until filmmakers Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman stumbled upon it while working on their own award-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot At Compton’s Cafeteria.
Then, in 2017, the Tenderloin Museum and the California Preservation Program restored the footage and edited it into a full film.