LGBTQ culture in San Francisco

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community in San Francisco is one of the largest and most prominent LGBT communities in the United States, and is one of the most important in the history of American LGBTQ rights and activism alongside New York City. The city itself has been described as "the original 'gay-friendly city'". LGBTQ culture is also active within companies that are based in Silicon Valley, which is located within the southern San Francisco Bay Area.

History

19th century

San Francisco's LGBTQ culture has its roots in the city's own origin as a frontier town, what San Francisco State University professor Alamilla Boyd characterized as "San Francisco's history of sexual permissiveness and its function as a wide-open town – a town where anything goes". The discovery of gold saw a boom in population from 800 to 35,000 residents between 1848 and 1850. These migrants were composed of miners and fortune seekers from a variety of nationalities and cultures, over 95% of whom were young men.

These transient and diverse populations thrust into a relatively anarchic environment were less likely to conform to social conventions. For example, with an unbalanced gender ratio, men often assumed roles conventionally assigned to women in social and domestic settings. Cross-gender dress and same-sex dancing were prevalent at city masquerade balls where some men assumed the traditional role of women going so far as to wear female attire. In her study "Arresting dress, cross-dressing in 19th-century San Francisco", Clare Sears also describes numerous cases of women who donned men's clothing in public spaces for increased social and economic freedom, safety, and gender-progressive experimentation.