![]() By the mid-late 60s “the queer communities that had evolved through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s had acquired both the ability to negotiate directly with police, civic leaders, and lawmakers and the ability to work together as a coherent social and political constituency” (Boyd, 6). Yet Stonewall “did not function as a mobilizing factor in San Francisco’s queer social history…In fact, many of the demands articulated through the Stonewall Riots had already been addressed in San Francisco by 1965” (Boyd, 10). ![]() The popular narrative places the 1969 Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village, NYC at the start of the modern gay rights movement. Within this fraught climate, queer culture emerged in the San Francisco of the mid-twentieth century, particularly in its bars, taverns, and nightclubs. Ironically, though, news of these crackdowns often brought even more notoriety to San Francisco’s tendency towards licentiousness, become an integral part of its appeal to tourists. At the same time, the history of San Francisco is also a story of repeated anti-vice campaigns and crackdowns against this tendency. Lying out on the edge of the North American continent, in many ways the city has embraced this image throughout its roughly 200-year existence. San Francisco has a long history as a “wide open town,” a place where anything goes.
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