Indecent·SF

I. Sally Rand (1904 — 1979)

Also known as: Helen Gould Beck of Missouri. The Feathered Fan. Proprietress of the Music Box. Owner of the Sally Rand Nude Ranch on Treasure Island.

“The Rand is quicker than the eye.”

She gained her reputation at Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair. In a single day she was arrested four times for a Lady Godiva act performed on horseback, a stunt staged to draw crowds to her Sally Rand Nude Ranch concession at the fair. The charges were eventually dropped. The authorities could not actually prove that she had been nude. Her act grossed six thousand dollars a week in the depths of the Depression, and the fan dance, seven foot ostrich plumes moving in counterpoint, was hers, along with the trick of letting the audience do the imagining.

In 1939 she came to San Francisco for the Treasure Island World’s Fair and made the Bay her stage. In the fair’s amusement zone, the Gayway, she opened the Sally Rand Nude Ranch, billed in the Official Guide Book as “a dude ranch a la 1939.” Women in cowboy hats, gunbelts, boots, and little else. It was one of the most discussed attractions of the entire exposition. San Francisco pretended to be scandalized and bought every ticket.

She bought the theater at 859 O’Farrell, renamed it The Music Box, and ran it on her own terms. Three shows nightly. World’s Most Beautiful Glamour Girls. No cover charge. The building, originally opened as Blanco’s after the 1906 earthquake, still stands today as the Great American Music Hall. The interior is largely as she left it.

Before all of it she had been a cigarette girl and chorus dancer, in pictures since 1924, including Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings and Bolero with George Raft. What she protected was not her body. It was the right to decide how it was seen.

Stage: Sally Rand Nude Ranch, Treasure Island · The Music Box, 859 O’Farrell (now Great American Music Hall). Craft: Burlesque, Choreography, Showmanship. Legacy: Performance as ownership · A 1906 building still standing on her watch.

II. Carol Doda (1937 — 2015)

Also known as: The Cocktail Waitress Who Rewrote a Neighborhood.

“Why would I be ashamed of something most of the world is born with?”

On June 19, 1964, she walked down from a hydraulic piano onto the stage at the Condor on Broadway and became the first topless dancer in America. The city tried to call it obscenity. The city kept the tax revenue.

She turned a neighborhood into a destination. North Beach’s neon, its tourist economy, its myth of itself as the place where the proper rules paused for the evening, was largely her work and the work of women like her, dancing through legal challenges that kept being reframed as her problem and never the city’s.

She kept dancing until she chose to stop. She ran a lingerie shop. She sang torch songs. She buried friends. She remained, in every account, exactly herself.

Stage: Condor Club, Broadway. Craft: Performance, Provocation. Legacy: An entire economy of a block.

III. Tessie Wall (1869 — 1932)

Also known as: Theresa Susan Donahue. Queen of O’Farrell. Widowed twice, in love forever.

“I shot him because I loved him, goddamn him.”

She ran what was, in the early 1900s, the most lucrative parlor house in San Francisco. A thousand dollar green velvet gown was not an exception in her wardrobe. It was a uniform. She drank champagne for breakfast, paid her girls more than the going rate, and held political conversations that shaped which men could run, and which could not.

When her ex husband Frank Daroux returned to her life, she shot him in the chest outside the St. Francis Hotel. He survived. She walked. The line she said in court became one of the truest sentences ever spoken about loving someone you cannot keep.

She was a power broker who happened to be a madam. The men of City Hall preferred to remember it the other way around.

Stage: The Tenderloin, O’Farrell Street. Craft: Hospitality, Power. Legacy: Influence dressed as scandal.

IV. Sally Stanford (1903 — 1982)

Also known as: Mabel Janice Busby. Proprietress, Restaurateur, Council Member, Mayor.

“A whorehouse is, after all, an institution.”

Her house at 1144 Pine Street was, for years, the most discreet and most discussed address in the city. Senators came. Judges came. So did the police, occasionally, when the optics required it. She kept ledgers and she kept her mouth shut, which is the same thing as saying she kept her power.

She crossed the bridge to Sausalito, opened Valhalla, and ran for office until she won. She served on the city council and was elected mayor in 1976. The wallpaper she chose for the Mayor’s office was reportedly imported. The woman herself was unimportable.

The American story she lived was the same one men get to tell every Fourth of July. She just happened to tell it from a brothel and a banquette.

Stage: 1144 Pine St, then Sausalito. Craft: Hospitality, Politics. Legacy: The respectable second act, taken.

V. Ah Toy (c. 1828 — 1928)

Also known as: Arrived 1849. Outlived the century. Outsued the men who underpaid her.

She walked into court in silks the city was not sure how to read, and walked out paid.

She was among the first Chinese women to arrive in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. She built a business in Chinatown when neither her gender, her race, nor her trade were protected by anyone in the city. So she protected herself in the most American way available. She used the courts.

She sued miners who tried to pay her in brass shavings instead of gold. She sued men who reneged. She sued her way into a kind of fragile legibility in a legal system designed to ignore her. She did not always win. She kept filing.

She lived to nearly one hundred. The city that tried to erase her did not last that long.

Stage: Chinatown, Pike St. Craft: Business, Litigation. Legacy: The law as a woman’s tool.

VI. Margo St. James (1937 — 2021)

Also known as: Founder of COYOTE. Patron Saint of the Hookers’ Ball. Politicized the working girl.

“Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics.”

She was arrested for being a prostitute before she was one, learned the law inside the holding cell, and decided that if the law was going to write her into a category she would write the category back. She founded COYOTE in 1973 in San Francisco. It was the first sex worker rights organization in the United States.

The Hookers’ Ball she ran in this city in the seventies was an honest to god civic event. Politicians came. Press came. Working women came in the costumes of women who had been told they were not allowed costumes. She ran for the Board of Supervisors. She did not win. She did not need to.

She moved the political conversation around sex work from invisibility to argument. Argument is upstream of everything.

Stage: San Francisco, Public Hearing. Craft: Organizing, Rhetoric, Spectacle. Legacy: The first U.S. sex worker rights movement.

VII. Alma Spreckels (1881 — 1968)

Also known as: Big Alma. The girl from the Sunset who married the sugar king and built a museum on his name.

“He’s my sugar daddy.” The line, the city likes to say, started with her.

She was the model for the Victory atop the Dewey Monument in Union Square. She was also, in another life, a poor French Danish girl from the Sunset who modeled for sculptors because it paid better than the laundry. Six feet tall, broke, and entirely uninterested in pretending otherwise.

Then she met Adolph Spreckels of the sugar fortune. He was twenty four years older, wildly wealthy, and besotted. She married him in 1908 and, by the lore this city refuses to let go of, gave the English language one of its more enduring terms in the process. He was her sugar daddy. She, accordingly, was the first sugar baby. Whether she coined it or simply made the joke land, the phrase walked out of her marriage and never came back.

She pushed the fortune places it was not expecting to go. She brought Rodin to San Francisco. She built the Legion of Honor on a windswept point overlooking the Golden Gate and gave it to the city. Union Square’s Victory is bronze. Alma was a woman. They look like each other on purpose.

Stage: Union Square, Legion of Honor. Craft: Patronage, Acquisition, Memory. Legacy: A museum, and a phrase, the city kept.

VIII. Lola Montez (1821 — 1861)

Also known as: Eliza Gilbert of Limerick. Countess of Landsfeld. Performer, mistress, memoirist.

“I have known all the world has to give. All. All.”

She arrived in San Francisco in 1853 already infamous. She had been the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the cause of riots, the author of her own legend. Her signature was the Spider Dance, in which she pretended to find spiders climbing up her skirts and shook them out with theatrical violence. The audience understood. The audience always understood.

She did not stay long in San Francisco. She went to Grass Valley and kept a small house full of strange friends and a pet bear. She lectured later in life. She wrote. She died poor. She remains the patron saint of women who, accused of being too much, decide to be more.

You do not have to like the Spider Dance. You only have to notice that no one made her apologize for it.

Stage: SF, then Grass Valley. Craft: Performance, Mythmaking. Legacy: The unapologetic woman as a literary form.

IX. Francesca Valdez (1953 — 2025)

Also known as: The Queen of Broadway. The last Filipino property owner in North Beach.

Legacy is rarely loud. Sometimes it is simply the woman who kept the lights on for forty more years.

San Francisco loves to talk about its venues in the past tense. Francesca Valdez spent decades refusing to let Broadway Studios become one of them. She held a space where weddings, debuts, drag, theater, fundraisers, and after parties kept meeting, through every wave of cost, gentrification, and forgetting.

She arrived in America in 1974, at twenty, sponsored as a mail order bride. She walked out of the marriage as soon as she could and educated herself between jobs. The attorney Melvin Belli, the King of Torts, noticed her and hired her. Through his rooms she met the people who would underwrite the next forty years of her ambition.

She built a modeling company. She called her training course Model-Cize and taught body language at Stanford. The discipline she taught was the one she practiced: how to hold a room before you say a word.

She first stepped into 435 Broadway in 1976, modeling at The Mab for the Filipino-American designer Thomas West. In 1989 the landlord asked her to clean the building out. By 1995 she ran it. In 2001, with her partner Karl Pleskot, she bought it outright and called herself, without irony, the last Filipino property owner in North Beach.

The building was raised in 1919 by the Italian community as Garibaldi Hall, then a jazz ballroom that hosted Louis Armstrong, then Mabuhay Gardens, where the Dead Kennedys, the Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Clash, and Metallica played to packed rooms. Francesca kept that lineage and added her own. She held a space the city kept trying to forget it needed.

In November 2013 a man placed an explosive device at her front door and walked away. It detonated. No one was walking by. Francesca had been openly critical of the surrounding strip clubs and the toll they took on the corridor. She did not stop being critical.

They called her the Queen of Broadway. She died July 21, 2025, at seventy one, after a five year fight with cancer. The room is still standing, which is the truest sentence anyone could write about her. The women in these pages would not have had stages without women like her keeping the rooms. Stewardship is its own kind of scandal in a city this allergic to permanence.

Stage: Broadway Studios, North Beach. Craft: Stewardship, Hospitality, Refusal. Legacy: The room itself, still standing.

X. Lillie Hitchcock Coit (1843 — 1929)

Also known as: Firebelle Lil. Honorary Member, Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5.

“Tell me where the fire is.”

She smoked cigars in rooms where women were not yet allowed to inhale. She gambled at North Beach poker tables in men’s clothing because she preferred them. She rode out with Knickerbocker Engine Company Number 5 as an honorary firefighter after, the story goes, she helped haul their engine up a hill as a teenager and refused, then and forever, to be polite about it.

She inherited money. She married money. She used both to ignore the script she was handed. When she died, she left a third of her estate to the city she loved, with instructions to build something for the firefighters who let her ride. They built Coit Tower.

Femininity was a costume she removed in private. She kept the city in the dress.

Stage: North Beach, Telegraph Hill. Craft: Refusal, Patronage. Legacy: Coit Tower, and the right to wear what you came in.

XI. Belle Cora (1827 — 1862)

Also known as: Arabella Ryan of Baltimore. Mistress of one of the most lavish houses the Gold Rush had ever seen.

A city does not earn its dead just by killing them.

She ran a parlor house in the early 1850s that was, by every contemporary account, the most decorated room in town. Chandeliers from France. Wallpaper too good for the climate. A clientele that included exactly the men who, by daylight, called for women like her to be exiled, jailed, or worse.

When her husband Charles Cora shot a US Marshal in a dispute the city had been pretending not to see coming, the Vigilance Committee took him from his jail cell and hanged him in the street. Belle would not let them have him after. She paid for his body, bought him a tomb at Mission Dolores cemetery, and buried him there herself. She is buried beside him.

San Francisco loves to romanticize the Vigilance Committee as folk justice. Belle Cora’s grave is the rebuttal.

Stage: Waverly Place, then Mission Dolores. Craft: Hospitality, Defiance, Mourning. Legacy: The city’s vigilante myth, refused.

XII. Jeanne Bonnet (1849 — 1876)

Also known as: French born, men’s clothed, arrested for it routinely, murdered for it eventually.

She wore the suit, then organized the women out of the rooms that wouldn’t let her in.

She made her living catching frogs in the marshes for French restaurants. She wore men’s clothes by preference and got arrested for it more than twenty times. The city had a law against women wearing trousers. She had the law memorized and the city outlasted.

Her real work was organizing. She found women working in the brothels of the city in the 1870s and convinced them, one by one, to leave together. To pool what they had. To live in a household of women, by women, for women.

In 1876 she was shot to death through a window in San Miguel Station, almost certainly by men who had lost what she had taken from them. She was twenty seven. The idea did not die with her.

A painting titled Jeanne or Jean Bonnet memorializes the life of the San Francisco frog catcher — honoring a person the city could never quite decide how to name.

Stage: The Marshes, San Miguel Station. Craft: Labor Organizing in a Cassock. Legacy: Queer mutual aid in San Francisco.

XIII. Lotta Crabtree (1847 — 1924)

Also known as: The Girl of the Camps. The Fairy Star. America’s first homegrown leading actress.

She danced for miners as a child and never let a man hold the purse.

Her mother brought her to the Sierra mining camps as a small child. She learned to dance, sing, and play the banjo for audiences of men who had not seen a child in a year, and who tossed gold dust on stage when she finished. By the 1870s she was the highest paid actress in the United States.

She never married. She traveled with her mother, who managed her finances with a discipline that would have made a bank envious. When she retired she lived quietly and gave the city Lotta’s Fountain, which still stands at Market and Kearny, the meeting point where 1906 earthquake survivors found each other for decades afterward.

She is the first San Francisco woman to die rich on her own terms. The fountain is hers. The terms were too.

Stage: Sierra Camps, then Broadway. Craft: Performance, Asset Management. Legacy: Lotta’s Fountain, Market & Kearny.

XIV. Adah Isaacs Menken (1835 — 1868)

Also known as: Possibly Creole, openly Jewish, married four times, the most famous actress of her decade.

“I am infinitely more than what I do for a living.”

She played Mazeppa, the Cossack warrior, bound to the back of a galloping horse in a flesh colored body stocking that the press called nudity and the audience called genius. San Francisco in 1863 lost its mind for her. Mark Twain wrote about her. Bret Harte courted her. She did not stay still long enough to be courted seriously.

She was Jewish in a country that still mostly was not. She was rumored to be of Creole and Black heritage in an era that punished both. She married four men, several of them poets, none of them in charge. She wrote poetry herself that was published seriously after her death.

She died at thirty three in Paris. San Francisco still claims her, which is fair, because she did the same.

Stage: Maguire’s Opera House, SF. Craft: Performance, Poetry, Selfhood as Brand. Legacy: The actress as cultural seismograph.

XV. Vicki Marlane (1934 — 2011)

Also known as: Trans drag legend. Star of the Hot Boxxx Girls revue. The reason Aunt Charlie’s is still on the map.

She kept showing up. The neighborhood kept being saved a little by it.

She came out of a circus background and built a life on small stages most of San Francisco never visited. From the 1990s on, she anchored the Hot Boxxx Girls at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in the Tenderloin, the only working gay dive in a neighborhood that has lost almost every other one. She performed into her seventies. She walked to work.

Her dressing room was the size of a closet. Her gowns were better than anything you would see on Broadway. She lip synced like a woman who had memorized every recording in her catalog four times over and still found something new in the song.

This city does not protect what is precious in it. Vicki Marlane protected herself, and a stage, and a generation of younger queens, by simply continuing to exist on the corner of Turk and Taylor.

Stage: Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the Tenderloin. Craft: Drag, Endurance. Legacy: The last dive standing, kept standing.

XVI. Felicia Elizondo (1946 — 2021)

Also known as: Self described screaming queen. Vietnam veteran. Tenderloin organizer.

“We were tired of being kicked. So we kicked back.”

In August 1966, three years before Stonewall, a group of trans women and queer street kids in the Tenderloin fought back against a police raid at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria on Turk Street. They threw sugar shakers. They flipped tables. They broke windows. They had been pushed too far for too long.

Felicia Elizondo was one of them. She spent the rest of her life making sure that night was remembered, that the women who fought it were named, and that the Tenderloin’s queer history was treated as a foundation and not a footnote. She testified, she taught, she marched, she lit a candle every August.

Without her insisting, Compton’s would still be a rumor. Because of her, there is a historic district, a plaque, and a generation of young people who know.

Stage: The Tenderloin, then everywhere she was needed. Craft: Memory, Witness, Riot. Legacy: The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, written into history.

XVII. Doris Fish (1952 — 1991)

Also known as: Philip Mills of Sydney. The Sluts a Go-Go. Star of Vegas in Space.

She trained a generation, then died trying to keep them alive.

She arrived from Sydney in the late seventies and joined a community of drag performers, painters, and performance artists who had already decided that San Francisco was the place to be too much in. The Sluts a Go-Go, her trio, made shows so wildly inventive that the line between drag, theater, and performance art became, in their hands, useless.

Her film Vegas in Space, finished after years of pieced together production, is now in the Smithsonian. She died of AIDS complications in 1991. She had used her last years to raise money for friends in the epidemic, sell paintings, and finish the film.

Almost every drag queen working in San Francisco today is downstream of her, knowingly or not.

Stage: The Mission, the Stud, Vegas in Space. Craft: Drag, Painting, Film. Legacy: The grammar of SF drag.

XVIII. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (est. 1979)

Also known as: A drag order of nuns, founded in the Castro in 1979 by three friends in surplus habits.

“Go and sin some more.”

They started as a joke that immediately stopped being one. Three men in nun’s habits walked through the Castro in Easter of 1979 and discovered that a parody of the church, performed by queer people who had been told they were going to hell by it, did something specific to a neighborhood that needed it.

By 1982 the Sisters were producing the first AIDS fundraiser the city had ever seen. They printed the first Play Fair safer sex pamphlet. They have raised tens of millions for queer and HIV positive communities since. There are now chapters around the world.

They are not a punchline. They are an institution. A camp, joyful, foul mouthed, drop dead serious institution.

Stage: The Castro, then global. Craft: Camp, Care, Fundraising, Joyful Heresy. Legacy: The first AIDS fundraiser; safer sex literature.

XIX. Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814 — 1904)

Also known as: Born into slavery. Died a millionaire. Called “Mammy” only by people who could not bear her actual name.

“I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.”

She arrived in San Francisco in the early 1850s with capital, a network, and a memory of having worked alongside John Brown in Massachusetts. She is the woman who quietly financed his raid on Harpers Ferry. She ran boarding houses that doubled as political headquarters, kitchens that doubled as Underground Railroad stops in the west, and a fortune that she used as leverage every time a Black San Franciscan was denied a right available to anyone white.

In 1866 she sued the North Beach and Mission Railroad Company for refusing to let her board the streetcar. She won. The case set California precedent. Every Black rider on a San Francisco streetcar after 1866 rode because Mary Ellen Pleasant had been thrown off one and chose to take it to court.

She built a thirty room mansion on Octavia Street. The press called her sinister, called her a voodoo queen, invented a witch to explain a Black woman with money. She is the mother of California civil rights. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a softer history.

Stage: Octavia Street, the SF Supreme Court. Craft: Capital, Litigation, Underground Railroad, Insurgency. Legacy: Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission RR (1866); funded Harpers Ferry.

XX. Dianne Feinstein (1933 — 2023)

Also known as: Acting Mayor on November 27, 1978. Senator from 1992 to 2023. The hand that wrote the federal assault weapons ban.

“As President of the Board of Supervisors, it is my duty to make this announcement. Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed.”

She is the woman who held a press conference on the worst day in modern San Francisco history and kept the city from coming apart on camera. She found Harvey Milk’s body. She became acting Mayor an hour later. She served as Mayor for a decade, through the AIDS crisis, through the city’s most ungoverned years, through the slow recovery.

She left for the US Senate in 1992 and stayed for thirty one years. She wrote the federal assault weapons ban that passed in 1994. She chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and forced the release of the report on CIA torture. She was the longest serving woman in the history of the United States Senate.

Her politics were not everyone’s. Her endurance was. She did not leave the floor until she died on it.

Stage: SF City Hall, US Senate. Craft: Governance, Legislation, Composure Under Catastrophe. Legacy: The 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban; the SSCI torture report.

XXI. Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940)

Also known as: Representative for San Francisco since 1987. Speaker in 2007 and again in 2019.

“I’ve always said in politics, when people say we tried that, I say, you didn’t try it with me.”

She raised five children to school age before she ran for anything. Then she came in to the House of Representatives at forty seven and proceeded, over the next four decades, to count votes better than anyone else in the building. She became the first woman Speaker of the United States House of Representatives in 2007 and brought the Affordable Care Act across the line in 2010 by single vote margins that any other Speaker would have failed.

She managed two impeachments. She faced down a violent insurrection in the Capitol in January 2021 and was on her feet certifying the election by that night. She is widely considered the most effective Speaker since Sam Rayburn.

She is from San Francisco. She is married to San Francisco. The city forgets sometimes how much of Washington runs on her instincts.

Stage: SF District 11, the US House Floor. Craft: Whipping Votes, Holding a Caucus, Reading a Room. Legacy: The ACA; two impeachments; the post-Jan 6 certification.

XXII. Phyllis Lyon & Del Martin (1924 — 2020 / 1921 — 2008)

Also known as: Founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, 1955. Authors of Lesbian/Woman. The first legally married same sex couple in California, 2008.

“Lesbian is the word for me.”

In 1955 they founded the Daughters of Bilitis in their San Francisco living room with six other women. It was the first lesbian rights organization in the United States. They published The Ladder, the first lesbian magazine in the country, when publishing such a thing could and did get women arrested.

They wrote Lesbian/Woman in 1972, a book that did for lesbian visibility what almost no other single text had done. They organized in domestic violence response when no one was treating women hitting women as worth recording.

On June 16, 2008, after fifty five years together, they were the first same sex couple legally married in California. Mayor Newsom officiated. Del Martin died two months later. Phyllis lived another twelve years and continued to fight.

Stage: The Castro, City Hall, the National Movement. Craft: Organizing, Publishing, Legal Pressure, Patience. Legacy: The Daughters of Bilitis (1955); CA marriage equality (2008).

XXIII. Janice Mirikitani (1941 — 2021)

Also known as: Internment camp survivor. Third Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Co-founder of the GLIDE Foundation.

“We must recite our names like a song.”

She was born into a US internment camp during World War II. She came of age in a country that had imprisoned her family for the crime of being Japanese American. She became a poet, an editor, and an activist whose work made Asian American identity visible at a time when American culture was still pretending the category did not need to exist.

With her husband Cecil Williams, she built GLIDE in the Tenderloin into one of the most replicated urban service programs in America. Free meals, free childcare, recovery groups, HIV testing, housing services, hot food without questions asked. Other cities have spent decades trying to copy what she ran out of a single church on Ellis Street.

She was San Francisco’s third Poet Laureate. She wrote, in plain language, about rape and internment and addiction and what it costs to survive each one of those. Then she went back to the cafeteria and put up another tray.

Stage: GLIDE Memorial, the Tenderloin. Craft: Poetry, Program Design, Refusal of Shame. Legacy: The GLIDE model, replicated nationally; SF Poet Laureate.

XXIV. Rose Pak (1948 — 2016)

Also known as: Reporter, organizer, immigrant rights champion, the most feared and effective non politician in San Francisco for thirty years.

“I am not afraid of anyone.”

She came to San Francisco from Hong Kong in the 1960s, worked as a journalist, joined the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and proceeded to remake San Francisco politics from a folding chair in the back of Chinatown. She backed Willie Brown. She backed Ed Lee. She backed the rebuild of Chinatown after the 1989 earthquake. She backed the construction of the Central Subway.

She held no office. She held everything else. Mayors took her phone calls before they took the calls of their own chiefs of staff. When the Health Department tried to close a Chinatown clinic, she rerouted them. She did this in fluent profanity in three languages.

She made the immigrant Chinese community of San Francisco politically immovable for a generation.

Stage: Chinatown, City Hall, the Phone. Craft: Power Without Office, Coalition Building, Memory. Legacy: The Central Subway; thirty years of SF politics.

XXV. Anne Kronenberg (b. 1954)

Also known as: Harvey Milk’s campaign manager. Director of Emergency Services. Deputy Director of Public Health for SF.

She kept showing up to the building people had been told to die in.

She managed Harvey Milk’s 1977 campaign at twenty three, on a motorcycle, while half the city still treated openly gay candidates as a joke. She was in the office the day he was assassinated. She did not leave San Francisco public service for the next four decades.

What she built afterward is the part the city does not talk about enough. She helped design the San Francisco Model for AIDS response: integrated case management, community organization led care, low barrier service, the assumption that the patient and the patient’s neighborhood knew things the doctors did not. The CDC took the model national. So did Europe.

The SF model for AIDS, the one cited as the global gold standard, was hers in part because she made the city be it.

Stage: SF Department of Public Health. Craft: Crisis Management, Coalition, Care. Legacy: The SF AIDS Response model, replicated globally.

XXVI. Roberta Achtenberg (b. 1950)

Also known as: SF Supervisor. Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of HUD. The first openly LGBTQ person Senate confirmed to a federal sub cabinet position.

“The day I was confirmed, the United States got a little more honest with itself.”

She was an attorney and SF Supervisor by the time President Clinton nominated her in 1993 to be Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing at HUD. Her confirmation hearings were ugly. Senator Jesse Helms called her a militant activist on the Senate floor for the apparent crime of being a lesbian. She was confirmed by a vote of 58 to 31.

It was the first time the United States Senate had ever, knowingly, voted to confirm an openly gay person to a federal cabinet level position. Every queer federal appointee since has walked through a door Roberta Achtenberg held open at considerable personal cost.

She came home to San Francisco after, ran for mayor, lost, kept working in higher education and civil rights, and made a quieter career out of the harder problems.

Stage: SF Supervisors, US Senate Hearing Room, HUD. Craft: Law, Housing Policy, Going First. Legacy: The first Senate-confirmed openly LGBTQ federal appointee.

XXVII. Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (b. 1940)

Also known as: Stonewall veteran. Formerly incarcerated trans elder. Former Executive Director of the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.

“I am still here.”

She was at Stonewall in June 1969. She was twenty nine. She is still here. She has spent her entire life since looking out for Black and brown trans women, the women everyone, including most of the queer movement, was prepared to forget.

From San Francisco and later Oakland, she ran TGIJP for years, organizing for and with formerly incarcerated trans women, providing housing, advocacy, and the literal phone call you can make when there is no one else. She is mother and grandmother to a generation of trans women, by their own naming, not hers.

She is the last living veteran of Stonewall who has continued to organize publicly into her eighties. To include her while she is here is the point of this entire archive.

Stage: Stonewall, San Francisco, Oakland, Little Rock. Craft: Mothering, Organizing, Survival, Refusal. Legacy: TGIJP; a generation of trans women alive because of her.

XXVIII. London Breed (b. 1974)

Also known as: Raised in the Plaza East public housing project. SF Supervisor, Board President, Mayor.

“I’m a girl from public housing in this city.”

She grew up in the Plaza East projects in the Western Addition, raised by her grandmother. She worked at the African American Art and Culture Complex on Fulton Street as a young woman. She ran for the Board of Supervisors and won. She became Board President. When Mayor Ed Lee died suddenly in December 2017, she became acting Mayor.

She ran for the seat in her own right in 2018 and won it. The first Black woman to be Mayor of San Francisco, a city that had until then been governed entirely by men or by white women for its full history.

Her tenure is contested, in the way that every San Francisco mayoralty has always been contested. The fact of her being there at all is not. The girl from Plaza East holds the seat.

Stage: Plaza East, City Hall Room 200. Craft: Governance, Endurance, Public Memory. Legacy: The first Black woman Mayor of San Francisco.