3464 19th Street, San Francisco 94110 (historic site)
San Francisco is storied as a safe haven for LGBTQ communities, and the Castro District’s gay nightlife is the subject of many guides and historical treatments. The laser focus on tourism in the Castro, however, often obscures the many other queer stories that have made the city tick, from the formation of queer enclaves in the Tenderloin, Polk Gulch, the Mission District, and beyond. In some ways the “big gay story” in this city, and the region more broadly, is about the vastness of queer life—queers in the Bay Area are rich and poor, powerful and everyday, urban and suburban. Still, the concentration of LGBTQ people in San Francisco has been uniquely strong and has produced many subcultures and neighborhoods across the city. The rise and fall of such places has to do with much more than sexuality, as the short life of the Lexington
Club—a lesbian bar that opened here on 19th Street in 1997 and closed in 2015— shows. By the time it shut down, the “Lex” was said to be the last remaining full-time lesbian bar in a city that had birthed waves of queer nightlife as far back as the nineteenth century. The closing was tied to financial troubles in a rapidly gentrifying part of the Valencia corridor.
While the Mission District was never predominantly LGBTQ, post-WWII population shifts in the area made the neighborhood more affordable and thus a magnet for people on the socioeconomic fringe. As largely Irish and German families formed the white middle class and left, lower-income gays and lesbians found their way to the Mission. In doing so, they joined migrants primarily from Mexico and Central America, who expanded the small Latino enclave that had been growing in the Mission for years. Lesbians in particular clustered together as one of several strong minorities in the district, which was close to the male-dominated Castro, but far cheaper, and they began to put down cultural roots in the 1960s and 1970s. Over the years, they reclaimed words like dyke and queer as positive descriptions, and so we use those terms here in that way as well.
Some of the earliest dyke-oriented businesses included a women’s printing-press collective and bookstore in the early 1970s; by the late ’70s there were cafés and bars catering to women/lesbians, notably Amelia’s (645-647 Valencia Street), which offered space for political events, in addition to music and drinking. The ’70s and ’80s saw an expansion of the lesbian presence, with fairs and cultural events, craft stores, and the Osento bathhouse, which was based in a Victorian at 953-955 Valencia Street. Good Vibrations, perhaps the nation’s first cooperatively owned, feminist sex shop opened up around the corner on 22nd Street (before moving to Valencia Street and expanding around the Bay Area).
By 1997 when the Lexington Club opened, the neighborhood was already feeling the housing and economic pressures of the first dot-com boom. The dominant Latinx population was under siege by rising housing costs, but remained a cultural and demographic majority. The Mission was still a key hearth for the tenants’ rights and housing rights movements, with a strong political identity centered around class that bridged race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The working-class and artistic identity of the Mission was evident at the Lexington. For much of its eighteen years it served as a community space, playing host to weddings and domestic partnership ceremonies, meetings, and perhaps thousands of first dates and sexual encounters. In 2015 it fell victim to rising commercial rent, which exacerbated the bar’s troubles with changing clientele amid the shrinking lesbian presence in the neighborhood. This demographic shift was in part a product of the gentrification that was pushing lower-rent households to the urban fringe. It was also likely the result of cultural changes, as many dykes that came of age in the 1990s moved on to other things, beyond the bar scene. As the bar closed, a documentary film project was underway, and there were plans to continue event programming under the name of the Lexington at other venues.