5 Historic San Francisco Lesbian Bars We Wish Still Existed

Back in March, thanks to my ongoing obsession with the city’s dives, I decided to compile a list of five supremely entertaining bars from San Francisco history. I found some gems in the archives — a spider-filled tavern in North Beach and a lawless basement bar on the edge of Chinatown, among them.

In the course of that research I also discovered Mona’s 440 Club — a bar for lesbians, crossdressers and genderfluid folks that was active in the 1940s. Finding a place “where girls [could] be boys” from that era prompted me to wonder: How many other fantastic little lesbian venues existed in Bay Area history that few of us know anything about today?

Here are five that are particularly noteworthy.

Ann’s 440 Club

In the early 1950s, when Mona’s 440 Club was sold by Mona and Jimmie Sargeant to Ann Dee she, rather naturally, renamed it Ann’s. Dee understood that her core audience should remain genderfluid lesbians and she catered to them with exotic performers like Miss Wiggles, Carol “the Dangerous Curver” Hill and “Cuban bombshell” Delia Martine. In a departure from Mona’s, however, Dee also opened up the in-house entertainment to include more male musicians and comedians — Lenny Bruce and Johnny Mathis among them.

Ann’s carefully curated choice of entertainers often prompted local critics to attend. In 1953, The San Francisco Examiner praised an “Original Pantomime” show that was quite obviously a drag performance of sorts. “In a nutshell, it’s group pantomiming of Broadway hit musicals … go[ing] through the motions of the play, the songs and the dances, in a clever, sparkling and original way.”

Mona’s had established a safe nightclub space for lesbians in San Francisco throughout the 1940s, but it was Ann’s that helped bring sapphic culture to mainstream city nightlife.

The Front

The legacy that The Front’s owner Charlotte Coleman left on LGBTQ+ nightlife in San Francisco is immense — and it only happened because homophobia pushed her out of her day job at the IRS. Forced to resign after her employer discovered she was a lesbian, Coleman took her retirement savings — and a cue from her father, a Prohibition-era rum-runner — and went into the bar trade.

Coleman bought The Blind Mouse in 1958 — a gay restaurant at 600 Front St. — and renamed it The Front. The bar had a stage and a piano, and was known for its drag shows (featuring both male and female impersonators). Coleman opened the bar in a relatively deserted part of town specifically with the goal of avoiding police harassment. Sadly, the location didn’t help. Coleman got slapped with multiple morals charges, lost her license and was forced to close The Front in 1962.

Coleman went on to open nine other gay venues around the city — including still-beloved bars like Twin Peaks and The Mint — and became known for her charitable fundraising for LGBTQ+ causes, as well as her work with the Tavern Guild. The Front, however, would be her last lesbian venue.

“The women got into so many fights, pulling hair and dumping beers over each other!” she once explained. “I always was in the middle trying to break things up. And I really didn’t make any money either, so I decided that was a lot of fun, but I couldn’t make a living.”

Tommy’s Joint/ 12 Adler Place

In 1948, inside a four-story brick building at 299 Broadway, San Francisco acquired its first queer bar opened by an out lesbian.

The owner went by the name Tommy Vasu; Vasu had dressed in masculine attire since the age of 12. Despite once being described by Herb Caen as “a gentleman among ladies,” Vasu was known to be involved in organized crime and often associated with sex workers. (The 299 Club operated on the two bottom floors of the bar’s address. The top two acted as a hotel known to be a venue for prostitution.)

“Anything you wanted, Tommy could get it for you,” historian Pat Bond once said. “You wanted a watch, she’d bring out 40 watches. She liked being a gangster.”

Four years into successful operation, the 299 Club moved to 529 Broadway (today’s Garden of Eden strip club) and was renamed Tommy’s Joint. Tommy’s was a popular venue with live entertainment. It also backed directly onto a lively lesbian bar known as 12 Adler Place, also owned by Vasu.

Vasu’s North Beach success was short-lived. Vice squad officers closed the adjoining bars down after just two years, revoking Vasu’s license and landing one of the venue’s bartenders in jail for allegedly serving minors. It was a major local scandal at the time, milked in the media to scaremonger about the corrupting nature of homosexuality on youth. (The Examiner referred to 12 Adler as a “sex thrill bar.”)

Today, Specs’ pays tribute to its former incarnation with a sign in its doorway that reads “12 Adler Museum.” Sadly, zero ephemera from the original Tommy’s Joint or 12 Adler Place remains in Specs’ today. Still not quite as sad as the ending that Vasu got, however — the former bar owner was murdered in 1978, four years after serving time for dealing heroin.

Peg’s Place

Peg’s Place forged a reputation in its early years for being a refined bar where patrons weren’t even permitted to wear jeans. (Pants were okay.) The San Francisco Examiner once described the joint at 4737 Geary as a “small bar with Norman-style stone arches, pool table, dance floor and open fire,” and “a cozy haven from the claimed harassments of the straight world.”

“I think they wanted you to be — maybe they call it classy,” a regular named Jackie later recalled. “They didn’t want to think they catered to bums or truck-driver types.”

While in its earliest days, dancing at Peg’s wasn’t permitted because of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, the bar rules relaxed as police monitoring did. A regular named Virginia Benavides remembered a lively scene at Peg’s by the 1980s. “There was dancing, with a DJ, and the crowd was mostly white women and Black women,” she said. “I loved the energy.”

Owner Linda Symaco was a Filipina who first moved to the city in 1965 — and she was fierce. When the bar was attacked by a bachelor party of angry men — two of whom were off-duty cops — late one night in March 1979, Symaco relentlessly pursued justice. She, along with bouncer Arlene Levine and a customer named Kathryn Miller filed a lawsuit against three of the men in question, the city and the SFPD. Even while dealing with harassing phone calls and bomb threats to Peg’s Place, Symaco remained undeterred.

In the end, one of the police officers was convicted of battery and he and another man were also convicted of disturbing the peace. It took until 1985 for the San Francisco Police Commission to pay the three women $75,000 in damages.

Even for those who frequented Peg’s Place, it all feels like ancient history now. Today, what’s left of Peg’s is a Chinese restaurant named Dong Bei Mama.

Maud’s

Nowadays, you might know it as Finnegan’s Wake, but between April 1966 and September 1989, 937 Cole St. was Maud’s, the Haight’s greatest ever lesbian bar. The owner was Rikki Streicher, a self-confessed “bar person” who wanted women who loved women to have a safe space to make connections and community together.

“I’ve always felt that bars were the most honest, open, free place that women could go,” Streicher said in 1993 documentary Last Call at Maud’s. “So when I made this bar, I wanted it to be a composite of probably all the bars that I’ve gone to and all of the good things I’ve found in each of those bars.”

The wood-paneled venue was equipped with pinball and a pool table inside, a ping-pong table in the yard and — because women couldn’t legally bartend in California until 1971 (!) — a variety of men pouring the drinks (at least in the early days). Originally named The Study, it morphed into Maud’s Study, then finally just Maud’s.

As late as the mid-1970s, patrons and staff were under such scrutiny that Streicher had to install an alarm to warn customers when cops were approaching. If any of the women were caught dancing or touching, there would almost certainly be legal consequences. So a red light would flash on, a short noise would sound and the women knew exactly what to do.

“You know, it really looks strange for anyone to walk into this bar,” one customer later recalled, “and there’s 200 dykes standing in the middle of the floor all looking at each other, not doing anything.”

In its earliest years, the bar was overrun with gay hippies thanks to its proximity to Haight-Ashbury. (Even Janis Joplin stopped by once in a while.) Into the ’70s and ’80s, there were variety shows and performances. Annual (raucous) anniversary parties were held, a bar softball team was formed and many relationships and affairs forged. Maud’s most important asset, however, was its customers. The bar fostered and nurtured an incredibly tight community of gay women. Its final closing was indeed a sad one — a fact surely true of every bygone watering hole on this list.