It’s been a banner few months for one of San Francisco’s most important queer venues. The Stud, which closed its doors in the first months of the pandemic, recently announced it will reopen in early 2024 in a new location, continuing the bar’s now 57-year history.
In further cause for celebration, that history will soon be even more visible thanks to an image-filled, nearly 200-page book published by the Oakland press Land and Sea. The Stud Pin Archive and Ephemera 1970–1999 contains photographs, news clippings and documentation of the Stud’s pin collection (numbering over 250 pins!), lovingly documented by former bartender Chloe Miller. On Friday, Oct. 20, Et al.’s Mission Street gallery will host a launch party for the book, with music and performances befitting the eclectic, welcoming nature of the bar.
For Miller, the project came out of a desire to preserve, but also from a basic curiosity about the artist behind the pins. When Miller worked at the Stud, the pins held up pictures on a wall opposite her well, operating as thumbtacks for pieces of Stud ephemera. Most were created by longtime Stud bartender Paul “Gidget” Sinclair, who often placed a telltale lower-case “g” on his pared-down, visually arresting pin designs.
“They were hilarious,” she remembers thinking. “They’re really comical. Like, whoever made them has to be such a funny person.” She tracked down Sinclair’s identity (he died from AIDS in the late 1990s) through stories in the Bay Area Reporter and by talking to former Stud bartenders.
The pins capture a real sense of the time in which they were made — and the events that were notable in the lives of Stud staff and patrons. “The pinbacks are like tiny time capsules,” Miller writes in the book’s introduction. Alongside cheeky designs made for parties and dance nights are pins that mark the Challenger disaster, the Atlanta Child Murders, 49ers games and the royal wedding of Diana and Charles.
