Take Yourself on a Self-Guided Tour of Chinatown’s Queer Past and Present

Updated July 2

San Francisco’s iconic Pride celebrations saw community groups and artists organize rallies, concerts and film festivals that explored the spectrum of experiences across the LGBTQ+ community in June.

But there’s something you can do in San Francisco any day of the year: a self-guided tour of Chinatown’s historical queer landmarks.

Heading out on this independent walking guide is also a particularly good option for anyone who missed the second annual Chinatown Pride back in May, organized by the Chinese Cultural Center and contemporary arts organization Edge on the Square. As part of the celebration, drag queens with the Rice Rockettes and the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance led a procession of hundreds of residents throughout the neighborhood on a six-stop tour of places connected to Chinatown’s LGBTQ+ community.

“Chinatown holds so many untold queer stories,” said YY Zhu, director of galleries and programs at CCC, whose team spent months researching and talking to elders in the community to identify the places in the neighborhood where LGBTQ+ individuals lived, connected and organized. “This is really our invitation to people to come to Chinatown and interact with this history,” she said.

So, for those who want to recreate this tour for themselves, we chatted to Chinatown Pride’s organizers to learn how folks can follow the procession’s footsteps. Each stop is only one or two blocks from the starting point, so if you are walking, the whole tour should take less than an hour.

“We might not recognize this landscape as queer — but now we do,” said Erika Pallasigue, art and public programs manager at Edge on the Square. “You don’t have to be queer, you don’t have to be Asian, you don’t need to be any of those identities — but think about which parts of you are coming up as you’re in these spaces.”

Keep reading to learn the location of each stop and what motivated organizers to include it in the tour — and use our Google Map below to guide your journey:

Stop #1: Edge on the Square, 800 Grant Ave.

A few feet away from Portsmouth Square, Edge on the Square is an art exhibition and performance space that first opened in 2021 — on the same corner once occupied by retail store Asian Image and the iconic Shing Chong market before that.

Edge on the Square is currently hosting the exhibit “All Eyes on Us: Invention & Ingenuity During Artistic Diasporas,” which features artists representing a wide range of mediums. This includes Hou Yumei’s art of paper cutting, installations by Sun Park, illustrations by Chinatown’s own Leland Wong and drawings by Jeanette Lazam — who you’ll see again later on in your tour, thanks to her role as an openly queer tenant organizer in the struggle to save the neighborhood’s International Hotel.

The exhibit, curated by Candace Huey, frames these artists as “hidden dragons,” producing their work while adapting to the challenges of “immigration, assimilation and survival.”

While social circumstances may have limited the visibility of some of these artists, Edge on the Square’s Pallasigue encourages visitors to also think about how staying under the radar can serve as a form of protection. “Marginalized communities — not just queer communities — have to negotiate what it means to be out or visible,” she said. “They may choose not to be out or visible as a form of safety, protection and resilience.”

Stop #2: Bars and shops along Grant Avenue

From Edge on the Square, head north on Grant Avenue. Along these next few blocks, you’ll see staple Chinatown bars Li Po Cocktail Lounge on your right and Buddha Lounge on your left.

These spots are remnants of the time when Chinatown was a big nightlife destination.

From the 1930s to 1960s, clubs like Forbidden City and Chinese Sky Room threw glamorous shows featuring big bands and showgirl troupes — drawing in major celebrities like Frank Sinatra and then-actor President Ronald Reagan.

“But the queer history here is that there were several underground bars that served as gathering spaces for the community,” Pallasigue said. People who frequented these establishments often had to live a double life, she said, transforming into a version of themselves devoid of queerness during the daytime.

“Based on our research, it’s during the 1940s and ’50s that the queer nightlife in Chinatown was thriving,” Zhu said. “Chinatown was the go-to space where you could have a relatively safe environment to hang out and be yourself.”

Groups like CCC continue working on recovering the history of these underground bars. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about Chinatown’s nightlife boom and the Asian and Asian American performers behind it, visit the Showgirl Magic Museum at 2 Waverly Place, a block away from the Grant and Sacramento street intersection.

Stop #3: East West Bank, formerly the site of Telephone Exchange, 743 Washington St.

From Buddha Lounge, cross Washington Street. On your left side, you’ll see a three-tiered pagoda painted in red and green. Now a branch office of East West Bank, this building served as the home of the Chinatown Telephone Exchange from the end of the 19th century till 1949. Before cell phones or even landline telephones with dials, you would have to first call your local telephone exchange and ask the operator — an actual human — to connect you to the person you were trying to reach.

At the Chinatown Telephone Exchange, a team of dozens of women connected the neighborhood’s thousands of residents to the outside world. As part of their jobs, these female operators were required to wear traditional qipao dresses every day and be fluent in multiple languages, Zhu said.

During the Chinatown Pride procession, an elderly woman approached Zhu to share that she herself had worked at a telephone exchange in the city similar to the one located on Washington Street.

At work, “she saw women flirting with each other,” Zhu said. “While they connected the outside world to Chinatown, there was this concealed intimacy. She was sure that there were other queer women operators besides her.”

The Exchange’s architecture is also a symbol of Chinatown’s ability to transform in order to survive, Pallasigue said. The 1906 earthquake destroyed most of Chinatown and local officials saw that as an opportunity to remove the Chinese community from this part of the city.

But Chinese and Chinese American business groups instead proposed that in order to boost tourism, the neighborhood be protected and rebuilt as an exaggerated version of what Westerners at the time imagined China to be like. Up went the paper lanterns, neon lights and pagodas — including those at the Chinatown Telephone Exchange.

“This is built into Chinatown’s DNA,” Pallasigue said: “Being creative with the use of space as a form of resilience in order to preserve the culture and community.”

Stop #4: 41ross, 41 Ross Alley

From the old Telephone Exchange building, walk up the hill on Washington Street and turn right at Ross Alley. On the left side, you’ll find 41ross, a gallery space managed by CCC that has hosted the work of dozens of LGBTQ+ artists over its 11 years in operation.

“The goal for this space is really to support artists and provide a platform for them — not only to showcase their work, but to also sell it,” she said, adding that 41ross includes a design store where visitors can find works by Jeanette Lazam, Hou Yumei, Leland Wong and other artists currently featured at Edge on the Square.

In 2024, 41ross collaborated with queer artist-activist Xiangqi Chen to host “OUT/出 MUSEUM,” a museum prototype focused on Chinese queer art. Visitors can ask the 41ross staff to learn more about ongoing work to find a permanent home for Chen’s collection.

Stop #5: International Hotel Senior Housing, 848 Kearny St.

Stepping out of 41ross, take a left and then a right on Jackson Street. Walk downhill on Jackson until you reach the intersection with Kearny Street, where you’ll see a tall apartment building behind a Muni bus stop. This is International Hotel Senior Housing, an affordable housing complex that opened in 2005 for lower-income seniors — and it stands on the site of the former International Hotel (or I-Hotel), where one of the most extensive struggles between tenants and developers in the city’s history went down.

Since the 1920s, the I-Hotel housed hundreds of elderly and impoverished Filipino and Chinese men who shared cramped living quarters known as single room occupancies, or SROs.

When the property owners decided in 1968 that they wanted to turn the hotel into a parking lot and started handing out eviction notices to residents, students, activists and other community members quickly rallied in support of the hotel’s tenants, sparking a nine-year battle to prevent evictions. And although the owners ultimately succeeded in removing all residents in 1977, the struggle for the I-Hotel formed a generation of activists in Chinatown, Pallasigue said.

“The struggle for the I-Hotel was about displacement, gentrification and the question: who belongs here?,” she said — adding that even within this movement, “there weren’t many queer leaders at the forefront because they tended to be pushed out.”

One of the younger I-Hotel tenants at the time of the 1977 evictions was Jeanette Lazam — one of the artists currently featured at Edge on the Square. During the struggle to save the I-Hotel, she pushed for Asian American activists from different generations to work together, all the while defying homophobia and sexism.

And when a group of nonprofits succeeded in transforming the former I-Hotel site into affordable housing, Lazam was one of the few surviving former tenants who returned.

Stop #6: Crossing Portsmouth Square pedestrian bridge, 745 Kearny St.

To wrap up your tour, head south to Portsmouth Square and step on the pedestrian bridge over Kearny Street. During the procession, Pallasigue and Zhu recalled that drag queens led the crowd across the bridge to the sound of taiko drums, with Pride flags flying high in the air. “This is the immortal runway,” Zhu said.

Ending the procession at the bridge was intentional, Zhu said — because this landmark will soon disappear.

As part of a city-led improvement project, the bridge is scheduled to be demolished later this year. But “even if the bridge goes away, even if these landmarks, one day, are physically gone, we still have the fact that we’ve brought all of these different people together — and they’re now telling these stories,” Pallasigue said. “We’ve woven ourselves into it.”

This story includes reporting from KQED’s Nastia Voynovskaya and Rae Alexandra and NPR’s Chloe Veltman.