From 1965 to 1970, Jonathan Raymond, a gay filmmaker who lived in San Francisco, created a documentary titled Gay San Francisco. In this film, which was made over 50 years ago, he documented LGBTQ+ life in the city, capturing stories from the nightlife, filming bars, events, and other important venues for the community.

Raymond interviewed drag queens, trans women, gay men and lesbians about their time in San Francisco. The result was an hour-long documentary that is free to watch through the Internet Archive, and California Revealed, which both split the film into two different videos.

The documentary was never screened in its entirety and was thought to be lost for decades, until filmmakers Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman stumbled upon it while working on their own award-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot At Compton’s Cafeteria.

Then, in 2017, the Tenderloin Museum and the California Preservation Program restored the footage and edited it into a full film. 

The documentary is an 18+ film which includes scenes of intimacy, which, at the time, were acts of rebellion and love. The interviews discuss topics about how safe it was to be LGBTQ+ in San Francisco and the trouble members of the community had with the law.

Raymond’s project also takes the viewer inside San Francisco’s leather bars and offers glimpses into the city’s vibrant drag scene, as well as the shops that catered to the community. There is a drag show in the second half of the film, putting the viewer in a world that is similar to now but also a completely different world.

 

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The documentary also dives into explaining what cruising is, where it happens, and what the scenes were like for lesbian and gay parties.

It is important to preserve films such as this to keep our history alive and to keep our cultural knowledge alive. The film shows us that LGBTQ+ people have always been around, and we will always find a way to be around.