Before the riots at New York City’s Stonewall Inn in 1969 and at the Compton’s Cafeteria at Turk Street in San Francisco three years prior, San Francisco’s LGBT community experienced a pivotal moment in which they had to fight for their rights in the face of police harassment and intimidation.

San Francisco has long taken a socially open-minded attitude toward homosexuality. Its earliest settlers were mostly men who migrated west to make their fortune prospecting for gold, resulting in a disproportionately high ratio of men to women. Over the decades however, tensions arose between the gay community and the City’s

With the Stud closing in 2020 (though currently “alive” in a sort suspended animation) South of Market’s the Eagle becomes the oldest currently operating leather bar in San Francisco. But the Eagle has taken a beating over the last ten years too; the bar announced it would close in 2011,