The Stud, San Francisco's Oldest LGBTQ Bar

Historical Essay

By Drew Bourn PhD MLIS for San Francisco Heritage, October 2025

Tie-dye banners and a flag festoon The Stud at its original location at 1535 Folsom Street. The bar’s entrance was on the far right in the photograph, adjacent to Norfolk Street.

Photo: Henri Leleu. Henri Leleu Papers (1997-13), The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

In 1976, Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City” column in the San Francisco Chronicle featured a comic scene in which a gay man named Michael Tolliver and his straight friend Brian Hawkins decide to go out on the town. Each man was hoping to find a sexual partner for the evening. Their dilemma was to determine where in San Francisco a gay man and a straight man could go cruising together. Their answer was a bar called The Stud.

Unlike Maupin’s fictional characters The Stud really existed, and it still exists today. In fact, it is San Francisco’s oldest LGBTQ bar and it has operated in three different South of Market locations.

The Stud’s three locations in the South of Market.

2025 map created by Drew Bourn using ArcGIS Online.

The bar was opened in 1966 by George Matson and a business partner who later came out as a trans woman named Alexis Muir.

Alexis Muir is commemorated with a bronze boot print on Ringold Alley in the South of Market. This is part of Jeffrey Miller’s 2017 permanent art installation, Leather Memoir, which commemorates people and institutions that contributed to the South of Market’s leather history.

Photo: Drew Bourn, 2025

The Stud’s initial location was 1535 Folsom near 12th Street, which put it on the western end of what soon become known as “the Miracle Mile” or the “Valley of the Kings”— a concentration of bars, bathhouses, and other businesses on and near Folsom Street that catered to gay men who were part of the leather scene. “Leather” is a subculture that emerged after WWII in which gay men drew inspiration from motorcycle clubs, the military, and other sources to imagine new and specifically queer kinds of masculinity. These men sought each other out for heightened sexual encounters involving role-play, bondage, and fetishes. Although The Stud was part of the Miracle Mile, it began with a country/western saloon theme. Also, unlike the decidedly male environs of the South of Market leather bars, The Stud drew a mixed crowd—which is what made the humor in the “Tales of the City” scene work. Marke Bieschke, a current co-owner of The Stud, has argued that it was the first bar on the Miracle Mile to hire women as bartenders and to welcome more femme gay men on Folsom. Rob Jones, who patronized the bar in the early 1970s, described the clientele as a younger hippie crowd where leather didn’t predominate. In 1981 Ellen Sadie wrote about her experience as a woman at The Stud:

No one’s sensibilities are shocked. No one gets the vapors. On the dance floor at the Stud I can get approval, get pleasure, get into my own rhythm or pick up someone else’s.

Until approximately 1970 some of The Stud’s patrons also enjoyed going to an after-hours venue in the same building called the Universal Life Corral. Tom Ammiano, later San Francisco Supervisor and member of the California State Assembly, recalls,

It was a space set up like a church so it could stay open all night, and everyone would have sex and do a lot of drugs. There was a woman at the door—I think her nickname was Quaaluda or Quaalina—who would give you the run-down before you went in.

Still, homophobes reacted to the bar’s unabashed queerness. A vitriolic article by Robert Patterson in the San Francisco Examiner in October 1969 singled out The Stud as one of the “traps” on Folsom Street where gay men “gather for their sick, sad revels.” Activists responded by picketing outside the Examiner offices at 5th and Mission streets. When purple printer’s ink was dumped on the protesters from above, the activists covered the Examiner building with inked handprints in what became known as the “Friday of the Purple Hand.” Homophobes continued to target The Stud in other ways, though—including police harassment of patrons leaving the bar. In one altercation in December 1970, police shot 27-year-old San Francisco State student Charlie Christman in the back, elbow, and ankle.

But the bar persisted. Over the years it has changed owners and locations more than once. By the mid-1970s Jim “Lady Edie” Fleckenstein became owner. A rent increase in 1987 prompted him to relocate The Stud to 399 9th Street, on the corner of 9th and Harrison. Upon his death in 1994 Fleckenstein left The Stud in the hands of his partner Larry “LaRue” Holloway and his accountant Ben “Fiesta” Guibord. Michael McElheney joined Holloway and Guibord as an owner in 1997; both LaRue and Guibord passed away in the following years. In 2016, when the landlord increased the rent at 399 9th Street, McElheney retired and turned ownership of the bar over to The Stud Collective, a group of nightclub professionals that now includes seventeen members. This group was initially organized as a worker-owned cooperative; by 2018 it was operating as a collective with employees. The Covid-19 pandemic closed The Stud in 2020 but the bar re-opened in 2024 in its third and current location at 1123 Folsom near 7th Street.

In looking back over The Stud’s history, it is not only the eclectic mix of the people that has made the bar distinctive. Art has also played a significant role. At the time of The Stud’s opening in 1966 Michael Caffee and Chuck Arnett did interior design work on the bar; their art figured prominently in other venues on the South of Market’s Miracle Mile. There is a long roster of artists whose work was featured in temporary exhibits in The Stud: John Bix, Lou Rudolph, Andrew Toller, and Ramon Vidali are only a few among many. Live performances at The Stud ranged from local artists like the Popstitutes and Pearl Heart to stars like R&B legend Etta James and disco diva Sylvester (In 1979, when San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt presented the Key to the City to Sylvester, Britt announced that he first saw Sylvester perform at The Stud). Marke Bieschke has asserted that The Stud was the first gay bar in the South of Market where DJs spun new wave, punk, and hip hop. Club organizers presented weekly or monthly events that catered to specific audiences, such as “Girl Spot,” “Klubstitute,” “Junk,” and “Trannyshack,” a long-running nightclub and variety show presided over by the late drag legend Heklina (in response to transgender activists Heklina rebranded the nightclub as “Mother” in 2015 as it changed venues in the South of Market). The B-52s, John Waters, Lady Gaga and other artists came to The Stud to dance and enjoy the shows.

Undated club flyer: Undated flyer for one of the many clubs held at The Stud. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is a 1982 autobiography by Black lesbian writer Audre Lorde. Lorde said she learned the word “Zami” from her Caribbean mother as “a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.”

San Francisco LGBT Business Ephemera Collection, The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

In addition to the many forms of art that contributed to the experience of The Stud, a wide range of events at the bar also brought members of the community together. Some of these were light-hearted, such as the “Come as Your Mother” drag contest in 1991. Others were more in earnest, including benefits for activist organizations such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Yet others were more reflective, including memorials—such as the 2019 tribute to Gene Barnes, whose erotic hippie art evoked the long-haired bearded young men who made up so many of The Stud’s earliest patrons.

1990 flyer for Godfather Service Fund: A benefit for the Godfather Service Fund, a San Francisco direct service program for people with AIDS. The benefit was held in honor of Stud bartender Greg Douthwaite, who had died the previous month.

San Francisco LGBT Business Ephemera Collection, The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors established the Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District in the South of Market in 2018, the ribbon-cutting ceremony took place in front of the Stud—a testimony to the bar’s long-standing prominence in the neighborhood.

The Stud was added to the San Francisco Legacy Business Registry on November 28, 2016.

Sources

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