Author’s Talk

Wide-Open Town traces the history of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco from the turn of the century, when queer bars emerged in San Francisco's tourist districts, to 1965, when a raid on a drag ball changed the course of queer history. Using police and court records, oral histories, tourist literature, and manuscript collections from local and state archives, Nan Alamilla Boyd explains the phenomenal growth of San Francisco as a "wide-open town"—a town where anything goes. She also relates the early history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement that took place in San Francisco prior to 1965.

 

Nan Boyd is an historian of San Francisco’s LGBTQ communities, and she was a professor for many years at San Francisco State University. In 2003, she published Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco (UC Press). Currently, she is the Director of Home Match San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that matches people with an extra room in their home with people looking for a place to live.