Center ED pens welcome
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Museums & galleries
ARTS
The State of the Movement
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Best LGBTQ films of 2025
The
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Serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities since 1971
Vol. 56 • No. 1 • January 1-7, 2026
LGBTQ laws take effect by Matthew S. Bajko
John Ferrannini
A rave was held in Chinatown last January 8 to celebrate Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration.
Lurie bets on events to revive SF by John Ferrannini
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hen Daniel Lurie became mayor of San Francisco on January 8, 2025, he invited the city not to an inaugural parade or ball – but to an inaugural rave. For Mary Conde, a straight ally who is a senior vice president at concert promoter Another Planet Entertainment, it was a labor of love. In about a two-week timeframe, Conde put together a show headlining San Francisconative electronic music producer Zhu for a free event on Grant Street in Chinatown. “There’s always this fear, ‘Is anyone going to show up?’ when you throw a free party,” Conde told the Bay Area Reporter. “It quickly became apparent we were the party of the year. The mayor and his family were out in it. It was crazy. He’s in the middle of 25,000 people.” The inaugural rave was just one part of a strategy to get people on the streets of San Francisco, particularly downtown – a strategy Mission Local columnist Joe Eskenazi described as leaning “heavily on getting young people drunk.” And not without reason. Early on, Lurie co-sponsored legislation by gay state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) to create 20 new liquor licenses downtown. Governor Gavin Newsom, a former San Francisco mayor himself, signed the bill into law in October. Wiener has been working for years at loosening rules around liquor sales for outdoor consumption. Senate Bill 76 in 2023 and SB 969 in 2024 gave the city the ability to define particular times and places for outdoor parties. Older events such as the Castro Street Fair joined newer ones – particularly night markets in the Castro and elsewhere that had been sponsored by the Civic Joy Fund (a venture co-founded by Lurie before his mayoral run) – in taking advantage, and drawing San Franciscans out of their homes for liquor, but also for merchants plying their wares, arts and crafts, food trucks, DJs, and drag performances. One of those events, Downtown First Thursdays, drew 300,000 people in 2025 and had an estimated $27.9 million in economic impact, Civic Joy Fund announced. West Walker, a gay nightlife promoter, has been involved in producing aspects of the event. He told the B.A.R. he’s glad the city’s government has been so supportive. “You can’t help but feel that San Francisco is healing,” he stated. Lurie, in turn, provides these events with visibility by featuring them on his social media platforms, much as with restaurants. Nate Bourg, a gay man who is president of the Castro Merchants Association, likes that Lurie has been around the Castro. “His presence at Castro community events – including the Castro night markets, and the recent holiday tree and menorah lightings – has also stood out to me as a genuine sign of his allyship with our LGBTQ+ community, and an understanding that showing up truly matters,” Bourg stated. See page 6 >>
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mprovements to transgender, nonbinary, and queer Californians’ health care privacy and access are coming in the new year due to a number of bills taking effect as of January 1. New protections are also being implemented for providers of gender-affirming care, while safeguards for LGBTQ youth are being bolstered. Most are due to laws passed in 2025, though a trio of bills signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2024 had implementation dates in 2026. Senate Bill 1491 by now termed out lesbian state Senator Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton) requires the California Student Aid Commission to provide, beginning with the 2026-27 school year, written notice to college students who receive state financial aid if their postsecondary educational institution has an exemption from either the Equity in Higher Education Act or Title IX on file with the commission. Often, religious-based colleges will seek exemptions in order not to comply with providing protections covered by the rules to LGBTQ students on their campuses. The state commission had only been required to post which schools have exemptions online. Due to Assembly Bill 3161 by Assemblymember Mia Bonta (D-Oakland), as of January 1 hospitals will need to analyze patient safety events by sociodemographic factors, like race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, and disability status.
Courtesy the Assemblymember’s website
Assemblymember Mia Bonta’s Equity in Health Care Act: Ensuring Safety and Accountability goes into effect January 1.
Dubbed the Equity in Health Care Act: Ensuring Safety and Accountability, it aims to bring to light the disparities in health that communities of color and LGBTQ communities are facing. Additionally, AB 3161 requires hospital safety plans to include a process for addressing racism and discrimination and its impacts on patient health and safety. And AB 1899 passed by lesbian state Senator Sabrina Cervantes (D-Corona) when she was in the lower legislative chamber requires jury questionnaires used by state courts as of January 1 to
allow “a juror the ability to express their gender identity or gender expression, if applicable.” It is meant to make the jury selection process more inclusive for gender-nonconforming individuals. The state’s Judicial Council has until July 1 to develop forms and rules to implement SB 59 by gay state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and known as the Transgender Privacy Act. After that date, court records related to the gender transitions of transgender and nonbinary adults in California will be sealed in order to protect their privacy, similar to the protections afforded trans and nonbinary youth under the age of 18 by a state law that took effect in 2024. “This bill ensures the confidentiality of court records related to gender transition, providing a life-saving layer of protection for transgender and nonbinary adults and youth against the harassment and hostility that currently seeks to track and endanger our community members. Every time we codify dignity into law, we establish a stronger foundation for the future,” noted California LGBTQ+ Health and Human Services Network Director Dannie Ceseña, who is TwoSpirit and Native. Wiener’s SB 59 does not apply retroactively, so those individuals who already went through the judicial process to change their name, gender, and/or sex need to file a petition with the courts requesting their records be kept confidential. See page 6 >>
SF, long a queer safe haven, remains competitive for homebuyers by John Ferrannini
The latest available data from The Urban Institute reveals that the homeownership rate for individuals identifying as LGBTQ+ stands at 51%, in contrast to 71% for those who identify as both straight and cisgender. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, at least 1.3 million same-sex couples reside in the U.S., meaning a significant number of LGBTQ people in this country do not own their own homes.
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GBTQ people have a variety of housing options when they’re lucky enough to be able to afford property. In San Francisco – long considered a safe haven for the queer community – individual needs have to be weighed both against the city’s chronic housing shortage and a competitive but often lucrative job market. After a lull of several years, the city’s real estate market has heated up in recent months, driven by the city’s economic recovery post-COVID lockdowns and the artificial intelligence boom. For Rick Page, 68, and Anthony Farace, 57, both gay men, the job market was a top reason to move back to the city after they’d left the Bay Area five years ago. Page said the couple had left behind a “huge home in a town called Oakhurst, on the way to Yosemite.” When moving back to San Francisco they wanted to balance suburban and downtown vibes, Farace said, leading them to settle in Diamond Heights, a tiny neighborhood built atop three hills above Noe Valley, that has suburban sensibilities but isn’t too far from downtown. “In the summer it’s a little foggy but it’s nicer up here the rest of the time, and where it felt like you aren’t downtown where it’s just concrete and buildings,” Farace said. Added Page, “It sounds goofy, but if there’s a tsunami, it won’t get all the way up here.” Page said that in the spring the couple initially bought a relatively small studio in Diamond Heights. But they found that it didn’t meet their needs and purchased a second studio unit nearby that did. They closed on the larger condo unit in October. “It just didn’t have any kind of patio or outdoor thing for the dog,” Page said of their first studio, “so we saw something upgraded with a kitchen redone, nice hardwood floors, a fireplace, a sunny patio, so it was much nicer. We bought that one, now we have to figure out what to do with the first one.” The first unit was $450,000 and the second $520,000, they stated.
Close to the Castro Rick Gerharter
San Francisco’s LGBTQ Castro neighborhood is seeing an uptick in home purchases, local real estate agents said.
The couple also mentioned a lack of some of the downtown, South of Market, and Mission District street disorder that garnered negative headlines in the past several years. The couple also noted that Diamond Heights is more affordable than traditionally high-priced Russian Hill, which is closer to downtown. Nevertheless, “The employment, the social life is better” in San Francisco, Page added. Federal data shows many LGBTQ people want to own a home. Fannie Mae, the government sponsored enterprise that buys home loans, does have some LGBT data, according to research from 2023 that was published in 2024. The data is the result of sexual orientation and gender identity identifiers in the National Housing Survey. It did not ask about queer representation. According to the report, 8.6% of respondents identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender – similar to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. The survey included responses from a weighted total of 12,363 people 18 years and older, with a weighted total of 1,059 identifying as LGBT. The research found the LGBT homeownership rate to be 46%, which is much lower than the overall U.S. homeownership rate of 65%.
In San Francisco, the Diamond Heights neighborhood is just a half-hour walk from the Castro, and even shorter on the bus. Charlie Mader is a gay man who has been a Realtor in San Francisco for “just under 25 years,” with a particular emphasis on Diamond Heights, the Castro, and Noe Valley. He said that while many LGBTQ people want to live relatively close to a queer neighborhood, such as the Castro, “It’s not like it used to be.” Even in spite of a recent backlash to LGBTQ equality in the mid-2020s, leading to a number of federal policies largely targeting transgender and gender-nonconforming people, Mader said that since marriage equality, “You hear ‘There’s no need for us to live together in a gay ghetto,’ and we’re interspersed throughout the community and the country.” Marriage equality became legal in California in June 2013, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex unions legal nationwide in 2015. Mader said marriage equality helped incentivize more LGBTQ home-buying due to an old Clinton administration tax law that gave married couples favorable tax incentives versus single homebuyers. But even within the City-by-the-Bay, the distinction between neighborhoods is not as stark. “I hear the Mission is just as gay as the Castro is, and the food is better,” Mader said. “I can’t argue with that.” See page 7 >>