'Danny's photos are a treasured artistic record of the people who initiated a movement from within their own neighborhood, and this work links that exuberant time to the larger history of LGBT people. This book is a very welcome addition to our enduring collective memory.' - Gus Van Sant. LGBT: San Francisco is the first book dedicated to photographer Daniel Nicoletta's archive of powerful images tracing the burgeoning lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender mecca that was San Francisco in the 1970s to its present. Nicoletta is perhaps most well-known for his iconic images of Harvey Milk, one of the world's first openly gay elected officials who was assassinated by a homophobic colleague in 1978, but Nicoletta's oeuvre is also a unique insider's perspective on the years that followed Milk's death taking us through the ebullience and the pathos of the times. Introduced by a foreword by Gus Van Sant and text by Chuck Mobley, LGBT: San Francisco is a stunning photographic work that is not to

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 energized the gay community. Includes excerpts from oral histories of lesbians and gay men who have lived in San Francisco since the 1930s.

Intelligently written and attractively illustrated and designed, this study of gay and lesbian history culture in San Francisco begins with the cross-dressing practices of 18th-century Native Americans and continues through to the signing of municipal transgender laws in 1995 in the "Gay Capital of the World." Some 300 well-chosen black-and- white and color photos document the history (though none are sexually explicit, there is some nudity). Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The End of San Francisco breaks apart the conventions of memoir to reveal the passions and perils of a life that refuses to conform to the rules of straight or gay normalcy. A budding queer activist escapes to San Francisco, in search of a world more politically charged, sexually saturated, and ethically consistent—this is the person who evolves into Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, infamous radical queer troublemaker, organizer and agitator, community builder and anti-assimilationist commentator. Here is the tender, provocative and exuberant story of the formation of one of the contemporary queer movement's most savvy and outrageous writers and spokespersons. Using an unrestrained associative style to move kaleidoscopically between past, present and future, Sycamore conjures the untidy push and pull of memory, exposing the tensions between idealism and critical engagement, trauma and self-actualization, inspiration and loss. Part memoir, part social history and part elegy, The End of San Francisco explores and explodes the dream of a radical queer community and the mythical city that was supposed to nurture it. "Mattilda is a dazzling writer of uncommon truths, a challenging writer who refuses to conform to conventionality. Her agitation is an inspiration."—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals “Author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the artistic love child of John Genet and David Wojnarowicz, deconstructing language swathed in unbridled sensuality, while flinging readers into a disrupted, chaotic life of queer anarchy.”—Gay and Lesbian Review "Bring on The End of San Francisco! And Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose new book has reinvented memoir without the predictable gloss of passive resolution. This book is undeniably brave and new, and the internal energy churning at its core is like nothing you've seen, heard or read before. I swear."—T. Cooper, author of Real Man Adventures "We hear so much about coming-of-age narratives that we seldom think about going-of-age—the shutting down and closure, the making sense of where we've been. Written with grace, reserve and the honest tremblings that come when things matter, Mattilda shows us that The End of San Francisco is really the beginning of joy."—Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive "It would be easy to describe The End of San Francisco as a Joycean 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Queer' (although the book's intense stream of consciousness is reminiscent of the later, more experimental, Joyce) . . . but this is misleading. This journey of a life that begins in the professional upper-middle class (both parents are therapists) and the Ivy League and moves to hustling, drugs, activism—Sycamore was active in ACT UP and Queer Nation—and queer bohemian grunge, is profoundly American. At heart, Sycamore is writing about the need to escape control through flight or obliteration."—Michael Bronski, San Francisco Chronicle

Unlike many social movements, the gay and lesbian struggle for visibility and rights has succeeded in combining a unified group identity with the celebration of individual differences. Forging Gay Identities explores how this happened, tracing the evolution of gay life and organizations in San Francisco from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.

This sweeping memoir tells the life story of longtime LGBTQ and AIDS activist Cleve Jones in a profoundly moving account from sexually liberated 1970s San Francisco, through the AIDS crisis, and up to his involvement with the marriage equality battle. Born in 1954, Cleve Jones was among the last generation of gay Americans who grew up wondering if there were others out there like himself. There were. Like thousands of other young people, Jones, nearly penniless, was drawn in the early 1970s to San Francisco, a city electrified by progressive politics and sexual freedom. Jones found community--in the hotel rooms and ramshackle apartments shared by other young adventurers, in the city's bathhouses and gay bars like The Stud, and in the burgeoning gay district, the Castro, where a New York transplant named Harvey Milk set up a camera shop, began shouting through his bullhorn, and soon became the nation's most outspoken gay elected official. With Milk's encouragement, Jones dove into politics and found his calling in "the movement." When Milk was killed by an assassin's bullet in 1978, Jones took up his mentor's progressive mantle--only to see the arrival of AIDS transform his life once again. By turns tender and uproarious, When We Rise is Jones' account of his remarkable life. He chronicles the heartbreak of losing countless friends to AIDS, which very nearly killed him, too; his co-founding of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation during the terrifying early years of the epidemic; his conception of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest community art project in history; the bewitching story of 1970s San Francisco and the magnetic spell it cast for thousands of young gay people and other misfits; and the harrowing, sexy, and sometimes hilarious stories of Cleve's passionate relationships with friends and lovers during an era defined by both unprecedented freedom and and violence alike. When We Rise is not only the story of a hero to the LQBTQ community, but the vibrantly voice memoir of a full and transformative American life. Lambda Literary Award Winner The partial inspiration for the ABC television mini-series! "You could read Cleve Jones's book because you should know about the struggle for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights from one of its key participants--maybe heroes--but really, you should read it for pleasure and joy."--Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me

"Menergy tells the story of a "post-disco" recording industry in San Francisco between the years 1978-1984. For most of America, disco died in 1979. Gay men, however, continued to dance, and in the gay enclave of the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, enterprising gay DJs, record producers, and musicians started their own small dance music record labels to make up for the lack of new, danceable music. These independent labels' music did more than copy what the larger industry had been doing, however. Instead, the upstart companies built upon the musical experiments their roster of local musicians and producers had been exploring over the last several years, developing a distinctive style of its own. Known as "high energy," the music reveled in electronics, fast tempos, disco and DJ culture, and, above all, gay liberation as it had emerged over the previous decade in the Castro neighborhood by so called "Castro clones" (a gay subculture of exaggerated masculinity with a strong presence in the city's nightlife). The sound, like the new revolutionary ethos, derived its aesthetic from San Francisco's unique configuration of elements, but immediately this music had a reach far beyond the Bay, with Megatone Records, Moby Dick Records, and other labels achieving worldwide success with San Francisco artists such as Sylvester, Patrick Cowley, Paul Parker, Lisa, Loverde, and Jolo, creating the world's first gay-owned, gay-produced music for a dancing audience"--