San Francisco

San Francisco has the highest proportion of LGBT population in the United States, around 15% in the city and 6.2% in the metro area according to Gallup in 2015. The scene is split across three poles: the Castro, classic and social, by day and by night, SoMa, with leather, circuit parties and late sessions, and the Mission, with the Latino queer, lesbian and alternative ends.

The offer has fallen from a peak of 118 gay bars in 1973 to the 33 of 2011, with closures one after another in SoMa and Polk. Even so it remains one of the densest LGBTQI+ ecosystems in the world, with legendary bars such as Twin Peaks, open since 1972, and the Stud, leather bars such as the SF Eagle, from 1981, and a calendar of street fairs that fills the year.

SF Pride has been held on the last weekend of June since 1970 and is one of the biggest in the country, with historic attendance around a million people. The parade runs along Market Street between Steuart and 8th, from half past ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. In 2025 the event went through a crisis, with corporate sponsors pulling out and its future financial sustainability called into question.

Outside June there is the Folsom Street Fair, on the last Sunday of September, the leather community's big street fair, with between 250,000 and 400,000 people. Also the Castro Street Fair, in October, and the Trans March and Dyke March, on the Friday and Saturday of Pride weekend. And the National AIDS Memorial Grove, in Golden Gate Park, is open all year.

The Castro is one of the first gay neighbourhoods in the United States. Its LGBT identity dates from the late sixties, as a side effect of the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, and settled in the seventies, when Harvey Milk opened his shop Castro Camera in 1973 and started his political career.

The core is the junction of Castro and 18th, which acts as the axis for marches and memorials. Around it are Harvey Milk Plaza, beside the metro station, the GLBT Historical Society Museum, the first stand-alone LGBT museum in the country, opened in 2011, Pink Triangle Park, on the corner of 17th and Market, dedicated to the LGBT victims of Nazism, the Castro Theatre, from 1922, and the Rainbow Honor Walk, with its plaques set into the pavement. The metro stop is Castro, on the K, T, L and M lines.

San Francisco was the cradle of the modern US LGBT movement. The Daughters of Bilitis were born here, in 1955, the first lesbian organisation of national reach, along with the Tavern Guild, in 1962, the first gay business association, the Society for Individual Rights, in 1964, which within a few years was the country's largest homophile organisation, and Vanguard, in 1965, of LGBT young people in the Tenderloin.

Among health services, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation runs the Strut clinic, in the Castro, with PrEP, rapid testing and sexual health care. Lyon-Martin Health Services specialises in LGBTQI+ people and in women, and UCSF's Alliance Health Project in mental health. The GLBT Historical Society, from 1985, keeps one of the largest LGBT archives in the world. And the National AIDS Memorial Grove, in Golden Gate Park, is a national memorial.