Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social ...
Erotic Resistance: The Struggle for the Soul of San Francisco celebrates the erotic performance cultures that have shaped San Francisco. It preserves the memory of the city’s bohemian past and its essential role in the development of American adult entertainment by highlighting the con...
California History is pleased to announce the winner of the Richard J. Orsi prize for the best article published in the journal in 2022. The committee unanimously selected Warren C. Wood’s “S. An-Sky’s The Dybbuk and the Process of Jewish American Identity in 1920s San Francisco” (Cal...
By Eric Porter, author of A People’s History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport
For many people, airports may seem like alienating “nonplaces”—as anthropologist Marc Augé put it—where we rush to make connections and spend long, monotonous hours waiting for delayed flight...
By Kimberly Hannon Teal, author of Jazz Places: How Performance Spaces Shape Jazz History
In some ways, it’s completely unremarkable that pianist Fred Hersch spent his 66th birthday earlier this October recording a live album at the Village Vanguard in New York City with guitarist Juli...
Out today, Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis is the first in-depth biography of Sam Francis, the legendary American abstract painter who broke all the rules in his personal and artistic life.
The following passage is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Light on Fire: The Art and...
As we begin National Hispanic Heritage Month, we invited Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture contributor Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa to talk about her ALAA award-winning article “Metamorphic and Sensuous Brown Bodies: Queer Latina/x Visual and Performance Cultures in San Francisco S...
In the past decade, Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker, and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro—aided by local writers, artists, historians, urbanists, ethnographers, and cartographers—have compiled three stunning atlases that have radically changed the way we think about place....