Maud's was a lesbian bar at 937 Cole Street in San Francisco's Cole Valley neighborhood which opened in 1966 and closed in 1989. At the time of its closing, which was captured in the film, Last Call at Maud's, it was claimed to be the oldest lesbian bar in the United States. Its history, documented in the film and other media, spanned almost a quarter-century of LGBTQ events.
History 1960s Maud's was opened in 1966 by Rikki Streicher, a San Francisco lesbian and gay rights activist who would later go on to open another women's bar, Amelia's, and become a co-founder of the Gay Games. It was originally called "The Study", and later "Maud's Study." As women were not allowed to be employed as bartenders in California until 1971, Streicher hired male bartenders and tended the bar herself. Streicher stated about the creation of Maud's, "I've always felt that bars were the most honest, open, free place that women could go," and that she founded Maud's with a "no labels" policy, welcoming women who did not fit the butch/femme dress and manners code preferred by some other lesbian bars."Heather Cassell, Maud's and Amelia's Made Space for Women," Bay Area Reporter, 3 November 2010, in Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History
In 1967, the Haight-Ashbury became the center of the hippie movement's Summer of Love, bringing in new cultural mores with a new generation of lesbian and bisexual women, some of whom became regulars at Maud's. One patron of the bar was legendary singer Janis Joplin, who would visit Maud's with her lover Jae Whitaker. Other notable patrons of that era were Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, poet Judy Grahn, and academic and activist Sally Gearhart. Maud's, said historian Nan Alamilla Boyd, was a "clubhouse, community center and bar" that served to "bridge the gap between San Francisco's lesbian community and its hippie generation."
In her memoir Making Butch, Sue-Ellen Case describes her first visit to Maud's in 1966:
I pushed open its plain black door to discover two dimly light rooms. The long bar occupied the first room. It was illuminated by various neon ads for beers, the warm, orange light from the juke box, and the garish surround of the pinball machine. The other room afforded a central view of the pool table, with its low-hanging lamp and a few tables along the walls. The old butch-femme scene hunkered down at the end of the bar itself, while a few hippie dykes straggled in to sit at the tables. ... The two groups eyed each other with suspicion.Sue Ellen Case, “Making Butch,” a historical memoir of the 1970's, in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, edited by Sally Munt, Cherry Smyth, A&C Black, 1998, p. 37.
Another former patron, trans woman Suzan Cooke, remembers how police cars would park near the bar to intimidate its patrons:
[One night] I was coming back from this place, and I was wearing a black leather jacket and boots and jeans and a turtleneck t-shirt. Semi-longish hair ... Then the good old Tac squad boys came rolling along. And sometimes they would — well, later they pretty much always would — park a cop car right outside Maud's. Or near Maud's, as a form of intimidation ... They had the cameras out. Because there was still at this time a "let's keep track of the queers" mentality.
1970s With the Stonewall riots of 1969, the gay liberation era had begun, and LGBTQ people flocked to San Francisco, which was rapidly becoming a "gay mecca' for young people looking for a place to be themselves.John D'Emilio, “Gay Politics, Gay Community” in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University, Psychology Press, 1997, p. 87 While many gay men moved to the Castro district, many women were attracted to the lower rents of Valencia Street in the Mission District, creating businesses and non-profit organizations. "By the mid-1970s," writes historian John D'Emilio, "San Francisco had become, in comparison with the rest of the country, a liberated zone for lesbians and gay men.D'Emilio, Making Trouble, p. 87.
Women's bars like Maud's, explained ex-patron Cheryl Gonzales in an oral history, "were communities. They were families ... there was a cliquish component also, but there was a real sense of belonging. If you were having problems in your personal life or if you couldn't make your rent. ... people would really rally together. If someone had, ie. breast cancer or something, people would set up funds."Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Talking About Sex”, an interview with Rikki Streicher and Cheryl Gonzales, Bodies of Evidence, The Practice of Queer Oral History, Oxford University Press, Feb 6, 2012 "For gay men and lesbians", wrote LGBT historians Johnson and Summers, "the centrality of bars to community life has probably been truer than it has for any other community group."Gay and Lesbian Bars by Matthew D. Johnson; Claude J. Summers, GLBTQ Archives Other San Francisco lesbian bars of the 1970s, included Peg's Place, which initially had a dress code and drew a more conservative crowd,Vice.com The History of Lesbian Bars by Nicole Pasulka Scott's Pitt, home to "leather-clad motorcycle women and old school dykes",Bob Powers, Alan Ellis, A Family and Friend's Guide to Sexual Orientation: Bridging the Divide Between Gay and Straight, Routledge, Dec 2, 2013, p. 137 Wild Side West, which started in the bohemian era of North Beach,April Sinclair, Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice: A Novel, Open Road Media, Aug 18, 2015 Leonarda's, with a strong butch-femme culture,Alamilla Boyd, Bodies of Evidence, p. 100 Amelia's, and A Little More, both dance clubs which drew a varied crowd.Eric Marcus, "Rikki Streicher and the Lesbian Bar," Out in All Directions: A Treasury of Gay and Lesbian America, Grand Central Publishing, Sep 26, 2009Ain't Gonna Be the Same Fool Twice: A Novel, April Sinclair Open Road Media, Aug 18, 2015
In the late 70's, Maud's and its sister bar Amelia's formed the first women's softball teams in the growing Gay Softball League. As other lesbian bars in the San Francisco Bay Area created their own teams, bars competed against each other on public playgrounds, while fans gathered to root for their teams, and the winning bar hosted drinks for everyone afterwards. Pool tournaments were another social activity that bar patrons participated in.Deborah Goleman Wolf, The Lesbian Community: With an Afterword, 1980 University of California Press, 1980, p. 103 Maud's also hosted variety shows, poetry readings, and a bowling team.Bonnie Zimmerman Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures, Routledge, Aug 21, 2013, p. 665
Writer Judy Grahn recalls how, during the 1970s movement of second wave feminism, she tried to bridge the gap between old-school lesbians and a newer more politicized generation by putting a political bookrack in Maud's to generate discussion: "While we hoped that people would sober up and turn the bar into a place of political discussion and interaction, instead, everything heated up socially as more and more women came out and joined the lesbian subculture."
Despite the plethora of lesbian bars and the 70's wave of gay and feminist liberation, Maud's bartender and later bar manager Susan Fahey remembers that the bar was once closed by an undercover police officer who saw a woman touching another woman's neck and recalls that as late as 1976, she would flick the lights on and off to warn patrons that the police were coming and to make sure no touching was going on. The Briggs Initiative, which would have prevented gay people from teaching in public schools, the election of Harvey Milk as the city's first gay supervisor and his subsequent assassination, and the 1978 attack on Peg's Place by off-duty members of the San Francisco Police were all issues that affected the San Francisco gay community, and the lesbian patrons of Maud's, during that time.We thought the world we built would be forever: An Interview with Lenn Keller By Adrienne Skye Roberts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Open Space, June 12, 2012
1980s In the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis devastated the gay community of San Francisco, more gay and lesbian bar patrons began to adopt a 'clean and sober' lifestyle and look for other ways to meet each other.Last Call at Maud's, Paris Poirier, 1993. Kelly Hankin, The Girls in the Back Room: Looking at the Lesbian Bar University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 148 Organizations like the Bay Area Career Women offered lesbian professionals other social and networking venues.Lesbian Connection, Winter, 1986-87Bay Area Women's Yellow Pages, 1986-87 The eighties also saw the emergence of Lipstick lesbians and a turn away from the androgyny of the 70's back towards a butch-femme aesthetic. Women began to look for nightclubs where they could dress up and show off.George Haggerty, Bonnie Zimmerman, Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures Taylor & Francis, Sep 2, 2003 More exclusive, upscale clubs for queer and bisexual women like Clementina's Baybrick Inn, which offered a hostel and cabaret entertainment, provided alternatives to the neighborhood bar of the 60's and 70's.J ames Paul, The Center Of Strange In San Francisco The Washington Post; June 24, 1984 Maud's, however, continued to attract its regulars as well as new patrons. Democratic politician Carole Migden began her political career when she decided to run for city supervisor during a conversation at Maud's.
Then, in 1989, after twenty-three years in business, owner Rikki Streicher announced that the bar would close. In addition to the trend towards sobriety, and the growing availability of establishments and organizations where women could meet, Maud's once free-wheeling, countercultural clientele "had gotten more middle class, moved to the suburbs, and bought houses." and business had deteriorated as a result.
Depictions in culture and media On September 9, 1989, Maud's served its last drink. The event was documented in Paris Poirier's 1993 film Last Call at Maud's, which featured interviews with Streicher, bar manager Susan Fahey, and some of the bartenders, as well as patrons Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Judy Grahn, and Sallie Gearhard, and others. The film blends their reminiscences of Maud's with vintage footage to look at Maud's in the context of the history of lesbian bars from the 1940s through the 1980s. Patrons, known as "Maudies", reflect on the fun they had, the secretive and outlaw nature of lesbian bars, the bars' role in women's and LGBT history, and their capacity to change lives.Rebecca M. Alvin, Finding Your Tribe: Revisiting Lesbian Bar Culture in Last Call at Maud’s, Provincetown Magazine, OCTOBER 9, 2013 The film was screened internationally and received positive reviews from press that included The New York Times, the Village Voice, Variety, and the Toronto Star. "What makes Last Call at Maud's so interesting," notes the Village Voice, "are the intersection of the sweep of history with the smallness of one social circle. It's as if the cultural moment and the tiny bar stand off, each alternately throwing down a card across the notion of history, each card changing the game. "Martha Baer, 'Last Call At Maud's, Village Voice, 1993