The GLBT Historical Society Museum, located in the heart of San Francisco’s Castro District, is the first stand-alone museum of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender history and culture in the United States. At 1,600 square feet (150 square meters), the museum, while small, packs a powerful punch, celebrating the city’s vast queer past through dynamic and surprising exhibitions and programming.

Open since January 2011, the museum showcases the sheer depth and breadth of the GLBT Historical Society’s archives, demonstrates the importance of queer history to the public, and mounts wide-ranging exhibitions with an emphasis on diversity and social justice. The museum contains three gallery spaces for exhibitions.

Our powerful Main Gallery exhibition, “Queer Past Becomes Present,” documents the queer presence in the Bay Area from as far back as the Spanish explorers and missionaries to the present and features rich multimedia drawn from our archival collections. Our two other galleries, the Front Gallery and the Community Gallery, are dedicated to rotating exhibitions on a range of themes.