GLBT Historical Society Museum

Located in San Francisco's Castro District, The GLBT History Museum is the first full-scale, stand-alone museum of its kind in the United States. The museum celebrates 100 years of the city's vast queer past through dynamic and surprising exhibitions and programming. Celebrating San Francisco's GLBT History  To honor the GLBT Historical Society's 25th anniversary, the curators of "Our Vast Queer Past" burrowed into every corner of the society's extraordinary archives. To spark the topics for the show, we picked an inspirational object from virtually every year the society has been acquiring collections. Our objectives: raising new questions about familiar gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender stories and evoking largely untold stories that speak eloquently about our diversity. The resulting exhibition offers a kaleidoscopic view of nearly a century of queer experience in San Francisco and the Bay Area. It does not form a single narrative; our history is too varied and unruly to be limited in that way. Instead, we bring together multiple stories, sometimes interlinking, sometimes isolated, sometimes in conflict.All of them reflect deeply human themes: the search for companionship and pleasure; the struggle for self-determination and respect in an often-hostile society; the value of individual and collective expression; and the spirit, ingenuity and wit that have been keys to our survival.