Customer Reviews

Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
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2 star:		(1)
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What an excellent book about one of my favorite places on earth! I was especially impressed by the authors' commitment to archiving the history of the LGBT movement but highlight the contributions and challenges that people of color within the LGBT community have brought to the achievements and complexities of the LGBT community. Also, an abundance of pictures, captions, and graphics to assist in chronicling such a rich and diverse movement. Bravo!

This well researched book is also quite entertaining. While I bought it for its scholorship, it also serves as a nice "coffee table" book. Guests in my home enjoy thumbing through its many illustrations. This is a MUST HAVE.

As a long time gay resident of San Francisco, I was thrilled when this historical pictoral tome came out way back then.
I bought the book and have it sitting proudly on my coffee table - after all these years.
It has great text and even more wonderful photos of personalities and memorabilia from decades of historical gay & lesbian San Francisco. Van Buslkirk and Stryker know their stuff and I appreciate all the research and the historical facts that come out in this masterfully produced work.
The photos are well reporduced and there is even the great reprodcution of the hilarious 1982 SURRENDER DIANE campaign poster from Sister Boom Boom's historical SF supervisorial run against then and unpoular Mayor Diane Feinstein. Classic. BUY THIS BOOK.

This book works as an entertainment, but as a research book it trips itself by not indexing everyone and everything mentioned in the body of the text. For example, check out the "Robert Mapplethorpe and Jack Fritscher" connection --as well as San Francisco's own Gay-Bay "Drummer" magazine itself-- all on page 134, and then try to find these two people and that singular magazine in the index. This is just one instance of sloppy indexing and sloppier scholarship that mars this volume,and the integrity of the editors--at least to this anal-retentive buyer of historical books. The two editors seem asleep at the wheel, relying on researchers who lack an overview. They should have paid attention. Armistead Maupin in his superficial introduction takes the usual cheap, gay potshot at Judaism and Christianity for the woes suffered by lesbigay culture, when he could have done so much more with the opportunity of the two pages to theorize/talk about the actual Gay-Bay culture itself. Obviously, his name is exploited as an advertising device for a kind of cover "endorsement".