Tenderloin Museum partners with Unspeakable Vice to offer a new walking tour on queer history in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Polk Street neighborhoods, focusing on the 1960s-1990s. TLM members have the opportunity to experience it first–space is limited, register today!

Saturday, October 26th, 2024 | 2-4pm

Meet at Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Tenderloin Museum is thrilled to partner with Unspeakable Vice, “a volunteer history initiative making queer belonging accessible to everyone,” to offer a new walking tour focused on the LGBTQIA+ history in the Tenderloin and Polk Street neighborhoods. Created by downtown San Francisco resident and professor at California College of the Arts Shawn Sprockett, Unspeakable Vice began as a close look at the queer origins of San Francisco, traversing the city’s North Beach and Barbary Coast areas to trace the history through from 1770-1960. This new tour extends Sprockett’s richly detailed and craftily delivered approach to the TL and Polk Street to offer a deep dive into the emergence of LGBTQIA+ icons and movements that shaped the area from the 1960s to the 1990s. 

The “Valley of the Queens” tour highlights key events such as the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, a landmark action of trans resistance that predates the Stonewall Riots, and the site of San Francisco’s first Pride parade. The tour also uncovers lesser-known yet significant histories, including a drag ball raided by the San Francisco Police Department that was defended by local Christian ministers—showing how a diverse coalition of activists, sex workers, and religious leaders helped shape the foundations of queer San Francisco.

“The Tenderloin and Polk Street areas are filled with stories of courage and defiance,” says tour creator Shawn Sprockett. “These are stories not just of struggle but of triumph, community, and the formation of an identity that has influenced the broader queer movement nationwide.”

“Valley of the Queens” (open to all) will happen monthly starting on October 27th. Learn more about the tour–and the Unspeakable Vice North Beach tour–at unspeakablevice.tours. For the upcoming monthly “Valley of the Queens” tour, book your ticket through the Tenderloin Museum to support the organization and keep queer community history thriving in the TL. 

Free for Tenderloin Museum members! Become one to join!

Email info@tendelroinmuseum.org to reserve your spot

Join Unspeakable Vice for a neighborhood/community focus group in advance of the new “Valley of the Queens” walking tour of LGBTQIA+ history in the Tenderloin & Lower Polk neighborhoods.

Wednesday October 2, 2024 | 6-7pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Unspeakable Vice is a local gay-owned-and-operated volunteer historical tour group that is researching a new walking tour around the Tenderloin’s LGBTQ history. We are seeking the input and perspective of former and current Tenderloin residents, especially concerning transgender experiences and those of queer People of Color. Please attend this early preview of the tour’s intended content and help ensure all stories are heard.

Free to attend | No registration required

Dancer, researcher, and master practitioner of Bharatanatyam Preethi Ramaprasad premieres a new work of dance on film created during her time as an artist in residence(AIR) at the San Francisco Public Library as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s AIR Program, paired with a special walking tour of the Tenderloin’s rich South Asian history.

Thursday, September 26 | 6-7pm walking tour | 7-8:30pm Film Screening, Talk, and Reception

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Yours, Tenderly is a multimedia experience that pays homage to the vibrant immigrant South Asian community of the Tenderloin and the greater San Francisco metropolis. Conceptualized by Preethi Ramaprasad, each component draws on her experience as a resident artist and researcher at the San Francisco Public Library and San Francisco Arts Commission of the local performing arts scene, residents, restaurants and other South Asian cultural markers of which there are only some remnants in the city.

The evening showcase will begin with a walking tour led by Anirvan Chatterjee and Barnali Ghosh, visiting notable places connecting to the area’s radical South Asian history and homes and will include stops featuring librarian and author Moazzam Sheikh, Dancer Shruti Abhishek, and Yoni Ki Baat on South Asian stories of Feminism. The tour will begin and end at the Tenderloin Museum. Space is limited, and registration is required.

At 7pm, Tenderloin Museum hosts an artist reception at which Ramaprasad will talk about her project and premiere her new film! Conceived as a dance film, Yours, Tenderly traces the history of South Asians in the Tenderloin through the artistic form of Bharatanatyam dance. In the film, Ramaprasad visits sites significant to the South Asian community, found through her research at the SFPL, and performs in front of them. Through performance, the film commemorates South Asian immigration and early cultural centers in the area, South Asian performances in the area, and generally, a celebration of the Tenderloin’s contribution to the national economy and culture.   

After the program on 9/26, Tenderloin Museum will exhibit Ramaprasad & collaborators' Yours, Tenderly in its main gallery space through the month of October.

Produced by: San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco Public Library

Event Partners: Tenderloin Museum, Radical South Asian History Walking Tour 

Concept, Choreography: Preethi Ramaprasad

Production Director: Xiomara Forbez

Film/Cinematography/Editor: Joanna Ruckman 

Music: Ganavya Doraiswamy

Creative Advisors, Mentors: Prof. Sudharani Raghupathy, Priya Murle

Dance Collaborator: Nadhi Thekkek

Both the walking tour and film screening/reception are free to attend, but space is on the tour is limited—email sfac.galleries@sfgov.orgto reserve your spot!

“The dean of postmodern lounge jazz swing singers” Mr. Lucky brings his ace group of local luminaries–The Cocktail Party–to the Tenderloin for a Concert at the Cadillac! 

Friday September 20, 2024 | 1:00 - 2:00pm

At the Cadillac Hotel | 380 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Mr. Lucky has been a character on the San Francisco music scene for decades. Pierre Merkel got his start as a lounge singer haunting the strip of bars that served the after-theater crowd in the “Tenderloin heights” such as the Curtain Call and the Blue Lamp. At those bygone joints, Merkel would sing jazz standards in a sharkskin suit while mixing martinis onstage, and thus Mr. Lucky was born. His act “tunes up” the Great American Songbook with an energy informed by performance art as much as Ellington and Mancini. 

His popularity took off from out of the underground during the swing craze of the 1990s, and Mr. Lucky has performed at practically all of San Francisco’s iconic venues–Bimbo’s 365, Club Deluxe, Flower Piano, etc.--except (until now) the Cadillac Hotel! Mr. Lucky’s longtime band, “The Cocktail Party,” was assembled in 1998 by Bay Area legends J. Raoul Brody and Ralph Carney. Today, the group features some of the Bay Area’s best musicians:

Joshua Raoul Brody: 'The Maestro' on piano,

Michael Groh: humming on guitar,

Randy “Ring-a-ding” Odell:  swell on drums,

Joe Quigley:  eclectic bass (Lisa Loeb’s ‘Stay’),

Jeff Hobbs:  terrific on violin and cornet,

and…Jamin ‘Sudsy’ Barton:  San Francisco’s hot-shot one-man-band on Theremin, saxophone, saw and more…!

Merkel’s intrigue extends beyond his musical persona: he worked for years as a private investigator in SF and is also an accomplished visual artist. But above all, Mr. Lucky is a lover of all things San Francisco, in particular the Tenderloin (and specifically original Original Joe’s on Taylor Street). Don’t miss this special performance of a San Francisco original at the Concerts at the Cadillac, presented in collaboration with the Tenderloin Museum as a “Sounds of the Tenderloin” live music program. Funding for this series is provided by Specified General Fund for the Museum Grant Program under the California Cultural and Historical Endowment.

Free | All Welcome!

A new book by Alison Owings chronicles the life and times of Del Seymour, his “journey from living on the streets to fighting homelessness in San Francisco,” and, in turn, a nuanced, on-the-ground history of the Tenderloin’s past decade. Owings and Seymour join longtime SF Chronicle writer Leah Garchik for a conversation celebrating the publication of Mayor of the Tenderloin. 

Thursday September 19, 2024 | 5:30-7:30pm

At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102

Long a fixture in the Tenderloin, Del Seymour is well known as an ambassador for the neighborhood and one of its most ardent supporters. His Tenderloin Walking Tours combine a passion for the neighborhood’s history with the experience and perspective of someone who has lived it. His organization Code Tenderloin teaches the unhoused, recovering addicts, sex workers, dealers, ex-felons, and other marginalized people how to get and keep a job. While Del wears his own tale of transformation on his sleeve–he overcame eighteen years of homelessness and addiction–never has his story been told in such rich, thoughtful detail.

In Mayor of the Tenderloin (out 9/10/24 on Beacon Press), author Alison Owings brings the rigor of a journalist and the methodology of an oral historian to bear witness to the extraordinary life of Del Seymour. Owings spent nearly a decade shadowing, interviewing, and writing about Seymour, and the result is a feat of biography: this deep and dedicated account “slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism surrounding San Francisco’s Tenderloin to reveal a harrowing and life-affirming account” of one man who now “gives back to people struggling with the same daunting setbacks he once faced.” 

Owings traces Del’s story and those in his orbit: from his daughters, sobriety buddy, and ex-girlfriend, to a police captain and a psychiatric social worker, housing activists and corporate philanthropists, and Del’s Code Tenderloin students. In doing so, she also conjures a detailed and nuanced look at the Tenderloin over the past decade. “Honest and compelling, Mayor of the Tenderloin follows homelessness in one of America’s toughest neighborhoods as it was lived—in the words of someone who lived it and is now fighting to solve it.”

Free to attend! | Register via Humanitix to let us know you’re coming

Support the museum by purchasing a copy of the book!