Friday June 26, 2026 | 8-9pm (timed to coincide with the conclusion of Trans March)
at 33 Turk St. (outside of the Timbri Hotel at the corner of Turk & Taylor Streets)
TRANSMARSH is a free outdoor vertical dance performance by trans people, for trans people — and all who love them. The show features B Dean/BODYSTORM, Pangaea, and tome performing on the Taylor Street facade of the Timbri Hotel, soaring over the intersection of Turk and Taylor Streets, the site of both the 1966 trans led Compton’s Cafeteria Riots and present-day for profit reentry housing for the incarcerated. TRANSMARSH kicks off Pride Weekend by rewilding the Transgender District with the trans history and ecology alive in the Tenderloin's soil.
8pm TRANSMARSH preview performance | Free; register via Eventbrite
Tuesday June 30, 2026 | 4-6pm
at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
TLM presents Indigenous Forever, a new gallery show of paintings by Adrian Arias that honor the strength, wisdom, and continuity of Indigenous cultures. Join us on the evening of June 30th for a special preview reception with the artist. Opening during the 4th of July holiday and the United States’ milestone 250th year as a nation, Indigenous Forever reframes notions of place, belonging, and permanence in a poignant and timely conceptual gesture. The humble postage stamp, one of the most fundamental trappings of modern statehood and a basic currency for communication, is enlarged and remixed, memorializing the land, its Indigenous people and their culture. Medicinal plants, native flora and fauna, and sacred designs from several Indigenous cultures past and present comprise the visual vocabulary of Indigenous Forever, symbolizing solidarity amongst the land and its original inhabitants, and celebrating place and people without the overlay of divisive, extractive colonial states. Tenderloin regulars will recognize the imagery from this Indigenous Forever gallery show from an evocative mural of the same name on Larkin St. unveiled in the spring of 2025–many of the paintings in this show served as studies for the mural. Indigenous Forever is on view July 1 - October 3, 2026.
Free to attend | No Registration Required
Thursday July 2, 2026 | 5-8pm
at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
TLM presents Indigenous Forever, a new gallery show of paintings by Adrian Arias that honor the strength, wisdom, and continuity of Indigenous cultures. Join us on the evening of June 30th for a special preview reception with the artist. Opening during the 4th of July holiday and the United States’ milestone 250th year as a nation, Indigenous Forever reframes notions of place, belonging, and permanence in a poignant and timely conceptual gesture. The humble postage stamp, one of the most fundamental trappings of modern statehood and a basic currency for communication, is enlarged and remixed, memorializing the land, its Indigenous people and their culture. Medicinal plants, native flora and fauna, and sacred designs from several Indigenous cultures past and present comprise the visual vocabulary of Indigenous Forever, symbolizing solidarity amongst the land and its original inhabitants, and celebrating place and people without the overlay of divisive, extractive colonial states. Tenderloin regulars will recognize the imagery from this Indigenous Forever gallery show from an evocative mural of the same name on Larkin St. unveiled in the spring of 2025–many of the paintings in this show served as studies for the mural. Indigenous Forever is on view July 1 - October 3, 2026.
Free to attend | No Registration Required
Tuesday July 7, 2026 | 7-9pm
at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Your presence is requested at the San Francisco Commission on Sex in the year 2126. What is sex? Who has it? Who pays for it? What feels good? What is missing from the way we have sex now? What kind of sex do we want our descendants to have? How do our current laws, medical practices, and cultural norms affect the sex we have, or want to have?
“Future of Sex” gathers a speculative “San Francisco Commission on Sex”--set in the year 2126–to conjure a portrait of sex in the not-so-distant future imbued with radical and/or utopian visions we can see from the present. This “town-hall style” immersive, interactive collective imagining is presented as part of the inaugural Future of Us Festival and organized by Olivia Bratko, a regular actor in TLM’s Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Join us on either July 7 & 8!
Sliding scale admission | Register via Future of Us Festival’s LUMA page
Wednesday July 8, 2026 | 7-9pm
at the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Your presence is requested at the San Francisco Commission on Sex in the year 2126. What is sex? Who has it? Who pays for it? What feels good? What is missing from the way we have sex now? What kind of sex do we want our descendants to have? How do our current laws, medical practices, and cultural norms affect the sex we have, or want to have?
“Future of Sex” gathers a speculative “San Francisco Commission on Sex”--set in the year 2126–to conjure a portrait of sex in the not-so-distant future imbued with radical and/or utopian visions we can see from the present. This “town-hall style” immersive, interactive collective imagining is presented as part of the inaugural Future of Us Festival and organized by Olivia Bratko, a regular actor in TLM’s Compton’s Cafeteria Riot. Join us on either July 7 & 8!
Sliding scale admission | Register via Future of Us Festival’s LUMA page
Thursday July 9, 2026 | 5-8pm
At Dodge Alley (Turk & Larkin St.)
July’s 2nd Thursday at Dodge Alley features a Bay Area supergroup—The Sampaguitas play Filipino folk songs and inspired original music sung in glorious three-part harmony! Drawing influences from folk, blues, doo-wop girl groups, and the Filipinx-American diaspora, Jenevieve Francisco, Cristina Ibarra, and Aireene Espiritu share music from their roots and explore what it means to be in a “third culture” between worlds.
Free to attend | No registration required
$15 vouchers for food/drink at nearby businesses first come first serve
Thursday July 16, 2026 | 6:30-8:30pm
At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Celebrate Tenderloin Museum’s 11th Anniversary with a special presentation of West is West, featuring director David Rathod and actor Sumati Patel in conversation with novelist Shruti Swamy. Shot on location in the mid 1980s, this jaunty rom-com follows Vikram, a would-be student from Mumbai whose college plans quickly disintegrate, as he lands a room and a job in a Tenderloin SRO and falls in love with plucky, punky artist working at a Market St. cinema. While he finds his footing in work and love, his visa runs low, imperiling his new life in San Francisco. Exploits ensue, making for a highly entertaining, fast-paced romp of a film that also happens to quite realistically portray the milieu of the TL at that time, with its network of Indian run residential hotels and seedy culture of movie-going on the bedraggled Mid-Market strip, as well as the ever-present challenges immigrants face attempting to live and work in America. All this, and a love story!
Originally released in 1987, this overlooked gem of local independent cinema stars Ashutosh Gowariker, who would go on to direct the Oscar-nominated Bollywood smash Lagaan, and was directed by David Rathod, who still lives locally and is an active filmmaker. Rathod will present West Is West in person, after which he and Sumati Patel, an actor in the film, will be in conversation with San Francisco based writer Shruti Swamy.
$10 | Register to attend via Humanitix
Saturday, July 18, 2026 | 2:00-4:00 PM
Meet at Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St., SF, CA 94102
Register to attend via Humanitix | Admission to the Tenderloin Museum included with ticket
Tenderloin Museum is thrilled to partner with Unspeakable Vice, “a volunteer history initiative making queer belonging accessible to everyone,” to offer a monthly walking tour focused on the LGBTQIA+ history in the Tenderloin and Polk Street neighborhoods.
Saturday, July 18, 2026 | 4 - 5pm
At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
Jesse Montgomery’s new book, It Is Not Enough To Survive: The Young Patriots Story, chronicles one of the New Left’s most evocative and enigmatic anti-racist organizations composed of poor white Southern migrants who helped found Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition. Formed in the late 1960s, the YPO grew from a local street gang into a powerful political and social force in the city’s Uptown neighborhood, where it fought against police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, the establishment of survival programs, and working-class cultural organizations.
The milieu that created the YPO has several direct links to San Francisco and the Tenderloin by way of the radical student movements of the ‘60s and Oakland’s Black Panther Party. But more broadly speaking, the aims, discourse, and challenges of the YPO should resound in the Tenderloin. Our neighborhood, like the YPO’s Uptown Chicago, has been characterized by its dense population of embattled tenants, transplants, immigrants, and refugees struggling on the margins (or just outside of) the working class and perennially fighting against forces of urban renewal.
TLM and LaborFest, San Francisco’s annual month of grassroots labor programs, welcome Montgomery to San Francisco to take a close look at the YPO, how its history resonates with the Tenderloin’s, and what its legacy can teach us about the white working class’s political power (and peril) past and present. He’ll be in conversation with the Bay Area’s Amy Sonnie, a radical librarian and fellow media scholar who co-authored (with local Labor Studies legend James Tracy) Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels and Black Power, a book that helped open the field for Montgomery’s scholarly focus on the YPO.
$10 Suggested Donation (museum admission) OR free with (discounted) advance book purchase
Thursday July 30, 2026 | 6pm
At the Tenderloin Museum | 398 Eddy St. SF, CA 94102
It is the greatest comeback since Lazarus! Bambi Lake has risen from the dead in the form of a new book. Wow. Did you hear? This book, aptly titled, Devour Me, Again, features poetry and an interview series—words of wisdom and revolution, a time long gone; glitter, glam, queens colliding, and, of course, some gossip…
Out July 21 via Nightboat Books, this volume was edited by August Bernadicou of the LGBTQ History Project, a non-profit digital archive that preserves primary sources of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement and makes accessible thousands of hours of oral histories with queer activists, performers, and “cutting edge catalysts.” Bay Area writer, rocker, and multi-valent performance artist Brontez Purnell contributed a beautifully witness reflection on Lake as a forward; Purnell will read at the July 30 TLM event alongside Donna Personna, Britney Smears, Stanley Frank, Fauxnique, Tahara, August Bernadicou, Birdie Bob Watt, and Nicole Henares and MORE!
Free to attend | Register via LGBTQ History Project Partiful