The Cinch Saloon, San Francisco

About The Cinch Saloon

The Cinch Saloon is a gay dive bar with a Western saloon look, and it's the last gay bar left on Polk Street. That matters here more than it would anywhere else: Polk Gulch was San Francisco's original gayborhood, home to dozens of gay bars, bathhouses, and hotels before the scene shifted to the Castro in the 1970s. The Cinch opened in 1974 and is San Francisco's second-oldest continuously operating gay bar, after Twin Peaks in the Castro. Polk Street also hosted the country's first Pride march on June 27, 1970, a year after Stonewall, which is part of why this corner of the city still carries weight for people who know its history. Inside, it plays like a proper neighborhood dive: a 40-foot wooden bar, pool tables, pinball, swinging saloon doors, and a rear smoking patio. The crowd skews regulars and Polk locals, low-key and unpretentious, with no cover-charge nightlife machinery and no dress code to speak of. If you're traveling and want to see the older, quieter side of gay San Francisco, this is the counterpoint to the Castro's bigger, busier bars. It's an easy stop for a beer, a game of pool, and a sense of a neighborhood that used to be the center of everything. The Cinch changed hands in 2025 when Scott Taylor, a longtime regular and former Cinch bartender with more than two decades in San Francisco hospitality, took over. His stated plan is to keep the dive-bar character mostly intact while refreshing the space and building out the back bar with a wider drink selection.