The Stud, San Francisco

About The Stud

The Stud is San Francisco's oldest queer bar, started in 1966 and still carrying a half-century of the city's underground nightlife with it. In 2016, facing a rent hike that would have closed it, the bar was taken over by a group of nightlife workers who organized as the Stud Collective, the first worker-owned cooperative nightclub in the country. The pandemic forced it out of its longtime 9th Street home in 2020, but the collective held the name together and reopened in April 2024 a few blocks away at 1123 Folsom Street in SoMa. The programming is what it's always been: drag, disco, and genuinely underground dance nights that lean toward the city's artists and queer fringe rather than a polished club crowd. It's not the place for bottle service or a guaranteed Top-40 floor; it's the place for something with more edge and more history behind it. For anyone who wants to see where a real, community-run piece of San Francisco queer nightlife landed after nearly closing for good, the Stud is the answer.