User:TrueKittyCat/LGBT culture in San Francisco

San Francisco had been known as a “gay” and “queer” town since the mid-nineteenth century. Over the course of the twentieth century, partly to in-migration, San Francisco became the first center of sexually and racially diverse communities. Even though the city was diverse, San Francisco was still segregated. After World War II, by the 1960s the city's neighborhoods were divided by race. By the late twentieth century, San Francisco was one of several “majority-minority” cities, municipalities where whites accounted for less than half of the city's residents.

Despite San Francisco's history of being predominantly majority-minority, San Francisco’s imaging has often been referred to as a white gay town. Racial minorities a part of the LGBTQ+ community are disproportionality marginalized and discriminated against. Due to the rising diversity, but lack of representation, gays, and lesbians of color created organizations in the 1970s, with the goal to meet individuals' needs as racialized and sexualized subjects as well. “Sub-identities” within various organizations started to accumulate in San Francisco. By 1980 eleven different organizations for gays of color existed.

Even though there were growing subcultures and organizations for equal representation there was not a general collective organization to unify the various groups and subcultures. The severity of the splintering of the LGBTQ+ community was seen during the AIDS epidemic. After the SFAF was created in the prevention and education of AIDS, large public outreach could only be accomplished primarily by meeting with the “leaders” of the minority communities and organizations.