Building Intersectional Identities

The Women’s Building and Lesbian Territorialization, 1979-present 

The Mission, San Francisco, CA 

In the 1970s and early 1980s lesbian feminists sought to carve out women’s spaces from mainstream heteropatriarchy not only in rural communities but also within U.S. cities. These spaces reveal the discontinuities and contradictions in urban coalition-building that affected LGBTQ urban politics in subsequent decades. The Mission, a Latinx neighborhood, already hosted cultural and political organizations that created a distinct collective identity for its residents. For example, the Mission's political, literary, and artistic organizations opposed dominant White American culture and U.S. imperialist engagement in Latin America throughout the 1960s and 1970s. 

This social and political environment also supported a vibrant lesbian scene on Valencia Street. This scene was still insular in the 1970s, as women met primarily inside a few bars in the area. However, by the mid-1980s, they had established a network of spaces that spanned several blocks. It included businesses and professional services as varied as those in the Castro. Spatial proximity with other political organizations and a shared anti-establishment ethos created synergies between longstanding Latinx organizations and new lesbian feminist spaces. A feminist collective established the Women’s Building of the Bay Area in 1978 in the Mission to create a centralized space hosting organizations, cultural, and political activities for and by women.  

The mural that adorns two of the Women's Building’s facades since 1993 was conceived and painted collaboratively by Mujeres Muralistas and is the outcome of intense debates about the meaning o feminism, lesbian identity, and international solidarity, among others. The muralist collective collapses abstract feminist space into a continuous field of relationships that bridge temporal, geographical, and cultural boundaries and the sometimes divergent visions of political feminism and lesbian feminism within it. 

The polaroid photographs shown here were taken during the making of the mural and are studies of different motifs that eventually were incorporated into the composition.  

The guides of Valencia Street and the photograph of Old Wives Tales lesbian feminist bookstore’s exterior show the extent and diversity of businesses for women in this vibrant hub. The absence of clear markers of homosexuality in that landscape was due to the embeddedness of lesbian politics within the feminist movement. However,  most women who visited these spaces would recognize Amelia's, Maud's, and Artemis Café as important lesbian hangouts. 

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