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A fabulous montage of word and image, this is the first book ever to chronicle the origin and evolution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. Capturing the international center of the gay experience as never before, and published to coincide with the opening of the Gay and Lesbian Center of the new main San Francisco Public Library—the only publicly funded archive of its kind in the world—Gay by the Bay contains over 200 full-color and black-and-white photographs of historical memorabilia, including correspondence, posters, buttons, and other artifacts. With anecdotes about Bay Area gay luminaries, past and present, and a foreword by acclaimed author Armistead Maupin, Gay by the Bay offers a scintillating look at a continually dynamic and evolving community.

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Average Customer Rating:

Invaluable Reference	Customer Rating:
This well researched book is also quite entertaining. While I bought it for its scholorship, it also serves as a nice "coffee table" book. Guests in my home enjoy thumbing through its many illustrations. This is a MUST HAVE.

Buy this book!!!

Customer Rating:

As a long time gay resident of San Francisco, I was thrilled when this historical pictoral tome came out way back then. I bought the book and have it sitting proudly on my coffee table - after all these years. It has great text and even more wonderful photos of personalities and memorabilia from decades of historical gay & lesbian San Francisco. Van Buslkirk and Stryker know their stuff and I appreciate all the research and the historical facts that come out in this masterfully produced work. The photos are well reporduced and there is even the great reprodcution of the hilarious 1982 SURRENDER DIANE campaign poster from Sister Boom Boom's historical SF supervisorial run against then and unpoular Mayor Diane Feinstein. Classic. BUY THIS BOOK.

Index of book fails to support research value: Mapplethorpe

Customer Rating:

This book works as an entertainment, but as a research book it trips itself by not indexing everyone and everything mentioned in the body of the text. For example, check out the "Robert Mapplethorpe and Jack Fritscher" connection --as well as San Francisco's own Gay-Bay "Drummer" magazine itself-- all on page 134, and then try to find these two people and that singular magazine in the index. This is just one instance of sloppy indexing and sloppier scholarship that mars this volume,and the integrity of the editors--at least to this anal-retentive buyer of historical books. The two editors seem asleep at the wheel, relying on researchers who lack an overview. They should have paid attention. Armistead Maupin in his superficial introduction takes the usual cheap, gay potshot at Judaism and Christianity for the woes suffered by lesbigay culture, when he could have done so much more with the opportunity of the two pages to theorize/talk about the actual Gay-Bay culture itself. Obviously, his name is exploited as an advertising device for a kind of cover "endorsement".