Opened in 1966, Maud’s was one of San Francisco’s earliest and most influential lesbian bars, and a cornerstone of queer women’s social life for more than two decades. Located on Cole Street in the Haight, Maud’s was a rare, vital space at a time when lesbian bars were few, closely watched, and often short-lived.
Maud’s wasn’t just a place to drink — it was a community hub, a meeting point, and a safe haven. Women gathered there to talk politics, build relationships, organize, flirt, argue, laugh, and exist openly in a world that rarely allowed them that freedom. The bar became deeply intertwined with the rise of second-wave feminism, lesbian visibility, and the broader LGBTQ+ rights movement unfolding in San Francisco during the late 1960s and 1970s.
When Maud’s closed in 1989, it marked not just the end of a bar, but the disappearance of a kind of lesbian social space that has grown increasingly rare. In 1993, filmmaker Paris Poirier captured the soul of the bar in the short documentary Last Call at Maud’s, preserving voices, faces, and conversations that might otherwise have been lost to history.
