Queer Trivia
She was an American activist and community leader in San Francisco.
Born in 1922, she served in the military and lived in Los Angeles during the 1940s, where she became part of the city's vibrant gay bar scene. She also spent time in the gay bars of North Beach in San Francisco, where strict butch-femme roles defined queer social life. Identifying as butch, she was photographed in 1945 wearing a suit and tie at Oakland’s Claremont Resort alongside other lesbians, which became a widely circulated image that captured the era’s queer visibility.
She played a key leadership role in the Society for Individual Rights (SIR), a San Francisco-based organization founded in 1964 that championed equal rights for gay men and lesbians, encouraging political engagement and community connection through events like fundraisers, dances, and educational programs.
In 1966, she opened a lesbian bar called Maud’s—originally known as "Maud's Study" or simply "The Study"—on Cole Street in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The next year, the area became ground zero for the 1967 Summer of Love and the rise of the hippie movement. As one historian noted, Maud’s helped “bridge the gap between San Francisco’s lesbian community and its hippie generation.” At the time, city law prohibited women from working as bartenders, so she either tended bar herself or hired men.
Maud’s soon became a beloved hub for lesbians and bisexual women in the city, with singer Janis Joplin among its notable patrons.
She was a devoted advocate for gay and lesbian softball teams and co-founded the Gay Olympics, later renamed the Gay Games, which began in San Francisco. She played a key role in establishing the Federation of Gay Games and served on its board of directors. “Sports are the great social equalizer,” she once said. “It’s perhaps the only time when who you are matters less than how you play the game.”
She died of cancer on August 21, 1994, at the age of 68, and was survived by her partner, Mary Sager. In her honor, the mayor of San Francisco ordered city flags to be flown at half-mast.
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