Aunt Charlie's Lounge

The last queer bar in a neighborhood once bursting with them, Aunt Charlie’s is living history. Directly across the street from what was once Compton’s Cafeteria, the site of the 1966 uprising by Black trans women that helped launch the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement, it’s also an unfailingly working-class hangout with quintessential Tenderloin characters and impossibly strong, impossibly cheap drinks. A carpeted dive narrow enough that you can touch the bar with one hand and the opposite wall with the other, it’s home to the Hot Boxxx Girls, a troupe of older drag performers who, as well as the Tubesteak Connection, DJ Bus Station John’s re-created disco and S.F.’s longest-running gay party.