City of Sacramento asks for feedback on LGBTQ+ history project’s first draft

The City of Sacramento is seeking feedback on the first draft of a project documenting local LGBTQ+ history in an effort to identify and preserve landmarks.  

Public comments on the LGBTQ+ Historic Experience Project can be submitted through July 7 and will influence how the city continues the effort until completing it in December. 

The draft goes back to before the city’s founding until 2000, but Preservation Planner Henry Feuss said most of the information begins in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the LGBTQ+ community became more visible. The city is interested in any leads on early history, Feuss said, and is also looking to add more diverse experiences through interviews and documents from the public. 

When the city began work on the project in January, Feuss said staff started with information in existing archives, which skew toward the white gay male community. 

Terry Adamson asks a question about the city of Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ Historic Experience Project during a Servant Hearts meeting at Eskaton Land Park in Sacramento on June 12, 2024.Kristin Lam/CapRadio

“We recognize that is not at all close to an accurate representation of the community as a whole,” Feuss said. “And so we're really trying to get the word out there about this project so we can fill in some other stories that are missing.” 

The skew isn’t surprising to Mauricio Torres, a board member of the Lavender Library, a nonprofit collecting and preserving queer Sacramento history. The library is partnering on the project by running a volunteer stipend program. 

The library has added more records of transgender and queer people of color in recent years, but Torres said its original collections focus on white gay male experiences. Possible reasons include how the library’s founders were overwhelmingly white and how rare it was for gay media to be published in the first place, he said. 

Still, Torres said he’s hopeful outreach and public input will make the project more well-rounded. He added it’s meaningful to see a single historic context statement, which he described as a queer history book, instead of needing to sort through archival documents. The volunteer-run library sometimes doesn’t have the ability to document and preserve history in a publicly accessible way, Torres said. 

“I think it’s really exciting to have the city come in with the resources to both be intentional in how they’re collecting information and how they’re telling the story about the LGBTQ history in Sacramento,” Torres said. 

Sacramento resident Terry Adamson first heard about the project when Feuss gave a presentation to an LGBTQ+ senior social group meeting held by the nonprofit Servant Hearts. He said it’s important how the draft includes gathering spaces outside of city limits, including in West Sacramento and Carmichael. 

In the early-to-mid-1970s, Adamson said he went to all of the four Carmichael gay bars listed in the report: Atticus, Play Penn, Fay’s and Joseph’s Montana Saloon. He didn’t know of any gay social groups at the time and said bars were the main way of getting together with other men. 

“Some of the bars would have a sign right where you walked in that let everybody know: look, this is a gay bar,” Adamson said. “If you don’t like that, if it’s not your cup of tea, then don’t come in.” 

Steven Bourasa, another gay Sacramento resident who attended the meeting, worked as a DJ at Faces Nightclub for five years in the early 1990s. The gay bar is one of the reasons why the intersection of 20th and K Streets is considered a central point of Sacramento’s Lavender Heights area, he said. 

A sign designating the Lavender Heights neighborhood sits on street light post in Midtown, Sacramento on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023.Claire Morgan/CapRadio