Photo by Gabriel Duckels
Gerard Koskovich is a San Francisco–based public historian, curator and book dealer who has published and presented internationally on LGBTQ+ history, archives and cultural heritage. A founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, he has served as a consultant on LGBTQ+ historic sites and cultural heritage for the U.S. National Park Service and the San Francisco Planning Department. He is teaching Finding the LGBTQ+ Past in Present Places with us this coming winter.
Your course is about finding the LGBTQ+ past in present-day places. Do you have a favorite site that captures what draws you to this work?
I’ll point to a tiny street in San Francisco — Albion Street in the Mission District, specifically between 16th and 17th. I love that block because almost no one knows it, yet it’s incredibly rich with LGBTQ+ history.
It’s where the original mission stood before it moved to Mission Dolores, so it represents an early site of encounter between Native populations and European imperial forces. That lets us talk about how Western Christian concepts of gender and sexuality were imposed, displacing Indigenous two-spirit traditions.
Then just two buildings down was Tivoli Hall, once home to the German Workingmen’s Association. In 1931, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld — who founded the world’s first homosexual emancipation organization in Berlin in 1897 — visited there during a world tour.
A few doors the other way lived Beat poet Harold Norse, whose guests in the 1960s–1970s included Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. And across the street in the 1980s lived Lou Sullivan, a pioneering figure in the FTM transgender movement, who helped create pathways for trans men to transition without being forced into heterosexual expectations by the medical establishment.
All of this happened on one small, overlooked block.
When did you begin to see those connections — and recognize the significance of that single block?
It came through a process of accumulation. I was researching Magnus Hirschfeld and traced where he visited in San Francisco. Then I noticed the plaque for the original mission, met Harold Norse and learned about his cottage, and later discovered Lou Sullivan had lived on Albion Street too.
Over time, these connections emerged. And they illustrate something important: these aren’t isolated sites. When you map them, you begin to see how people lived near one another, crossed paths, and how their stories overlap. That’s how you begin to see the possibility of community, culture, and collective action.
History doesn’t happen in a void — it happens in a place.
I’m a great enthusiast of walking wherever I go. One of my chief pleasures is reading the city — looking at a place and asking what we can learn about its history, its changes over time, and the people who have lived there or been pushed out.
How does that way of “reading the city” shape what members will experience in your course?
What may surprise people is that this is not a guidebook course. The sites will be used as examples, but the goal is to help people discover ways of thinking about LGBTQ+ place-based history — how to read a city, how to find resources, how to connect places to meaning.
We’ll start with how places acquire meaning and how LGBTQ+ people have often been excluded from that process. Then we’ll look at how historic preservation has dealt with the LGBTQ+ past — formal versus informal landmarking — and hear from a guest expert.
Finally, members will work together to identify, research and interpret sites themselves.
I’ve mostly worked in San Francisco and Paris, so I’m especially excited to hear what people bring from the East Bay and beyond. Everyone has stories of meaningful places, and my interest is especially in the stories of ordinary LGBTQ+ people and the places tied to them — those are the people we don’t usually hear about but whose experiences most resemble our own.
Half of each class will be devoted to participants sharing and building those stories together.
In a moment when history can feel contested or even erased, what role does preservation — formal or informal — play?
We’ve moved from a brief period when the federal government supported LGBTQ+ historic recognition to a time when much of that is being dismantled. A major National Park Service report to which I contributed a chapter, LGBTQ America, was removed from federal websites — but because it was in the public domain, it actually spread even more widely.
It’s a reminder that we’ve always had to do this work ourselves. Governments can assist, but the real work is in the communities we build and the stories we share.
There are dozens of ways to make sites visible — walking tours, social media, performances, art, protest, storytelling. We can turn almost any place into one full of meaning, where LGBTQ+ people belong.
You’ll have a guest speaker discussing landmarks and preservation. Can you share more about that?
We’ll have a lecture from Shane Watson, a prominent lesbian preservation architect here in the Bay Area, who’s a real expert on this work. She was one of the co-authors of the Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History in San Francisco — a major report produced with support from the City of San Francisco.
These kinds of studies are designed to identify meaningful places, especially as cities make decisions about development, demolition, cultural programming and funding for landmarking. They help answer a fundamental question: what places do we recognize as historically significant?
Shane, along with Donna Graves, produced San Francisco’s report a little over a decade ago. It runs to about 450 pages and documents hundreds of sites.
So it will be wonderful to have her join us and share how this work actually happens in practice.
What are some ways members can contribute their own discoveries beyond the course?
There are many ways to contribute — through landmark nominations, working with local history groups, creating zines, leading walking tours, or sharing stories online.
Part of what we’ll explore is how people can take what they learn and actively contribute to a broader understanding of places in the Bay Area marked by LGBTQ+ history.
What do you hope members take away from the course?
I hope they come away with a deeper sense that places tell the stories of the LGBTQ+ past — and that LGBTQ+ people today can find belonging in those places.
And I hope they leave with tools: ways to research, interpret, and share those stories, and to see the world around them as full of meaning for LGBTQ+ and our friends.