GLBT Historical Society, LGBTQ history museum in the Castro, San Francisco, United States

The GLBT Historical Society Museum is a space that documents the history of LGBTQ people in San Francisco and Northern California through collections and exhibitions. The building holds archival materials, photographs, manuscripts, and personal artifacts spanning multiple decades of community life.

The society's roots lie in the early 1980s, when nurse Willie Walker and Greg Pennington pooled their periodical collections as the San Francisco Gay Periodical Archive. Walker presented his plan for a historical society to the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project on September 5, 1984. A letter to 160 organizations and 100 individuals led to the founding meeting at the San Francisco Public Library on March 16, 1985, where 63 attendees created the San Francisco Bay Area Gay and Lesbian Historical Society. Renamed the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California in 1990 and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society in 1999, it opened its museum at 4127 18th Street on January 13, 2011.

The museum shows how LGBTQ people lived in San Francisco and the Bay Area and what role they played in shaping their communities. Visitors can see personal items, photographs, and letters that tell stories of how people expressed their identity and built connections with others.

The museum is at 4127 18th Street in the Castro. The archives and reading room are separate, at 989 Market Street, Lower Level, in Mid-Market. The two are not in the same building, so check which site you want before setting out.

The society's holdings include more than 200 boxes of papers donated by lesbian activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, alongside some 75,000 photographs and 2,500 slogan-bearing T-shirts. The archives and reading room are at 989 Market Street, separate from the museum at 4127 18th Street.