Since 2012, San Jose has required the outdoor patios of all bars in the city to be smokefree. Daly City and Fremont have adopted similar bans.

Queer history is not just in San Francisco. A raid at a gay bar in San Diego in 1979 helped galvanize the nascent LGBTQ community there, while Sacramento also has a rich past.

Joan Howard and Rebecca Longworth wish the walls could talk in their East Oakland home, which they discovered was once a working-class lesbian bar.

The shooting death of unarmed Black trans man Banko Brown by an armed guard has led the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance limiting security personnel from drawing their weapons.

A queer family advocate is seeking the vacant seat on the Oakland school board this November. If elected, Sasha Ritzie-Hernandez would be the second LGBTQ member of the oversight body.

There are problems with Mayor London Breed's public safety ballot measure — namely around loosening policies for police pursuits and "reforming" the police commission.

Longtime readers will note that I don't often discuss matters of religion. It's not a topic I am comfortable with. I am predominantly agnostic, with a very strong pagan bent to my spirituality.

The San Francisco Public Library presents "AIDS Self-Portraits: Positive Art," featuring photographs by Jeannie O'Connor taken at four centers for AIDS services in San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond from 1989-95.

The obituary for Roy D. Jones, who arrived in the Bay Area in 1965 and had a fulfilling career as a general contractor.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Matthew Shepard. On October 6, 1998, Shepard was beaten, tortured and left to die, bound to a fence in a remote Wyoming field, not far from the small town of Laramie.

Fantasy books and films are a massive hit with both readers and spectators. Although the tales occur in a fictional realm, the characters always speak with British accents instead of American accents.

The Supreme Court of India declined to legalize same-sex marriage in a ruling October 16, punting the issue back to India's Parliament and dealing a blow to India's estimated 2.5 million LGBTQ people.

The preliminary hearing in the case of the UC Berkeley employee charged in the killing of a gay Black man in Oakland earlier this year was pushed back one month during a court hearing Tuesday.

Two Bay Area gay medical professionals announced October 11 that 28 medical and psychological professional organizations have issued a joint statement against conversion therapy, in what they said was an unprecedented show of unity.