The Stud

Most bars that survive sixty years do it by being bought, flipped, and rebranded by someone with better financing than taste. The Stud went the other direction: when the landlord raised the rent at its old address in 2016, the people who actually worked there bought it instead. The Stud Collective — nightlife professionals, DJs, drag performers, artists — took ownership on 30 December 2016 and now runs seventeen members deep. That makes this the first worker-owned cooperative nightclub in the United States, which is a sentence worth reading twice, because the ownership model is not a marketing flourish here. It is the reason the room still exists.

What worker-owned actually changes

A co-op nightclub means the people booking the night, working the door, and performing on the stage are the same people who decide what the room is for. It shows in the programming, which runs less like a venue chasing a demographic and more like a rotating set of residencies with their own logic — TRUCK every Wednesday from 9:30pm, PUMPS bringing drag on Fridays, a Queer Nonprofit Happy Hour on second Tuesdays that is exactly as unglamorous and useful as it sounds. It also showed in 2020, when the collective could not make rent on the old building and chose to close the location rather than quietly dissolve the thing itself. Four years later they opened a different address instead.

The correction: the internet thinks this place is dead

This needs saying plainly, because it will affect anyone who looks the bar up before going. The Stud permanently closed its 9th & Harrison location in spring 2020 after 33 years there — that announcement is real, it is still live on the venue's own site, and it carries no visible date.

Search results, old listings, and the stock of available photographs all still point at that dead building. The bar itself reopened on 20 April 2024 at 1123 Folsom Street, near 7th, its third address in SoMa. It has been open for over two years. It was covered as an operating business through the summer of 2026, when Meta suspended its Instagram account — 32,000 followers, gone on a false "human trafficking" report filed against months-old archive posts, on the eve of Dore Alley weekend. After public outcry and pressure from state and local lawmakers, Meta reversed it that Saturday evening. A bar whose promotion runs through one platform, and which nearly lost its most profitable weekend to one bad-faith report, is a fair illustration of how thin the margins are on institutions like this.

Going

1123 Folsom sits in the Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District, established in 2018, and The Stud has been a registered San Francisco Legacy Business since 28 November 2016 — founded in 1966 by George Matson and a business partner who later came out as a trans woman, Alexis Muir. That makes 2026 the bar's sixtieth year, and the collective is marking it with a plain enough line: celebrating 60 years of queer revelry, 1966–2026, and beyond. The last two words are doing deliberate work for a room that has been written off twice. If you only get one night here, make it a Wednesday: TRUCK from 9:30pm is the weekly that reads most like the room's own personality rather than a booking. For a dated trip, Slaughter Haus takes the venue over 10-11 October 2026, and The Nudie Nubie Show SF - Ultimate Reveal is already listed for 8 May 2027, which is far enough out to build an actual visit around.

If you are assembling a San Francisco night rather than a single stop, Stray Dog in the Mission works as an earlier, quieter start, and Ocean Beach Cafe is the city's surviving alcohol-free option on the other side of town for anyone who wants the scene without the drinking.