Two neighborhoods where gay nightlife thrived in the 1970s, the Castro and SoMa, are still home to the majority of San Francisco gay bars, and Oakland is home to what is likely the longest continuously operating gay bar in the country, The White Horse, which officially opened in 1933 at the end of Prohibition. While longtime queer spaces may be disappearing in San Francisco and other cities, queer people in most of America, including in the Bay Area, understand that actual, physical social spaces are still vital to the culture.
