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Still, it's an important place. Historical, great bartenders, venerable crowd. The mezzanine is also a great place to bring a date you want to talk to. Where better to pass an unproductive Sunday afternoon than the big plate glass window looking out into Muni and an oversize Diesel outlet?

This is where I learned to be gay. Featuring a large fish tank, which somehow will be with me when I die. this is an honest neighborhood bar in the very dishonest neighborhood of the Castro. Drinks are competent and the crowd is non-threatening. A pool table makes for easy lingering.

This place needs more seats. I can count on one weathered, leathered hand the number of times I've came here with my husband and gaggle of friends in tow only to realize that there are not enough seats in this place to seat our little asses. So we leave. But otherwise the bartenders are sharp and the drinks are solid. Come for the Majito's, stay for the seats you finally score...

Where else can you party it up with a parking ticket's throw of the San Francisco Courthouse? The crowd is a diverse as a bacterial colony on a week-old doughnut. This is where young gay men came to grow up and grow old. Bring friends only if you're prepared to lose them.

While not open in the morning, this place gets kudos for being the only sustaining gay bar in the Mission. Oddly not featuring Latino music, it is still a fun place to embarras yourself on the dance floor. Bring quarters.

From the week after this place opened it had the wax monument to wasted hours and watered drinks burning brightly on the bar corner. There must be action here, and we we've never found it. It's as if the SoMa Phoenix was born, fully jaded and waiting, but there were no takers. Check out the Lone Star, which is sad but true...