There Will Always be Roses in San Francisco by Marissa Leitman

Exhibition Run: October 3 - December 1

For California-based photographer Marissa Leitman, discovering Aunt Charlie’s was like discovering a religious space. Performing drag at the beloved, working-class dive bar was not just a mode of entertainment, but an avenue for forming identify: a performance was a performance, but it didn’t end when the drag show stopped—it was important to who people were.

Featuring the iconoclastic queens of Aunt Charlie’s, Leitman’s latest exhibition, There Will Always be Roses in San Francisco, pays homage to High Fantasy, a legendary evening of drag nouveau that took place every Tuesday at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge from 2010 to 2018. The subversive event, which drew crowds of club kids and drag queen fixtures alike, was—and still is—unlike any other. 

This exhibition is part of a larger series, Aunt Charlie’s: San Francisco’s Working Class Drag Bar. Aunt Charlie’s is one of the oldest continuously operating queer bars in San Francisco, and the last of its kind in the Tenderloin district. Our project aims to celebrate and lend visibility to Aunt Charlie’s as a remarkable space of socio-historical importance that is graced nightly by offbeat, eccentric characters whose seemingly idiosyncratic lives open up universal themes related to beauty, community, and self-acceptance.