Dyke Bar* History: Mona’s Candle Light in San Francisco, 1950

Jack Jen Gieseking with Michaela Hayes and Mel Whitesell

To complement the launch of the Our Dyke Histories podcast, hosted by Jack Gieseking and co-produced in collaboration with Sinister Wisdom, we’re sharing a reading guide for the decades. For the first season, Our Dyke Histories is spotlighting dyke bars*: lesbian bars, queer parties,  and trans hangouts; the structures that made them necessary, the lives they made possible, and the worlds we built from them. This is the second part in a series, with the first part covering the 1920s-1930s!!

Mona’s Candle Light (1950). By unknown. UCLAFilm & Television Archive and OutFest.

Where would dykes be without blurry amateur films and gender fuckery?

Discovered amid rolls of unmarked film at a flea market, Mona’s Candle Light is a testament to the power of the archive, transporting viewers to a hazy evening at the legendary lesbian nightclub for just six ephemeral minutes.

Mona Sargent deserves to be a bigger name in the dyke world – in the 1940s she cornered the market on San Francisco’s lesbian nightclubs and drag events, bringing queer culture to the “bohemians” while still cultivating some of the earliest lesbian community spaces. (Read more about the history here or listen to an entire episode of the Cruising Pod podcast with actual archival audio with Mona herself).

As the video begins, neon signs blink against the night sky until the camera lands on one that reads “Mona’s Candle Light” – femme lounge singer Jan Janssen comes into focus, spotlighted onstage in a corner of the shadowy room. Introduced by drag king Jimmy Reynard, she performs two songs while apathetic straight couples watch from the audience (this is my one complaint: where are the dykes? These people don’t even know how lucky they are!).

Mona’s stayed open for decades in various forms since 1935, making it one of the oldest and longest-running lesbian bars in the country. It hosted the famous and fabulous Gladys Bentley and other so-called “gender impersonators” as a form of racial and sexual tourism, per historian Nan Boyd’s Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, the definitive history of LGBTQ+ San Francisco. Along with her in-depth oral histories of people like Mona herself and regulars like Reba Hudson, Boyd collected a series of photos of Mona’s which the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco has made public. Swoon.

Back to the documentary, this invaluable footage makes your queer/trans bodymind feel invaluable and loveable too, even to witness it. It’s a cinematic candle illuminating the darkness of the lesbian underground scene. As dyke bars across the country disappear, it’s powerful to witness this fragment of queer history – every city deserves a place like Mona’s, “where girls will be boys!”