Gay Guide to Sacramento
California decriminalized gay sex in 1975, and the deciding vote was cast a few blocks from the bars below. The Consenting Adult Sex Act, carried by Willie Brown with George Moscone working the Senate floor, reached a tie. Moscone stalled the chamber while a private plane brought Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally back from Colorado to break it; the bill cleared the Senate by a single vote, passed the Assembly 45 to 26, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it that May. California has written a great deal of LGBTQ+ law since, and effectively all of it has been argued out in this city.
Lavender Heights in Midtown, around 20th Street and K, is the district, and it is small, flat and entirely walkable. Faces is the large multi-room club that anchors it, with Mango's, the Mercantile Saloon, Badlands, The Depot and the cruisier Bolt nearby, and Roscoe's and Pizzasaurus Rex feeding people in between.
The community side is unusually well organized for a city this size. The Sacramento LGBT Community Center runs year-round services, the Lavender Library is a volunteer-run archive and lending library, the Gender Health Center handles trans care and counseling, and there is an active Rainbow Chamber of Commerce.
Sacramento Pride takes a June weekend and is run by the community center rather than a separate corporate entity, which shows in how it feels.
Sacramento is a river town and a state capital, flat enough to cycle end to end, roughly ninety minutes from San Francisco and an hour from the Sierra foothills. It is considerably cheaper than the Bay Area, which is a large part of why the queer population here has grown rather than thinned.