Gay Guide to San Antonio
On 5 September 2013 the San Antonio city council voted eight to three to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It came after two days and roughly nine hours of public testimony, with supporters wearing red and opponents wearing blue, and shouting from outside audible through the walls of the century-old building. The state attorney general, Greg Abbott, then running for governor, publicly condemned the ordinance as anti-religious, joined by Senator Ted Cruz and the Republican candidates for attorney general. Church leaders promised recall petitions. It passed anyway and still stands, and in 2025 the city went further and designated the bar strip an official Pride Cultural Heritage District.
That strip is North Main Avenue in Tobin Hill, marked with rainbow sidewalks. Heat, Pegasus, Sparky's, Knockout, The Eagle SA, WKND and the former Silver Dollar Saloon share a few blocks of it, with Purgatory a little closer to downtown and Cobalt a block over on McCullough. Away from the strip, Cowabungas is downtown on Martinez Street and the SA Country Saloon on West Hildebrand does country, Tejano and drag.
Bonham Exchange sits apart from the strip, downtown behind the Alamo, in an 1891 building that has been a gay club since 1981. Built as Turner Hall, a German athletic club, it has three floors, several bars, and a crowd that spans four decades of the city's queer life. It closed on 1 August 2026 to install a fire sprinkler system and plans to reopen in late 2026.
The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center has been doing arts and organizing work here since the 1980s and is unusual in how firmly it ties queer politics to Chicano and labor politics rather than treating them as separate causes.
San Antonio Pride takes late June and runs one of the very few nighttime parades in the country, which in a Texas summer is less a stylistic choice than basic sense.