It’s an open secret that gay people make the best coffee.
Across TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram, social media users have collectively agreed their drink orders will taste better if they can identify their barista as queer through the criteria of dyed hair, mullets, facial piercings, or pronoun pins. The titular “non-binary barista” has become a familiar stock image for these workers behind the counter, less a reflection of their individual identity and more a commentary on the nonnormative gender presentation of the staff. The punchline of each post, emphasizing the need to talk to a gay person when ordering, is the seemingly illogical fact that queerness is the missing ingredient to superior service. On one hand, the rise of the non-binary barista is a snapshot of the country’s material conditions. In our current labor market, queer people, particularly queer people of color, are much more likely to work service jobs.
But this preference isn’t merely a reflection of who’s currently measuring the grounds for the next espresso shot; it’s a historical development long steeped in the politics of urban development, race, class, gender, and sexuality of the 1970s and 1980s. In cities like San Francisco, a gay business class emerged in the Castro neighborhood from the success of cafes, bars, and restaurants, distinct in their publicly queer approach to service, followed by a slate of non-discrimination ordinances passed by city government banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The confluence of these developments produced a business model defined by queer work and the legal scaffolding to make it a legible and formal part of the city’s service sector.
Though this context has been lost in the meme’s ascent to Internet stardom, historicizing this relationship between sexuality and service work reveals a vexed history of trans exclusion alongside and within gay labor advocacy. Beginning in the 1970s, queer and trans people pursued various modes of redress against the discrimination they faced in the workplace through market-based solutions and campaigns to change municipal codes. These tactics concentrated the presence of queer workers in a particular neighborhood that developed around service work and offered broad employment protections citywide, albeit in uneven ways. Analyzing the gaps in protection, which often fell on trans workers, indicates both the advancements of labor advocacy for gay workers in the second half of the 20th century and the critical junctions at which they failed. Looking back at these moments of contestation helps identify the priorities of trans employment advocacy today.
To many businesses in San Francisco during the 1970s, looking gay on the job was a detriment to service, not an enhancement of it. With the ascent of service work amid the capital flight of industry, gays and lesbians recognized the need for guardrails against a job market that permitted discrimination based on how one presented themselves at work. This had become clear when activists, legislators, and community organizations passed employment protections for city employees in 1972 by banning discrimination based on “sexual orientation”, which later expanded to include all workers within the bounds of the city in 1978 under Article 33 of San Francisco’s Police Code.1 For the remainder of the decade, municipal employees under the purview of the city’s Human Rights Commission collected over 500 complaints spanning a range of industries from bankers to telecom employees to bartenders to florists.
A majority of complaints came from white gays and lesbians, though trans people too recognized the potential of the non-discrimination ordinance to address discriminatory practices related to employment and public services. They had good reason to believe such a connection existed; in other cities like Minneapolis, trans activists and gay liberationists had fought to include protections for trans people in the city’s non-discrimination ordinance in 1975 with great success. Their concerns, however, were met with far more ambivalence. In a summary of the Human Rights Commission’s caseload from 1983, one municipal worker titled a collection of complaints “Transsexual v. Public State Licensing Agency”, and described the complications of trans people attempting to change their state I.D. cards:
“Because of the relative newness of the need for this service, the agency had developed poor and arbitrary procedures to address this process…As a result, our complainants were reporting abusive and confusing response [sic] from agency employees. Application and Medical clearances were lost repeatedly. Applicants were asked to return to the offices 4 times and delays of over five months were reported in receiving the State I.D. This creates many problems for the individual who must give up their original I.D. while waiting for the replacement. Therefore they would be left without any I.D. to cash checks or apply for G.A., etc. For this particular complainant, the Agency agreed to release his original I.D. to H.R.C. staff and to speed his application through Sacramento. The individual received his new I.D. in two weeks.”2
The contents of this summary itself present an array of interpretive challenges. Who were these transsexuals, exactly? Given the poor handling of their cases and understanding of the issue at hand, should one assume they are trans women incorrectly identified as men or properly labeled as trans men? And were the repeatedly lost applications and medical clearances the result of human error, or, as the complainants suggest, a matter of abuse? Regardless, the Commission adjudicated most complaints to community organizations hosting job boards or providing pro bono or affordable legal services, but had yet to establish a standard avenue of redress in matters most pertinent to transsexuals five years after the passing of the non-discrimination ordinance.
Local legal protections granted a degree of relief for gays on the job — the Commission recorded a drop in cases following the passage of the ordinance — but it was only one tactic among many used by San Francisco activists. In response to workplace discrimination, many gays and lesbians turned instead to market-based solutions, some of which preceded advancements in legal protections by over a decade. In 1962, a network of white gay bar owners in the city founded the Tavern Guild with the goals of notifying each other of possible raids by the police and maintaining equilibrium in drink prices.3 These bars became the basis for the development of the Castro neighborhood, with restaurants and cafes opening alongside them. Fighting employment discrimination at the city level and investing in a gay neighborhood aimed to solve the same problem of ending gay discrimination in the city, but these tactics produced remarkably different results. Whereas legal advocacy gave diffuse protections across job sectors, the Castro neighborhood concentrated it around service work. And whereas an employment discrimination ordinance aimed to render sexual identity an irrelevant factor to employment, the Castro claimed it as the defining characteristic of the neighborhood.
This conceptual development of the neighborhood aligned with a particular vision of the gay liberation movement that promoted the idea of a self-sustained community operated by and for gay people. Creating a sense of belonging through the economics of a gay neighborhood blended with the trends of a deindustrializing nation: As the labor force became less concentrated around industrial work, it became more service-oriented and less protected by unions and the stable contracts attached to them. The Castro was no exception, with workers complaining of subpar wages, inadequate healthcare plans, unenforced seniority systems, and absent protections against sexual harassment.4
When workplaces in the neighborhood attempted to unionize in the 1970s, most failed. Barriers to employment also persisted among businesses in the Castro, often divided along the lines of race and gender. People of color made up 52% of the city’s population, but most gay establishments listed only 10% workers of color on their payroll.5 Trans women faced many of the same challenges of getting and keeping a job as gays and lesbians, but sometimes faced exclusion from the neighborhood altogether. Christy Henderson-Jenkins, a Black trans woman living in the city in the 1970s, remembers being turned away from entering a gay bar:
“When I lived in San Francisco, the gay boys, men or whatever, didn’t want transgenders to come into the club. I said, why? What’s wrong?…The way I see it, okay, I like to put on makeup, pair of heels and whatever, but does that make me any different than you? No. That’s just what I’m doing. But I also respect you. If you want to put on a pair of jeans and some boots, I’m good with you…I thought I would get solitude in the gay community… I have suffered from discrimination from my own gay people as well as other races. But you feel like this is your home. These are people who are supposed to understand you and accept you and sometimes that’s not true.”6
Like the transsexuals who brought their complaints to the H.R.C., Christy Henderson-Jenkins recognized that a community built around the idea of sexual and gender nonconformity could have provided protections for trans and gay people alike. Her retelling of this exclusion is as much a testimony of an individual business’s discrimination as it is a critique of the idea of the gay neighborhood itself.
The combined efforts of political and economic actions from gays and lesbians in San Francisco during the 1970s and 1980s amounted to a number of sordid victories, each lined with a negligence for trans people — particularly trans women of color — and the discrimination they faced on the job market. This exclusion continued well into the 1990s. San Francisco’s non-discrimination ordinance, first passed in 1978, banned discrimination based on “sexual orientation” but only added explicit protections for trans people in 1995 when the city amended the ordinance to include “gender identity”.7 Federal law lagged further still, with protections against trans employment discrimination arriving after the R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision in 2020.
This relationship between queerness and service work, and the exclusions trans people face within it, points to some concerning trends in trans employment discrimination today. The potential loss of Medicaid funding for hormone replacement therapy means trans people will become far more dependent on their employers for medical coverage. A reliance on market-based solutions to increasingly large gaps in public health in the absence of legal protections that include trans people will, at best, result in an uneven distribution of healthcare benefits, and at worst, create a class of workers unduly burdened by inadequate medical coverage.
This is, of course, not a conclusion to ruin the joke: The non-binary barista does make the best coffee, and for that, they deserve a stable job and a living wage.
1 Gay Advisory Committee, GAC Program/Purpose folder, box 1, San Francisco Human Rights Commission Records (SFH 718), San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; Report on the Effectiveness of Article 33, (Police Code) Six Months Since, It’s Inception, folder 23-25, box 5, Pride Foundation Records, Coll2011-071, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.2 Sexual Orientation Discrimination Complaints April 20, 1976-May, 1991; n.d. TS Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin: 8: Organizations, Committees, Coalitions, 1964-[1997] Box 73, Folder 14. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society. Archives of Sexuality and Gender, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BPAJQI130889725/AHSI?u=umn_wilson&sid=bookmark-AHSI&xid=45935a29&pg=47. Accessed 17 Sept. 2025. 3 Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Queer Cooperation and Resistance” in Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (University of California Press, 2003).4 Randy Alfred, “The Gay Life”, KSAN, San Francisco, March 29, 1981, https://archive.org/embed/TheGayLife/glbths_1991-24_2_089_sc.mp3. 5 Jackie Winnow, Investigation into Employment and Hiring Practices of Lesbian/Gay Businesses, Specifically Regarding Race, Color, National Origin, and Ethnicity: Findings, Recommendations, and Support Documentation (Human Rights Commission of San Francisco, 1984). 6 Christy Henderson-Jenkins, interview by Mix Mendy, September 05, 2023, Outwords, https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/christy-henderson-jenkins/
7 Jamison Green, Investigation into Discrimination Against Transgendered People (Human Rights Commission of San Francisco, 1994).
