At a sold out screening for the 1993 documentary film, Last Call at Maud’s, the memories — from the audience, and onscreen in the documentary — were a mixture of earnest and scandalous.
The documentary — which chronicles the history of Maud’s, a lesbian bar that operated at 937 Cole Street from 1966 to 1989, covers some of the most vibrant decades in the city’s (lesbian) history. But it wasn’t always that way. When Rikki Streicher, a San Francisco bar owner and gay rights activist, first opened Maud’s, not only was it illegal to run a lesbian bar, it wasn’t even legal for women to be bartenders — Streicher had to keep a man around to actually pour the drinks.
One Maud’s patron interviewed in the film describes how, in those days, one of the best ways to find a lesbian bar when you were new in town was to go to a women’s softball game — and then see where they went for drinks after. In San Francisco, it was often Maud’s.
So it’s appropriate that, this summer, when Danielle Thoe and Sara Yergovich opened the first women’s sports bar in San Francisco, they named it Rikki’s.
Prior to opening, Thoe and Yergovich joined forces with LGBTQ+ media arts nonprofit Frameline and hatched a plan to screen Last Call at Maud’s at their bar, in homage. As excitement grew, they realized they would need more space.
So they decided to hold two screenings: one at Rikki’s and one at the Roxie Theater. At the Saturday matinee screening at the Roxie, gray-haired lesbians and the scent of fresh popcorn filled the theater and spilled out onto the sidewalk.
“I used to go and we’d play ping pong. It was just always a really fun place to go,” said Cathy Miller, 67, at the screening. She was a customer at Maud’s in her 20s, and looks back on those days fondly. “I haven’t been to an event like this that’s so queer — about San Francisco history — in so long,” she said about the screening.
The film was met with excited cheers from the audience — many former Maud’s customers or friends of Streicher — who clapped and hollered when they saw their friends appear on screen.
“There’s a lot of people that clearly know each other and haven’t seen each other in a long time,” said Thoe at the screening. “I feel really honored to have been a little part in bringing these folks together.”
Rikki’s has been open for less than six months, and the founders said they are relying on their customers to determine the future and culture of the bar.
“We have this moment to create a purpose for people coming together in a space,” said Thoe.
As of late, Rikki’s has hosted trivia nights, a lesbian pie-eating contest and, of course, women’s sports watch parties, but Thoe and Yergovich hope that bar-goers will bring new ideas to the table.“It’s really the people that are what’s going to make us successful,” she said.
When asked what the plot of a Rikki’s documentary would look like, Thoe responded, “I would just be so excited that we were around long enough for anybody to consider putting together a documentary. That would be fabulous.”
Following the screening, Cheryl “Chuck” Rosenthal (the film’s director of photography), Susan Fahey (a former manager at Maud’s) and Louette Colombano(a Maud’s regular) answered questions on a panel moderated by Allegra Madsen, executive director of Frameline. “This might be the largest gathering of women who play softball,” joked Madsen.
Fahey — who dated Streicher on and off for several years — recalled that Streicher kept Maud’s open on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and would offer a free buffet for the holidays, including a turkey, which one of the bar patrons would cook the night before.
“She felt that people needed those kinds of places to go where they felt wanted,” said Fahey.
“What was created at Maud’s is needed again today,” said Rosenthal, describing the bar as a place to “make friends and create your own intentional family.” Lesbian bars in San Francisco have come and gone – and for a decade there were almost no spaces for queer women in the city to gather.
Rosenthal said she didn’t realize how much of an impact the film would have thirty years later, adding that Streicher would be proud to see the legacy that is carried on by Rikki’s and other spaces for queer women that are finally popping back up again — like Mother, which opened in 2024.
To Fahey the screening was a chance to see old friends and reminisce about their memories at Maud’s. “I’m seeing ghosts,” she said, “in a happy way.”
Rikki’s will be hosting an encore screening of Last Call at Maud’s on Sunday, December 7, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. Seating is first-come-first-serve.
Pat Ramseyer and Nancy White also kept the Wildside West open on Christmas and New Year’s and served Christmas and New Year’s food for lesbians and others who needed a “home” on those family holidays
David Looman
Maud’s old space in Cole Valley is now inhabited by Finnegans Wake.