For the leather bars, kink clubs and queer nonprofits of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, a dreaded sight has become increasingly familiar. An Instagram account with tens of thousands of followers, and years of event listings and photos, is suddenly replaced with “Sorry, this page isn’t available.”
Some pages came back within a day. Others came back after public outcry. Some never return.
The proprietors of such venues are especially concerned this weekend, as more than 200,000 people are expected to flood into the city for the Folsom Street Fair. It’s historically one of the busiest weekends of the year for SoMa’s leather bars.
“Nobody’s gonna come here if they don’t know what we are,” said Lex Montiel, the owner of the legendary SF Eagle Bar.
Like the Eagle, many of these organizations are decades old — old enough to have made it through police harassment, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and multiple waves of economic boom and bust cycles. Their lineage is a scrappy and resourceful one. Becoming dependent on a social networking service owned by a multinational tech company based in Menlo Park was not part of the plan. But rents are high, margins are low, and the old methods — flyering, word-of-mouth, local advertising — don’t have the same reach.
A well-targeted ad on Meta, said Montiel, can bring in thousands in business. The 45-year-old leather bar, Monteil said, was careful not to run afoul of Meta’s community standards, which forbid, among other things, pictures of saliva and “close-ups of visible buttocks.”
Montiel ran each flyer through the company’s ad review process, and if Meta flagged a problem, staff fixed it and resubmitted. It targeted its ads so that they could only be seen by users 21 and older.
Then, on the Friday before Pride weekend this year, Meta suspended the Eagle’s Instagram account, cutting the bar off from its nearly 20,000 followers. The only explanation given: The Eagle’s account hadn’t complied with Meta’s community standards.
“They take our money,” Montiel said. “They should be letting us know if we need to make adjustments, rather than just cancel the account.”
The loss comes as fewer people go out and the costs of running a bar climb.
“Younger guys are not drinking. The attendance is terrible. The prices are high for everything,” Montiel said. He has been putting in his own money to keep the bar open.
The Eagle is one of at least six LGBTQ San Francisco bars and organizations that have seen their accounts on Meta’s platforms flagged, suspended or deleted in the past year—often with no warning, no reason given, and no clear pathway for appealing the decision.
The cycle of appeals
The Eagle appealed right away. The appeal was denied. It wasn’t clear, Montiel said, whether the online process involved a human at all. The process felt “one-way” and “automated,” he said, with no way to actually talk about what went wrong, or how to make adjustments.
People from the mayor’s office and the district supervisor’s office contacted Meta on the bar’s behalf, Montiel said. He never heard back.
Powerhouse, another leather bar on Folsom, lost its account in August. Just a few blocks away, The Stud, a historic collectively-run queer bar known for its performance art-like drag nights, had its account suspended in July just before Dore Alley weekend, one of the biggest street fairs for the leather community.
Honey Mahogany, one of The Stud’s owners, said the bar relies on big weekends to carry it through the year. Losing the account right before Dore Alley “was just devastating to our bottom line.”
“There really wasn’t any warning,” said Mahogany. “We just lost the account.”
The Stud and Powerhouse accounts came back within about 24 hours, after public outcry and help from Meta employees who flagged the cases internally, Mahogany said.
“The only way that there seems to be any action taken is when folks make a lot of noise online,” she said.
Other queer bars have been less fortunate. Beaux in the Castro is now on its third Meta account and continues in a cycle of suspension and reactivation. The Exiles, a nonprofit that provides education on leather and BDSM culture, had its Instagram account removed last year and has yet to have it reinstated.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
Questioning punishment
The groups say the hardest part is not knowing what they did wrong.
Mahogany said she doesn’t know whether takedowns were prompted by a change in Meta’s algorithms, by people hostile to queer and trans communities deliberately ending takedown requests to Meta, or an unknown decision by Meta. But, she added, Instagram accounts that market to mostly straight audiences seem to be able to post more explicit content without receiving the same consequences.
Cal Callahan of the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District, which had its own account temporarily suspended in July, said that the cultural district now primarily makes text-only posts — only rarely using images. It has scrubbed through years of old posts after getting suspension warnings from Meta that appeared to be prompted by someone searching through the District’s archives.
“If you are not telling us what the rules are, how can we be punished for not following them?” he said. “Which community are these standards for?”
“A lot of the moderation is not being done by a human being,” said Mandy Salley, chief operating officer of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, which combats online censorship. Instead, she added, automated tools scan for keywords, phrases and images.
Meta’s latest community standards enforcement report on adult nudity and sexual content shows that 96% of flagged posts on Facebook and 85% on Instagram were addressed by the company before any user reported it.
Since Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act in 2018, which exposes platforms to liability for hosting content related to sex trafficking, Salley said, platforms have “cast a very wide net to make sure they are covering themselves from as much liability as they could.”
This new “wide net” has even affected works of art previously seen as uncontroversial, including a play by Virginia Woolf and paintings by Pablo Picasso.
A spokesperson for Meta did not respond for comment about concerns with the company’s content moderation system.
For this weekend
In advance of this weekend’s Folsom Street Fair, the Eagle started a new account with about 3,000 followers — and no guarantee that it will stay up.
If the account is shut down, Montiel said, his first instinct would be to walk away from the platform entirely.
“It is like a monopoly,” he said, “and then they decide how people get informed or get contacted.”
But for now, the Eagle will keep paying for ads. It will keep running flyers through Meta’s review, and it will keep fixing whatever gets flagged.
All Montiel asks in return is a warning and a chance to fix a post before losing everything.
Meta “should give us an opportunity to correct the content if it is in fact offensive,” he said, “but not because of what we are or who we are.”
