DNA Lounge

A couple of weeks ago, some crackhead threw a bottle at one of our second floor windows. We have no idea who this assclown is. Does he have some kind of grudge against us? Against that window in particular? Who knows. Long time readers may recall that those Above DNA windows are crazy complicated. On the outside are the original warehouse panes (which might, for all I know, date back to 1920) and directly inside those is a sheet of double-paned ¼" laminated glass. Then there's an air gap, then…

You have once again voted DNA Lounge to be "Best Nightclub" in the 2026 Best of the Bay! Thank you all for your continued support! It means a lot, and is really helpful. We also got second place for "Best Live Music Venue" and, for the first time, second place for "Best Pizza"! I just did a roundup of our Halloween events, but here's what we've got coming up in the next two weeks. It's a lot! Ravefurrest Secret Psy Egyptian Lover Echos

All Hallow's Eve, Sat Oct 31 The Crow, Thu Oct 29 Why 2K, Fri Oct 30 Rocky Horror, Thu Oct 15 Project X, Sat Oct 17 Ravefurrest, Sat Oct 10 Gotham City Follies, Mon Oct 12

Normally I reserve my vitriol for the slopbros for my personal blog, but this has become extremely DNA Lounge-related of late, as I shall explain. (This counts as plumbing-related, the internet being a series of tubes, full of toxic slop.) As you may be aware, our web site is being constantly, relentlessly hammered by AI scrapers. I am spending an absurd number of hours just trying to keep things barely functional under this brutal onslaught. It's not only us, obviously; this toxic blight…

We had a leak in the main men's room by the urinals. It turns out that one of the urinals has some kind of internal leak, and it's a spot-welded mess, so we weren't able to get in there with any kind of sealant. It probably has to be replaced. And, in the intervening two decades, it turns out that these urinals have become unobtainium. While the model shows up in some catalogs, you can't actually get them. Someone theorized that it may be because of newer water-conservation requirements; who…

Friday evening, the Folsom Street Fair web site finally published the map of the fair. (This is not unusual for them: many years they don't publish the map or schedule until after the fair has begun.) And lo what do we see? That for the first time in over twenty-five years they have decided that our block of 11th Street is outside of the fair. This has, to put it mildly, massive financial consequences. So we mail them, and: From: Angel Adeyoha <angel@folsomstreet.org> Date: Fri, Sep 25, 2026 at…

Thanks to Charles Lewis III for his nice writeup about our parklet situation in 48 Hills! (Vote for us in Best of the Bay!) But since this wretched timeline is one that moves backwards in all the worst ways, City Hall and the SFMTA want the Lounge's parklet destroyed. Again. Seemingly for no other reason than "just because." The 41-year-old club has two weeks to take down the utterly harmless, wholly beneficial structure, or face a 500-dollar daily fine. You know how this very column has…

We've had our parklet for 15 years, and now SFMTA says they're going to fine us $500/day if we don't demolish it in two weeks. We have spent nearly two years trying to negotiate with them to figure out some rational way to satisfy them, and they have been 100% unwilling discuss any alternatives. In their view, they can demand whatever they want and we just have to suck it up. Over the last few months, we have reached out to Mayor Lurie, and to District 6 Supervisor Dorsey (through various…

It's time for the Folsom Street Fair and we've got quite a lineup! First a bit of an outlier, on Friday the Aniclover folks are bringing some kind of anime maid thing, your guess is as good as mine. But this one is phone-free, which I can certainly get behind. (BTW, if, in your dotage, you ever find yourself thinking that there's no new kink out in the world that can surprise you, check out an anime party. They have such specificity...)

I hope you will be joining us for the Hubba Hubba Revue 20th Anniversary show this Sunday, Sep 20! Main floor seating has sold out, but some balcony seats remain. Broke Ass Stuart has a nice retrospective: How did this all get started? Kingfish: "I got a call from DNA Lounge, asking if I could book a show on a Saturday night in September of 2006. My friend, Eddie Dane, and I scrambled, put together a line-up of our friends in the Bay Area burlesque community, signed-up our pal, Lee Presson, and…

Hey! Are you a fan of DNA Lounge? Would you like to help us stay alive? There is a thing you can do that will make it easier for us to book better shows, receive grants, and avoid harmful interference from our local bureaucrats. And even better, it only takes a minute of your time, costs you no money, and only involves clicking some links! How, you ask? Vote for us as "Best Nightclub" and "Best Live Music Venue" in this year's Best of the Bay poll. I'm not exaggerating: being able to brag about…

There's someone on eBay trying to sell unused tickets to our 2013 Prince shows for $700 each. (I don't begrudge them the effort, but I'm still not linking to it -- and I realize that "asking for" is not the same as "receiving".) But what they don't know is, I have around 2,000 of those tickets left, and any time someone signs up for our Patreon and I mail them their membership card, I usually toss into the envelope a bunch of stickers and a Prince ticket or two. So, you know, if someone were…

38 years ago today, Zero Cool hacked all those banks across state lines. From his house. Crashed 1,507 systems in one day. Biggest crash in history. Front page New York Times, August 10, 1988. Naturally, that means it's time for our latest installment of CYBERDELIA. Yo, check it. DNA. Sun Aug 30. This is the THIRTY-FIRST Anniversary of HACKERS, yes really. Join me as I crumble to dust. So, as per tradition, we will have: A screening of Hackers at 8pm; Hackers costume contest at 11pm;…

I am currently incandescent with rage about something else entirely that I'm told I can't talk about yet, so let me sublimate that instinct with this unrelated story: The SFPD "Real-Time Investigation Center" is the surveillance nightmare funded by a $9.4 million "donation" from billionaire Chris Larsen and another $3 million "donation" from Salesforce and Trump quisling Marc Benioff. "We're going to be covering the entire city with drones," said RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire.…

Today's VHS find: Pam Doré posted a video of the first night of Club Q at DNA Lounge, back in the distant year of Two Thousand and Two. Wait, we were still using VHS in 2002? Yes. Yes we were. 2002, in case you didn't know, was 24 years ago. How dare it. The nerve. ▶︎

I found another 36-year-old VHS tape on eBay! D.O.A.'s final concert, live at DNA Lounge, in 1990. ▶︎

Twenty-five years ago today, on July 13th 2001, was the first event at DNA Lounge under current management. I am very old and I have been leaning on this bar for a very long time. Typically we treat Nov 22 as our "real" anniversary (the club will be turning 41 this year) but 25 is kind of a shocking number, so I thought that was worth noting. Check out what used to pass for photo galleries two and a half decades ago. Traditionally this is where I do the usual "if you'd like us to be around for…

As our "Cyberdelia" series has seen a bit of success at branching out from being only the "Hackers" party, we've decided to try and screen roughly one cult movie a month! I hope you will join us. Our bill through the rest of the year: Conan the Barbarian (this Sunday!), Evil Dead 2 + Army of Darkness double bill, Hackers (the main event), The Crow, and Batman Returns (the greatest Christmas movie). And you can get a discounted seated "Season Pass" ticket that gets you a seat at all five events…

We replaced our network rack with a slightly larger one. Exciting news, I know, but I'm posting these photos because I know that there is a certain segment of my readership who will be upset by them, perhaps even scarred. Is this what peak performance looks like? Probably.

A few days ago Doris Fish posted this 90 minute video of the full show of Sluts a Go Go All Star Gang Bang, a drag and burlesque show which took place here at DNA Lounge back in the Twentieth Century, in the distant past of January 1990! ▶︎ As with the Spencer archives, I hope this trend of people unearthing their 36-year-old VHS tapes continues...

SF Gazetteer, Cydney Hayes: Why do these Castro gay bars have TSA-style face scanners? The machine Owen encountered is called a Patronscan Guard+, a biometric and personal data collection device made by Servall Data Systems, a surveillance tech company headquartered in Alberta, Canada. Mix is one of at least three bars in the Castro, including Badlands and Toad Hall on 18th Street, that wheel out the Patronscan kiosk each night to collect the personal data of every customer that comes through…

Ira Sandler, owner of 1015 Folsom for 40 years, has passed away. 48 Hills and DJ Dials have some nice words. RIP to one of the absolute legends of nightlife. He was a huge inspiration to so many.

When people sign their names on the point-of-sale tablet at the bar, at least half of those signatures are "wavy horizontal line". Most of the rest are an attempt at an actual signature, but probably only about 1 in 1000 of those have anything in them that you would perceive as letters, or in fact, writing. And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those. If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"... ...you are a…

Speaking of our neighbors... Hey, remember that hideous flashbulb of an office building they built across the street from us in 2019? How's that going? Still walled up with plywood and sitting 100% vacant after 7 years? Blank wall covered with graffiti and posters rather than that "ground-floor commercial" we were promised? Emergency lights still strobing all night long? Good, good... I guess the matryoshka doll of shell companies begins with 340-350 11th Street LLC. The realtor on that sign…

KQED says: Long Live The Pound: The Forgotten 2000s Venue That Changed the Bay Area: At The Pound, Carracci, Cardinal and Cipriano carved out a pivotal and mostly unsung revolution in San Francisco's legendary music scene. The Pound was born on Feb. 8, 2001 with Jerry Cantrell from Alice in Chains playing the venue's first show. Its short-but-influential run lasted just five years; the Port Authority pulled the plug on their lease in fall 2006. Along the way, The Pound hosted a blizzard of…

Welp, that's about enough of that. We're back to not doing deliveries again. At the end of January we started using Chow Now for deliveries. It was a $50/month flat fee, and they were to drop the orders directly into our Revel POS on the back end. Guess what, they ...

To recap... Back in 2021 we finally received some federal grant money to keep us alive and cover the enormous costs of having been completely closed for 18 months starting in early 2020... This was the COVID-19 Shuttered Venue Operations Grant (SVOG) which I think is the ...

There are a lot of things to be angry about in the world today, but Ticketmaster is always one of them. Spare them a little rage if you have any left to give. When, two years ago, we heard that DOJ was moving forward with their anti-trust suit against Live Nation we all knew