For a stretch in the late 1980s, when Lynn Breedlove was living in the Mission District, his life consisted of a familiar, hazy routine: He’d walk down to Francine’s, a bar on the corner of 18th and Collingwood streets, with a half pint of Stoli in his boot and a pocketful of drugs to sell that he’d mostly end up using all himself in the bathroom.

“我是一个可怕的商人,” the San Francisco writer and musician admits.

Reflecting on that period, Breedlove says he was numbing himself as friends around him were dying amid the AIDS crisis. As an addict, Breedlove, who is trans, was around people who “were totally different than the people in these pictures,” he says, referring to the images in Chloe Sherman’s new book, “Renegades: San Francisco: The 1990s.”

But when Breedlove got sober, the burgeoning scene that Sherman’s book of photos documents — a vast, vibrant and defiant community of queer artists in the Mission during the ’90s — took him in.

“They took me to meetings, they helped me get sober,” Breedlove says of the familiar faces featured throughout the book. “We started bands together. All of a sudden I was dealing with this whole crowd of people. We were making art, writing.”

At the time, around the start of the decade, a wave of queer 20-somethings flocked to San Francisco, already the nation’s mecca for gay people. Yet, this new cohort began forming something new: a freewheeling, intensely creative haven of what Breedlove calls, in his foreword to Sherman’s book, “queer and trans, butch, femme, and everything in between youth.”

They were inspired by an already queer Bay Area punk scene and major global political shifts, including the end of apartheid in South Africa and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But most of all, they were all scarred and united by the mass death and political abandonment during the AIDS epidemic.

“Somehow (we were) moving forward with a kind of f— you energy of survivors and fugitives from basically annihilation,” Sherman says.

The Oakland-based photographer had moved to San Francisco’s Mission District during this tumultuous time at the age of 22, renting a room on 14th Street for $250 a month. She began documenting a colorful and bracing new order being built. Capturing both the raw edge and the familial tenderness of the scene, Sherman’s book pulls from a decade’s worth of photos of the neighborhood — young queer people in bars and in cafes, in bedrooms and in the streets, in moments of quiet intimacy and in pure thrall.

“All the years that we had to hide who we were — gender, sexuality, whatever trauma — we were just like, ‘Well, here it is, and it’s beautiful and we’re going to love it,’ ” Breedlove recalls.

Within what became a mostly lesbian subculture, it felt entirely groundbreaking to exist in a space “where there’s the possibility that women might have safety together,” says artist and writer Anna Joy Springer, who also wrote a foreword for the book. Now living in San Diego, she adds, “I don’t think that everyone is always aware that an important historical moment is happening while it’s happening. But many of us talked about it as if it was.”

Unlike the second-wave feminism of the ’60s and ’70s, the ’90s scene was sex-positive and trans-inclusive. Their spirit of gender nonconformity was undergirded by the idea that “women and femininity might be decoupled in a way that wasn’t dangerous. Or if it was dangerous, it didn’t lead to death,” Springer says.

These ideas thrived in a neighborhood that became a self-sustaining bubble. Everyone seemed to work at and spend time in a handful of queer-owned co-ops and businesses, like Mortem Records and Red Dora’s Bearded Lady cafe. Rent was cheap, and everyone was making art.

Sherman eventually enrolled at San Francisco Art Institute, giving her the resources to more intently document the community. Her photos, Springer notes, contain a softness from a distinctly queer feminist lens — one that embodies and captures a time and place where queer outcasts could not just be themselves, but playfully present and explore who they were.

Around the turn of the millennium, the scene began to disperse. The dot-com boom raised rents, and a gradual exodus led to the death of local queer businesses. Many of the young artists, writers and musicians also moved on to prolific careers or family life elsewhere.

But the spirit and politics of the era are ever-present. The scene’s once radically expansive and inclusive notions around feminism, sexuality and gender nonconformity have become at once normalized and intensely politicized within our contemporary culture wars.

“I do think a lot of what we did paved the way,” Sherman says. “But with every bit of progress, a presence begets attention, which begets all kinds of -isms.”

而从mainstr同性恋历史经常被抹去eam memory, “Renegades” stands as a monument to this vanguard in the Mission that was figuring out the progressive politics that many now take for granted.

But Sherman’s photos mattered the most when she was taking them, when she’d make big prints and hang them up at the Bearded Lady cafe — when it was only the people in these images that saw them.

“I didn’t know I was beautiful, and Chloe’s photos made me believe I was,” Springer says. “The photos showed me that I was in connection with other people — that I wasn’t alone. It proved that.”

Correction:An earlier version of this story misidentified the cross streets for Francine’s. It was 18th and Collingwood streets.

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.