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Skylark
Mission dance bar at 16th & Valencia with rotating DJs, a back-room dance floor, and a stiff house Manhattan. Long-running, unpretentious, queer-welcoming, the kind of room that feels different on a Tuesday vs a Saturday.
Open until 2am most nights — DJs late, dance floor in back, queer-friendly.
On Skylark
It is the corner of 16th and Valencia, just past midnight on a Saturday, and the sidewalk has the particular crowded energy you can only get in the Mission after most of the city has decided whether to go home or get one more. Skylark is on the corner. It has been on the corner for a long time. The neon is small. The line is small but persistent, and the bouncer waves you in without much fuss because Skylark, at its heart, is a bar that wants you to be inside it, dancing.
Push past the front room and you'll find a back-room dance floor with a DJ booth tucked into a corner and a sound system that is loud in the specific way that good Mission bars are loud — not so loud you can't lean into a friend's ear, but loud enough that your chest knows. The room is darker than most bars. There are mirrors. There is a small disco ball. The crowd is mixed in the way the Mission's better dance bars have always been mixed: queer and straight, gay and bi and otherwise, late-shift industry workers, art-school kids, people who came in alone and people who came in with five. Nobody is trying very hard. The dancing is good in the unselfconscious way that only happens when the music is dependable and the room knows itself.
Order a Manhattan. Or a vodka soda. The cocktails here are not the point — they are functional, well-made, fairly priced — but the bartenders have been doing this long enough that 'Manhattan' produces a Manhattan, on time, with a cherry. Find a corner of the back room. Watch what happens. By 1am the floor is full. By 1:45 the energy has shifted into the particular intensity that San Francisco bars get at the very end of legal drinking hours, when everyone realizes simultaneously that they have fifteen minutes to make this night mean something.
Skylark has been a queer-welcoming Mission staple for decades, in a city where queer-welcoming Mission staples have gotten thinner on the ground every year. That's the actual stake. Don't go for the cocktails. Go for the dance floor. Stay till they kick you out. The walk back up Valencia at 2am, the air still warm in the summer, is the part you'll remember.