Bohemian Club

The Bohemian Club is a private men's club founded in San Francisco in April 1872 by journalists who wanted a fraternal association for people involved in the arts. Its clubhouse at 624 Taylor Street on Nob Hill is a six-storey building containing dining rooms, meeting rooms, a bar, a library, an art gallery, a theatre and guest accommodation. The club also owns Bohemian Grove, a redwood property in Sonoma County where it holds an annual two-week summer encampment spanning three weekends, attended by roughly 2,500 people and organised around camps that function as the encampment's social units. The encampment includes theatrical productions and the Cremation of Care ceremony, first staged in 1881. Club bylaws require that ten percent of members be accomplished artists. Membership is restricted to men and membership lists are private. The club maintains no public website content: bohemianclub.org resolves to a member login page with no membership, history or contact information, so the admission process, the size of the membership, the waiting time and the cost of joining are all undisclosed.

How it works

Members use a San Francisco clubhouse year round and the club's Sonoma County grove for an annual two-week summer encampment held over three weekends. Within the encampment members belong to camps, which secondary accounts describe as the primary units through which long-term personal and business relationships form. The club's motto, "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here", is understood to mean that business dealings are to be left outside the club's formal gatherings. The club publishes no member services, reciprocal arrangements or programme information.

Typical member

Not publicly disclosed. Modern membership lists are private. Secondary accounts describe a club that began as a journalists' and artists' association and came to be dominated by business figures within its first decades, with a bylaw reserving a tenth of places for working artists.

The Bohemian Club is the least transparent organisation in this batch. Its own website is a login box, so every material fact -- membership size, fees, admission route, waiting time -- rests on secondary sources or on nothing at all. Figures for the initiation fee and dues circulate widely online; none could be traced to a source solid enough to record here, so they are left null rather than repeated. Two things are documented and worth noting. First, the artist quota is a real structural feature: a tenth of the membership is reserved for working artists, which is why the club has always mixed working musicians and writers with financiers. Second, the men-only rule survived a long fight over employment: California's Fair Employment and Housing Commission ordered the club to hire women in 1981, and the state Supreme Court's refusal to review the case in 1987 forced it to employ women at the encampment. That litigation concerned staff, not members. Anyone assessing the club should assume there is no application route that does not run through an existing member.

Editorial analysis by Peer Group Guide editors. It is separated from the record above and follows the editorial policy.