MISSION
Theatre Rhinoceros exists to tell queer stories with courage, craft, and unapologetic force. As the nation’s longest-running LGBTQ+ theatre, we create work that entertains, provokes, seduces, disrupts, and celebrates — giving voice to queer lives in all their beauty, rage, humor, complexity, and joy. We build a home for LGBTQ+ and allied artists, audiences, and truth-tellers who believe theatre can challenge power, expand empathy, and help imagine a more liberated world.
vision
Theatre Rhinoceros envisions a world transformed by queer storytelling — a world where theatre does more than entertain. It confronts, awakens, and connects us. We believe the stage can shift hearts, challenge injustice, and celebrate the full, fierce diversity of our shared humanity.
Art with Pride and Bite
Values
1. We Champion Queer Storytelling Without Apology
We believe queer stories are not side stories, niche stories, or “special interest” stories. They are human stories — urgent, necessary, political, hilarious, erotic, heartbreaking, and alive.
2. We Create a Home for Bold Artists
We support artists who take risks, speak honestly, and bring their full selves into the room. Theatre Rhinoceros is a place for creative courage, rigorous craft, and work that refuses to behave.
3. We Welcome the Beautifully Uncontained
We embrace the full spectrum of LGBTQ+ identity and experience — across gender, sexuality, race, age, class, body, culture, and imagination. Queerness is not one thing, and neither are we.
4. We Believe Joy Is Revolutionary
We value pleasure, humor, camp, desire, celebration, and collective release. In a world that has too often tried to erase queer people, our joy is a form of resistance.
5. We Make Theatre That Pushes the World Forward
We create work that challenges complacency, confronts injustice, and opens space for transformation. Our stage is a place to question what is, honor what has been, and rehearse what freedom might look like.
History
Founded in San Francisco in 1977, Theatre Rhinoceros is the world’s longest-running continuously producing professional queer theatre. Known affectionately as “The Rhino,” the company began with Doric Wilson’s The West Street Gang, staged in the South of Market leather bar The Black and Blue — a fittingly bold beginning for a theatre that has never been interested in playing it safe.
For nearly five decades, The Rhino has been a home for queer and allied artists, a champion of LGBTQ+ stories, and a fearless force in American theatre. Its work honors the history of the queer experience while pushing toward what comes next — amplifying emerging voices, fresh forms, and stories that are urgent, hilarious, provocative, tender, and alive. Our audiences come to be entertained, challenged, moved, and lit up — and their energy continues to fuel the next act.
