Bohemian Club

The Bohemian Club is a private members' club based in San Francisco, California, founded in 1872 by a group of journalists, artists, and writers who wanted a gathering place for creative and intellectual exchange. Over more than 150 years, its membership has broadened considerably, drawing in U.S. presidents, corporate executives, military officials, and entertainers alongside its original artistic constituency. The club's headquarters is located at 624 Taylor Street in the Tenderloin-adjacent Union Square area of San Francisco, not in the Presidio, as is sometimes erroneously stated. Its clubhouse is a privately owned building and not open to the public. The club is best known outside San Francisco for its annual summer encampment at the Bohemian Grove, a roughly 2,700-acre old-growth redwood property near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, where members and their guests gather each July for approximately two weeks of entertainment, speeches, and ritual ceremonies.

The club operates on a men-only membership policy, a restriction that has drawn periodic legal scrutiny and public criticism. Its membership has historically been difficult to document due to the club's strictly private nature, but a leaked roster that first circulated in 2025 and received renewed attention in February 2026 allegedly identified more than 2,200 members, generating significant press coverage and public debate about the club's reach and influence.

History

The Bohemian Club was founded in 1872 by a group of prominent San Francisco journalists, artists, and musicians who wanted a space for creative exchange and mutual support. Early members included reporters from major city newspapers, and the club took its name partly from the Bohemian tradition of artistic nonconformity. The club's early years were marked by a strong emphasis on the arts, with members organizing lectures, performances, and exhibitions that reflected the city's growing reputation as a center of artistic activity. Among the writers associated with the club during this founding era were Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain, whose presence reflected the club's origins in San Francisco's literary community, and Jack London, who remained active with the club into the early 20th century.

The club's first gathering spaces were informal, but by the 1880s the organization had established a more permanent presence in the city, offering dedicated rooms for performances, lectures, and member socializing. In 1889 the club moved to a location that offered more room for its expanding membership and programming. The current clubhouse at 624 Taylor Street has served as the club's home for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a privately owned building with no regular public access. The move away from the club's earliest locations coincided with a shift in membership, as the club began attracting not just working artists and journalists but also wealthy patrons, business leaders, and politicians who wanted proximity to the creative class.

The Bohemian Grove encampment developed separately from the clubhouse. Members began gathering in the redwood forests north of San Francisco as early as 1878, with the practice of annual summer encampments becoming regularized over the following decade. The Grove property, located near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, grew to encompass approximately 2,700 acres of old-growth coastal redwood. It sits in the Russian River region roughly 75 miles north of San Francisco, not in the Santa Cruz Mountains as is frequently misreported. The encampment became a destination for some of the most powerful figures in American public life, and by the mid-20th century it had become as well known as the Taylor Street clubhouse, if not more so.

The club's history is also shaped by what it chose to exclude. Women have never been admitted as full members, and that policy has been maintained through legal challenges. A 1986 California Supreme Court ruling in Bohemian Club v. Superior Court initially suggested the club might be subject to anti-discrimination law under California's Unruh Civil Rights Act, but subsequent litigation allowed the men-only policy to stand on the grounds that the club qualified as a sufficiently private organization. The policy remains in effect.

Membership and Structure

Membership in the Bohemian Club is granted by invitation only. Prospective members must be sponsored by existing members and are subject to approval by the club's membership committee, a process that has historically kept the membership rolls small relative to the club's prominence. The waiting list for membership has at times extended for years. Annual dues and initiation fees are not publicly disclosed, but the club's membership has consistently skewed toward figures with substantial financial means, reflecting both the costs of membership and the social networks through which invitations are extended.

The club's membership has historically included a substantial number of figures from American political and economic life. Republican presidents with documented attendance at the Grove or membership in the club include Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, was a longtime attendee, as was Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Secretary of Defense under both Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. From business, the membership has drawn executives from major financial institutions, industrial firms, and, in more recent decades, technology companies as Silicon Valley rose to prominence. Walter Haas, former chief executive of Levi Strauss and Co., and Henry Kaiser, the industrialist who built shipyards and hospitals across the American West, were among the mid-century business figures with documented club connections.

From the arts and letters, early members included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Mark Twain, reflecting the club's origins in San Francisco's literary community. The composer George Gershwin participated in club events, as did a range of figures from American music and theater. The 2025 leaked roster added contemporary names to this historical record, including actor James Belushi, television host Conan O'Brien, and country musician Eric Church, among many others, though the authenticity of the full list has not been officially confirmed by the club.

The Bohemian Grove

The Bohemian Grove is the annual summer encampment held each July on the club's property near Monte Rio, Sonoma County. It is located in a stretch of old-growth coastal redwood forest along the Russian River, not in the Santa Cruz Mountains as some sources have incorrectly stated. The property spans approximately 2,700 acres and has been owned by the club since the late 19th century.

The encampment typically lasts around two weeks and is attended by members and invited guests. Attendees stay in roughly 120 designated camps, each with its own name, traditions, and membership hierarchy. Some camps carry long-standing reputations for attracting particular categories of members — political figures, financiers, military officials — though the internal social geography of the Grove is not publicly documented in detail. The overall atmosphere is described by participants as deliberately informal, with the stated purpose of allowing powerful figures to interact outside the constraints of their public roles.

The Lakeside Talks are informal policy speeches delivered in a wooded outdoor setting and have historically attracted sitting and former U.S. presidents, Cabinet secretaries, corporate chief executives, military leaders, and prominent journalists. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both attended Grove encampments, as did George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and many other figures who shaped 20th-century American policy. The off-the-record nature of the Talks has been a source of both their appeal to participants and their controversy among critics, since no public transcript or record is kept of what is said.

The encampment opens each year with a ceremony called the Cremation of Care, a theatrical ritual in which a symbolic effigy representing worldly concerns is burned before a large owl statue at the edge of a lake. The ceremony has been performed since 1881 and involves costumed participants, music, and scripted dramatic speeches. Club representatives have described it as a lighthearted tradition meant to signal the start of a relaxed gathering, but the ceremony's imagery — a burning effigy before an owl idol, performed by a private assembly of powerful men — has attracted considerable outside speculation about its deeper significance. In 2000, radio host Alex Jones infiltrated the Grove and filmed a version of the ritual, releasing the footage publicly. The recording received wide attention and intensified existing public interest in the club's activities, though Jones's accompanying commentary was widely disputed.

The Grove is not open to the public and is actively guarded during the encampment period. Protest demonstrations have been held outside the property in multiple years, organized by groups opposing the concentration of political and corporate power they associate with the gathering.

Culture

The Bohemian Club has built a particular institutional culture around the idea of artistic performance and informal intellectual exchange. The club has historically staged elaborate theatrical productions known as "High Jinks" and "Low Jinks," performed by members for members, often with original music, sets, and costumes. The High Jinks is a full-length musical or dramatic production staged at the Grove encampment each year, while the Low Jinks is a shorter, more comic piece. These productions were once a central feature of San Francisco's cultural calendar and attracted attention beyond the club's membership. That public-facing cultural role has diminished over time as the club became more private and its public communications more guarded.

At the Grove encampment, culture takes a different form. The Lakeside Talks have functioned as informal policy seminars where figures from government, business, and academia present ideas in a setting explicitly designed to be off the record. Nixon, in a widely quoted remark recorded in 1967, described the Grove as "the most faggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine," a comment that has been interpreted variously as a criticism of its theatrical elements and as evidence of the social anxieties that shaped the club's all-male culture. Whatever his view of its aesthetics, Nixon continued attending.

The club's emphasis on exclusivity and secrecy has shaped how it is perceived from the outside. To its members, the Grove in particular is described as a rare opportunity for powerful people to interact without the pressure of public scrutiny or media coverage. To critics, the same dynamic represents an accountability gap — a space where major decisions can be discussed and relationships built without any public record. Both descriptions can be accurate simultaneously, and the tension between them has defined much of the public debate about the club's role in American life.

2025–2026 Membership Leak

In 2025, a document purporting to be the Bohemian Club's full membership roster circulated online and in press reports, listing approximately 2,202 names. The list received renewed attention in February 2026 when it was picked up by additional news outlets. Reported names included actor James Belushi, television host Conan O'Brien, and country musician Eric Church, alongside executives, politicians, and financiers. The late musicians Paul Newman and Jimmy Buffett were also named, indicating the list drew on rosters spanning multiple years rather than reflecting current membership at a single point in time.

Club spokesperson Sam Singer addressed the leak publicly, acknowledging the list's existence without confirming its accuracy. Singer characterized the club as a private social organization and pushed back against characterizations of the Grove as politically significant. The leak also prompted coverage in regional California news outlets examining which local figures appeared on the list, including examination of Central Valley political and business figures.

The leak renewed longstanding public debate about the club's influence. Critics have argued that a gathering that regularly brings together heads of state, corporate executives, and major political donors cannot reasonably be described as merely social. Defenders of the club note that the encampment has no formal decision-making function and that attendance at the Grove does not constitute membership in any governing body. The specific roster gave these arguments a more concrete basis than prior discussions had afforded.

The leak also drew attention to the Newsom family's complicated relationship with the club. Reporting in the New York Post documented that Gavin Newsom's father, William Newsom, had a sustained conflict with the Bohemian Club spanning years, rooted in disputes over access, exclusion, and the social politics of San Francisco's elite networks.

Geography

The Bohemian Club's clubhouse is located at 624 Taylor Street in San Francisco, in a neighborhood near Union Square and the Tenderloin. This location, a privately owned building, has served as the club's operational headquarters for most of its modern history. The building is not open to the public and does not function as a tourist site. It is sometimes mistakenly described as being located in the Presidio, a former military base on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula that now operates as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The Presidio and the club's Taylor Street address are separate locations with no institutional connection.

The Bohemian Grove property, distinct from the San Francisco clubhouse, is located near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, approximately 75 miles north of San Francisco. The Russian River runs near the property, and the surrounding landscape is characterized by old-growth coastal redwood forest. Monte Rio