Michael McElhaney sat alone on the stage. He was posted on a single stool, gold- and red-sequin curtains winking behind him, as he looked out at dozens of performers, promoters, staff and regulars. He’d called them there, to the Stud, a storied San Francisco gay bar, worn but warm, south of Market, for an emergency meeting.

A couple of weeks earlier, just a few days before the bar’s 50th anniversary party, McElhaney learned that the family who owned the Stud’s building for decades and had kept the club’s rent at a manageable $3,800 had finally sold it. The rent would jump to $9,500 a month in September. He had kept quiet about the news, not wanting to ruin the 50th, or the Pride celebrations the week after. But now it was time: He told the crowd he was getting out. The sale was as good a reason as any to move back to Hawaii to take care of his aging mother.

Bars feeling pressure

Dive bars and queer bars across the city have faced increasing pressure as the cost to do business in San Francisco rises and neighborhoods change. Just last year, the city’s only lesbian bar, the Lexington Club, located in the heart of the Mission, closed. Still, the effect is particularly acute south of Market, where developers see dollars and the gay bars fill a particular niche for self-described artists, weirdos and freaks. The Eagle was revived in 2013 after a near-death experience; other bars, like Kok and Beatbox, have been less lucky.

With the Stud, though, there was a twist. The bar’s future, McElhaney told the crowd that night, was somewhat up to them. While other gay and queer bars have announced their closures with a sort of finality in recent years, McElhaney was giving the community a chance to rally. He didn’t want to sell the bar to some “bougie whatever,” he would say later. “I want it to be able to maintain its attitude and philosophy. I want to be able to come back to San Francisco and go to the Stud.”

Mica Sigourney, a longtime drag performer who goes by the name VivvyAnne Forevermore!, was on the other side of this scene, sitting with the rest of the club kids, listening to McElhaney. Almost immediately, he decided to do something. He left the meeting with a few friends, and before the night was up, they had formed a group — Save Our Stud — with the intention of buying the bar and running it as a cooperative. News of the effort exploded. Nearly 1,700 people have joined a Facebook page to share stories and organize, and three city supervisors have already reached out.

Saving the Stud won’t be easy — or inexpensive. The liquor license alone could go for nearly a quarter of a million dollars on the open market. But Sigourney and the others at the center of the co-op movement are hopeful. They have to be. “It’s important. And it’s striking a chord for a reason,” he says. “This can’t keep happening to the city if this city is going to remain the gayest city in America.”

Sigourney is invested in the space in another way, too. For seven years now, he’s hosted one of the Stud’s most successful nights, a drag show and dance party called Club Some Thing. He’s been coming to the club even longer. He’s watched queens lip-sync from the top of a moving car in the parking lots across the street (now a big, glass building). He’s peeked into the DJ booth to catch Björk doing a secret, unplanned set. He’s seen his drag mother, Glamamore, decide, at 5 in the morning, no makeup, no drag, to jump on a go-go box and perform.

“I’ve seen some of the most magical things happen on that stage,” he says. “These magic things happen in a lot of places, but right now in San Francisco, if the Stud closes, where is the Stud? There’s not another one.”

‘It had no rules’

Stefan Grygelko, better known as the drag performer Heklina, helped revive the Stud in the late ’90s with Trannyshack, a show where — almost literally — anything went. “It had no rules,” he says. “The Stud was great because it allowed all that to happen, things that other venues would never allow you to do, like blow things up, set things on fire, piss on people.”

These days, Grygelko is one of the partners who own Oasis, a gay club that opened up not far from the Stud less than two years back. He’s watched the gay scene south of Market fade. “I’m poaching events from bars that are closing,” he says. “But I don’t want to. I want there to be a gay presence south of Market.” Some gay bars, he says, don’t have much of a sense of place. People walk in and they could be anywhere. That’s not true in SOMA. “When you go south of Market, those clubs like the Stud, there’s nowhere else like it. There’s nowhere else in America like the Stud. There’s nowhere else like Oasis. The Lone Star is very unique. These are unique spaces.”

The Stud’s entrance, just off Ninth and Harrison streets, is marked by a big red arrow outlined in blue lights. Inside, tinsel hangs from just about anywhere it could possibly hang, disco balls send the light flying every which way and gold lamé fabric covers the walls. On the right night, the sidewalk outside is full of people in club gear and audience members have to stand on their tiptoes to see the stage.

Friday afternoon, Kitty Von Quim took a break from doing her makeup in the back room and slid into one of the bar’s booths. She helps produce a burlesque show that was debuting at the Stud that evening after getting booted from Beatbox when it shut down. She’s been coming to the Stud for about a decade. “The Stud is completely one of my homes,” she says. She remembers going to her first show there and seeing “these completely otherworldly beings who created magic on stage. (The Stud) gave me a place to be weird and otherworldly, too.”

This isn’t the first time the Stud has nearly gone down. It’s had the sort of history full of highs and lows you’d expect from a place that opened 50 years ago, at a time when police were still raiding gay bars. But, by all accounts, it almost immediately became a scene for hippies and those on the outside of an outsider community. Over the years, performers like Etta James and Sylvester would come through. Harvey Milk hung out there, and Janis Joplin would stop in.

Patrick Walsh, who started going to the bar in the early ’70s and wound up working there into the ’80s, remembers the bar welcoming everybody — “any kind of character, no judgment. Everybody celebrated who you were.” Recently, he dug up a small article about the Stud from a 1980 Drummer magazine. “On any given night you’ll see men in leather, punks with pink hair and even women,” the article read. “But the mix works fabulously and the Stud remains one of the dominant dance bars in a city famous for its discos and clubs.”

When McElhaney bought the bar in 1996, the place was all but gutted. The previous owner had died, and a lot of the tchotchkes he’d filled the place with — gilded mirrors, soap sculptures from the 1930s, Wild West memorabilia — had been sold. There was no stage. Instead, at least at first, McElhaney would make one each night out of empty beer boxes and plywood. He was fresh out of art school and had that kind of energy. Now, after 20 years of filling the place back up, he’s tired. “I’m done. I’m toast.”

He does, though, understand how a place can come to mean so much. Time doesn’t stop for anything or anybody. It just rushes forward. But the Stud and other spots like it anchor communities to their shared histories. “Everybody, for generations in this city, has some kind of story about the Stud.” So McElhaney is pushing for the co-op, trying to help however he can.

A call for celebration

Late Friday, back on that stage where McElhaney had sat alone on that stool, Sigourney was hosting Club Some Thing. He was framed by a spotlight, going by Vivvy and wearing a bright red pleated dress that looked about right for a country square dance. The night’s theme was “Ho Down,” and the club was packed.

“Some of you have heard that the Stud has come under some hard times,” he said. The crowd booed. “No,” he said. “The only people you should be booing at are not here right now and that’s the new landlords.” He went on. “There’s been a lot of questions this past week. ‘What can I do to help? What can I do to help?’ You can put your body in the place, use the space for what it’s meant for, which is to come together and celebrate.” This time the crowd cheered.

“That’s it,” he said. “Come to the Stud.”

Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost.