“Cowboy Bob!” they shout.

A silhouetted figure, slightly hunched and topped with something akin to a park ranger’s hat, enters out of the bright daylight into the small, cramped space that sits at the eastern edge of The Tenderloin on Turk Street.

A regular has arrived at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, bearing a boxed dinner from Popson’s from around the corner on Market Street, a gift for Gabriel, the mesh-tanked bartender who’s managing the joint on a recent late Thursday afternoon.

When the oldest continuously operating gay bar, the Gangway closed in January of this year, it left Aunt Charlie’s Lounge with a bittersweet claim to fame: It became the oldest and only gay bar in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that once was the home to the majority of gay bars in San Francisco. That gayborhood transitioned from here to Polk Street and eventually to the Castro, now the gay heart of The City.

Let’s be frank: Aunt Charlie’s is a dive bar in every sense of the phrase. The single room is tiny, on a rough block in a rough neighborhood, and drinks don’t really get fancy. Beer comes in cans and bottles only, or a bartender’s heavy pour into a bourbon and soda or a seven and seven, all at surprisingly cheap prices (a Maker’s Mark on the rocks is only $6.25). Its clientele is an eclectic mix: nearby residents in for a drink and to borrow a letter opener to read mail; Michael from across the lot, in to let customers know the meat he’s been grilling on a sidewalk barbecue is ready to eat; older (much older) gay men; young queers looking for their safe space, pulling on a vape pen; and the random tourists who come looking for “the other” when visiting a new city.

Since it opened in 1987, drag queens have claimed the scene. These aren’t your thirsting-for-fame contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Except for the hostess of Friday and Saturday nights performances, these queens are delightfully up there in years, defying the conventional wisdom that being gay is for only the young. Lines are visible through their makeup, and the costumes are more conventional: a wig, a dress, heels and lipstick. It’s less about the glamour, and more about the spirit. A troupe of drag queens known as the Hot Boxxx Girls performs every weekend entertaining and throwing shade at the crowd as they work the room. The entirety of the bar serves as the stage, so don’t come here expecting to sit safely away from the withering gaze of these ladies.

For the past 15 years, DJ Bus Station John has been holding his weekly Tubesteak Connection dance party on Thursdays at 10 p.m., taking over the joint normally illuminated by Chinese lanterns and the giant pink neon script “Aunt Charlie’s Lounge” sign mounted about the bar. He flips the switch. Off go those lights, replaced by deep red gels casting their glow on well-worn posters of vintage ’70s gay porn and beefcake shots he hangs for each party, and the sounds of his well-curated vinyl disco collection begin to fill the air. It’s all to create a vibe before the AIDS crisis took its toll, when sexual liberation and overt cruising were very much part of the San Francisco gay scene.

But on nights when there aren’t dirty dance parties or drag queens taking straight bachelorette parties to task for slumming it in LGBT+ spaces, Aunt Charlie’s is a place of regulars who keep coming back because the watering hole serves as a second home.

Robert “Cowboy Bob” Parks is one of them. He turns 70 this month and has been coming here since it opened. Nursing his seven and seven cradled in a Budweiser koozie he brings with him, he explains his nickname thusly, “I used to wear a cowboy hat everywhere — always a Stetson, because they’re the best,” he says. “Now I have this ranger’s hat, but I still always wear western shirts. It’s just been my look.”

Parks is a Vietnam vet, a helicopter pilot who served four stints in the war. He came out upon his return to San Francisco in the early 1970s. He knows the names of almost everyone in the bar, and they know him. He attends every fundraiser the bar holds, and occasionally treats the bartenders to a meal.

“I come here more often now that the Gangway closed,” he says. “It’s the only real gay bar left in the city.”

If you go Aunt Charlie’s Lounge: 133 Turk St. (between Jones and Taylor streets), San Francisco; 415-441-2922; www.auntcharlieslounge.com.