Terrance Alan, a dynamic and fearless San Francisco activist, who went from acting in gay porn films and facing criminal charges for growing marijuana in the 1980s and ’90s to running a city commission and helping legalize cannabis, has died.
His death was announced Wednesday by Flore Dispensary, the cannabis store he co-founded in San Francisco’s Castro Neighborhood. He was 72, according to his business partner Nathan Whittington, who declined to say Alan’s cause of death.
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Alan was known as a relentless advocate for gay rights, cannabis and San Francisco’s nightlife community. His goatee and dangling earrings were a fixture across decades of commission hearings, smoky cannabis cafes, Board of Supervisors meetings, events in the Castro and flower-filled cannabis grows.
Alan told SFGATE last year that he first learned to grow cannabis in Humboldt County and then moved to the city in 1982. He started growing cannabis in the city to provide medicine to AIDS patients, including his husband, who eventually died from the disease. Alan himself was diagnosed with HIV in 1989.
In 1993, his live-in warehouse was raided and he faced criminal charges for growing cannabis. He told GreenState that the cops accused him of being part of “Dennis Peron’s gay weed mafia,” referencing the pioneering cannabis activist.
Alan said he actually didn’t know Peron at the time, but the charges united him with the leader, and soon, he was helping change the city and state’s cannabis laws. He helped pass Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative that recognized marijuana as medicine, and then founded CHAMP, a nonprofit cannabis dispensary.
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Alan said he continued to grow and distribute cannabis despite the heavy risk of state or federal charges because he saw AIDS patients in San Francisco in dire need of the medicine.
“There were moments the lawyers would tell us that we should be careful but, you know, I looked around and everybody was dying,” Alan told SFGATE in 2024.
After voters legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, Alan helped implement the law as chair of a San Francisco task force on legalization, although like many cannabis advocates, he would go on to criticize many parts of the state’s recreational legalization law. He founded the Flore dispensary in 2017.
In addition to his cannabis activism, Alan owned the more than 50-year-old cafe and LGBTQ hub Flore in the Castro for eight years. The cafe is separate from the dispensary. He was also an advocate for nightlife across the city. In 2009, the New York Times called him an unlikely “power broker” after he convinced the city to create a new SF Entertainment Commission that had authority over nightclubs in place of police oversight. The paper remarked on how he had gone from once peddling “low-budget gay pornographic movies, mostly starring Terrance Alan” to negotiating with politicians haggling over regulations.
Longtime cannabis activists have filled social media with tributes to Alan, recounting how he advanced the cause.
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Tributes have also come from the highest levels of state government. Department of Cannabis Control Director Nicole Elliott, who helped found the San Francisco Office of Cannabis, said in a LinkedIn post that she was “forever grateful, to him, and for him.”
“He was funky. He was stubborn. He was kind. He could debate for hours, disarm a room with humor in tense moments, and still show up at dawn to do the work again,” Elliott wrote.
Whittington told SFGATE that the Flore Dispensary has no plans to close down or change, and instead plans to remain a beacon of the values Alan championed.
“He was the symbol of resistance and resilience,” Whittington said. “The word he used a lot was resilience. It shows the ability to adapt and face adversity.”
*This article first appeared on SFGATE.com and is reposted with permission.