Time Travel This Pride with Queer Happened Here
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back in time and visit all the major places in New York City where queer culture and events flourished? Well, now you can with a new book.
The Stonewall Inn. Studio 54. The Continental Baths. Clit Club. The Cock. Mineshaft. Lucky Cheng’s… The names alone evoke intoxicating images of New York’s legendary LGBTQ+ culture, activism, underground nightlife, and vibrant community long after many of these groundbreaking spaces have closed. Few have been landmarked, and many have been forgotten or are the stuff of memories and tales — until now.
Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places is a dazzling illustrated history of the city’s most fabled queer locales as chronicled by author Marc Zinaman. Native New Yorker Zinaman crafts a fascinating look at the evolution of queer culture in Manhattan between 1920 and 2020, seamlessly weaving photographs, flyers, posters, club membership cards, and magazine spreads with first person stories and compelling research into a richly-layered living history.
Featuring over 400 works by artists and photographers including James Van Der Zee, Paul Cadmus, Fred W. McDarrah, David Wojnarowicz, JEB (Joan E. Biren), Bill Bernstein, Tina Paul, Mariette Pathy Allen, and Linda Simpson, Queer Happened Here meticulously researches these historic venues and revisits the bathhouses, drag balls, nightclubs, bookshops, cafes, and bars as well as more notorious locales including Women’s House of Detention and the Christopher Street Piers.
From Central Park to the Christopher Street Piers, Webster Hall to Westgay, queer history can be found throughout the city, yet it’s gone largely unmarked, and those who are still alive to recall what it was really like are increasingly few. It’s a great thing that Zinaman has compiled this research to prevent further erasure of the community’s history—particularly pivotal and influential in the past century of New York’s urban landscape.
Organized by decade, Queer Happened Here opens with a splash at the bathhouses, drag balls, and nightclubs of the Roaring ‘20s. It looks at the reactionary wave of persecution that pushed the LGBTQ+ community back underground until it rose up against the NYPD on June 28, 1969, Stonewall—the birth of the modern gay rights movement.
The book follows the First Pride March as the city became the site of hedonistic bliss until the arrival of AIDS. Zinaman illuminates how nightlife forged a safe space where the community could come together and fight back — while also setting the blueprint for decades of pop culture to come, with influential and pioneering drag luminaries including RuPaul at Pyramid in the 1980s and Peppermint, who wrote the book’s introduction, at Barracuda in the 2000s. In between are plenty of familiar faces, some still with us, others lost to time.
This is a terrific memento to get yourself this Pride, as we continue to fight for our rights, preserve our spaces, and honor those who have gone before us, and inspire those who will follow.
