A visual trip through 100 years of New York’s LGBTQ+ spaces

When writer and historian Marc Zinaman was a child, he’d walk past The Ansonia in New York City’s Upper West Side on his way to school each day. He originally deemed the detailed beaux-arts building – which opened in 1904 and was the site of The Ansonia Hotel – as ​“striking but unremarkable looking”, but that was before he had any idea about the history that lay underneath it. 

Between 1968 and 1976, the hotel’s basement was better known as the Continental Baths – a legendary bathhouse that had 400 private rooms, a swimming pool, a sauna, and a disco dancefloor. More importantly, it was an LGBTQ+ meeting place, where the city’s then-criminalised gay community could meet, dance, socialise and have sex.

“As a closeted and scared queer kid, I had no idea that it once housed the Continental Baths,” Zinaman says. ​“Learning that fact only when I was in my late 20s changed something for me. If I’d known even a sliver of that history earlier, it might have helped me understand that I wasn’t as alone as I felt, and that queer people had always been here, walking these very same streets long before me.”

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The legendary venue is now featured in Zinaman’s new monograph, Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places. Featuring 69 different formal and informal spaces tied to queer history in Manhattan, the book makes for a deep-dive survey into places where LGBTQ+ music, culture, activism and community have existed and thrived over the past century.

Queer Happened Here​’s beginnings trace back to one evening a few years ago, when Zinaman binge watched back-to-back documentaries on the legendary Studio 54 nightclub. Although disco’s most storied dancefloor ultimately forms a key part of the book, as well as the history of New York’s LGBTQ+ community at large, the films hinted towards a wider scene that piqued the writer’s interest.

“While Studio 54 has been covered endlessly, what caught my attention in those films were these quick, almost throwaway mentions of other New York City nightclubs from the same era that sounded completely surreal,” Zinaman recalls. ​“This included the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler sang to men in skimpy towels, but also places like Crisco Disco, which had a centralised DJ booth shaped like a giant Crisco can, and GG’s Barnum Room, which had transgender trapeze artists performing acrobatics atop a net that hung over its dancefloor.”

The rich slate of venues made him realise that just below the surface, there were a host of queer stories that had largely been overlooked in the canon of New York’s LGBTQ+ history. ​“Despite being born and raised in New York, I’d never heard of these places and that disconnect really stuck with me – how could these clearly unforgettable sounding spaces have existed just a few decades ago, in the city I grew up in, and still feel so hidden?” he says. ​“So I went online to look up more information about those spots and that, of course, unearthed so many more. Places like Sanctuary, Mineshaft or The Saint.”

Zinaman would wake up every morning and research ​“two or three spots” a day, uncovering photographs, addresses and stories, while documenting each on on Google Maps. Soon, he had amassed over 1,000 locations, and he began the Queer Happened Here Instagram account in 2021 to share his findings. It quickly grew a following, and print became the logical next step.

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Packed with archive photography and stories, the book acts as a visual archive of the city’s queer spaces, and uses them as a jumping off point to dive into the long history from New York City’s LGBTQ+ history over the past century. It begins in the prohibition-era 1920s, when the Harlem Renaissance saw a thriving underground arts and music scene. 

“The ​‘Roaring Twenties’ or the ​‘Jazz Age’ was actually a rather queer-friendly period, despite what came before and after it,” Zinaman explains. ​“The Harlem Renaissance was a period of immense creative expression by African American artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals. And many of the big names to come out of this period were in fact boundary-LGBTQ+ folks – people like Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, Countee Cullen and Ethel Waters.”

The postwar Beatnik countercultural period follows, before The Stonewall Inn and the Gay Liberation boom of disco and the West Village are all dived into in granular detail, as well as darker times such as the AIDS crisis. Fabled venues including the aforementioned Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage are explored, alongside lesser remembered spaces such as Lucky Cheng’s – a ​’90s restaurant whose front of house staff were all Asian drag queens, which became an important space for Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) queers.

In a greying political climate in the USA and beyond, which is increasingly seeing trans people in particular and their rights come under attack, the book serves as an important reminder that LGBTQ+ people have always existed, taken up space, and contributed hugely to the physical spaces that we move around everyday.

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“Our country has begun to experience a new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ backlash,” says Zinaman. ​“When LGBTQ+ rights – especially the rights and lives of trans people – are under attack, one of the first things that gets erased is its history. We’ve already started to see that in instances like our current administration removing references to transgender and queer people from several federal government websites.”

But at the same time, it’s a memento of hope. Within the darker periods of history, the community have found ways to emerge stronger than before. ​“One of the biggest takeaways from working on this book is seeing just how cyclical queer history can be,” Zinaman says. ​“For every moment of progress, there’s often been a corresponding backlash, whether it’s through criminalisation, surveillance, censorship or outright violence. The AIDS crisis, for example, decimated entire communities and revealed how quickly queer lives could be devalued by the broader public.

“And yet even in the midst of that devastation, queer people organised, cared for one another, and created new forms of visibility and resistance,” he continues. ​“So documenting this history isn’t just about preserving the past – it can also be about equipping ourselves for the present. It can remind us that we’ve been through dark times before, and still, we’ve survived, created beauty, found joy, and fought for one another.”

Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places is published by Prestel.

Subscribe to Marc Zinaman’s Queer Happened Here on Substack and follow him on Instagram.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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