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.”

• Read next: Some­where to go: the fight for London’s queer spaces

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.

• Read next: The UK is now sec­ond-worst coun­try for LGBTQ+ rights in west­ern Europe

“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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