By Marc Zinaman, Foreword by Peppermint
The Stonewall Inn • Studio 54 • The Continental Baths • Lucky Cheng’s • The Cock — the names alone evoke intoxicating images of New York’s legendary LGBTQ+ culture, activism, and community long after many of these legendary spaces have closed. 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, obscured, or forgotten entirely.
With Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places, author and native New Yorker Marc Zinaman sets the record straight with a dazzling illustrated history that chronicles the evolution of queer culture in Manhattan between 1920–2020. The book seamlessly weaves photographs, flyers, posters, club membership cards, and magazine spreads with first person stories and compelling research that illuminates the revolutionary role third spaces have played in queer life over the past century.
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, signaling the Gay Liberation Movement had arrived. 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 luminaries including RuPaul at Pyramid in the 1980s and Peppermint, who wrote the book’s introduction, at Barracuda in the 2000s.
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, and Linda Simpson, Queer Happened Here celebrates the indelible relationship between people and place, honoring the transformative power of pride, unity, and love.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
MARC ZINAMAN is a New York City-based writer and historian. Since 2021, he has been running the social media account @Queer_Happened_Here, which maps the forgotten LGBTQ+ history of the city. He has also been a contributing writer for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project and Making Queer History website. He was the contributing editor of the book Getting In: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s, and currently serves on the planning committee for the forthcoming American LGBTQ+ Museum.
PEPPERMINT is a New York City-based actor, musician, and public speaker who made history in 2018 as the first out transgender woman to originate a principal role in a Broadway musical.
@prestel_publishing
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