Out and About
A guide to the places where LGBTQ people have fought for their rights, created community, and shaped American culture
Drawn from the work of the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, an award-winning cultural heritage initiative, this long-overdue book carefully and thoughtfully catalogs 101 places that illustrate the LGBTQ community’s often-neglected contributions to New York City and American history. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these sites reflect the diversity of LGBTQ people, from internationally recognized figures such as Keith Haring, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde, to everyday New Yorkers who helped shape the city. Looking beyond familiar LGBTQ landmarks such as Stonewall, the book highlights the significant impact that LGBTQ people have made in all of the arts, literature, social justice, and more. It also documents important gathering spaces, such as bars, clubs, cafes, baths, parks, and community centers that were among the few places where LGBTQ people could come together, be themselves, form community, and organize. Illustrated with contemporary photographs and archival images, this book invites readers, whether exploring the city in person or from home, to look anew at spaces that previously went unnoticed and appreciate stories that, until this collection, have been all but invisible.
- George Chauncey, Columbia University, author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940What a fantastic guide for anyone who wants to know where queer people walked the city’s streets before them. This revelatory book takes you to 101 homes, bars, churches, parks, theaters, and protest sites across the city that were significant to New York’s LGBTQ history. Better yet, it provides evocative capsule histories of the queer people who lived, worked, and dreamed in those spaces, from Walt Whitman to the Jewish labor activists and Black writers and performers of the early 20th century, and from mid-century theater designers, dancers, and clergy to the activists and artists who led the great social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. An absolute treasure trove.
Andrew S. Dolkart, Ken Lustbader, and Jay Shockley are co-founders and co-directors of the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, where Amanda Davis is executive director and founding staff member. Dolkart is Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University and the author of several award-winning books about New York; Lustbader is a historic preservation professional and founder of the LGBTQ+ Heritage Alliance; Shockley had a more than 35-year career as a historian at the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission; and Davis is an experienced architectural historian and preservationist in the New York City nonprofit cultural heritage field.
