—the names alone evoke intoxicating images of New York’s legendary LGBTQ+ nightlife, 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 that third spaces have played in queer life over the past century.
The book’s cover features an image from the very first Pride in New York, taken by the venerable photographer of queer history, Diana Davies. The book’s foreword, meanwhile, was graciously written by Peppermint, the renowned drag performer who has been a New York City nightlife staple for decades, and who made history in 2018 as the first out transgender woman to originate a principal role in a Broadway musical.
Organized by decade, Queer Happened Here opens with a splash at the bathhouses, drag balls and nightclubs of the Roaring ‘20s—such as Rockland Palace, the Howdy Club and the Everard Baths. 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 fact that the Gay Liberation Movement had arrived. The book follows the First Pride March as the city became the site of hedonistic bliss at spots like the Mineshaft, Crisco Disco, and the Saint—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 at Barracuda in the 2000s.
Queer Happened Here features over 400 visual works by artists and photographers including James Van Der Zee, Meryl Meisler, Paul Cadmus, Fred W. McDarrah, David Wojnarowicz, JEB (Joan E. Biren), Bill Bernstein, Chantal Regnault, Tina Paul and Linda Simpson, as well as first-person memories and interviews from notables like Susanne Bartsch, Mario Diaz, Robbie Leslie, Daisy Ang, Susan Morabito, Johnny Dynell, Bob Pontarelli, Wanda Acosta, Peter McGough and Michele Saunders. Queer Happened Here will be published by Prestel on April 29th, 2025 and celebrates the indelible relationship between people and place, honoring the transformative power of pride, unity and love.
