WHO ARE THE CLOSE FRIENDS?

Close Friends Collective is a group of educators, historians, and artists with a passion for teaching queer history. Based out of New York City, we lead walking tours, host readings and events, and make zines.

The Close Friends: (starting from top left) erin reid, Salonee Bhaman, Daniel Walber, Natalie Hill, Jimmy Fay, and Katie Vogel

Close Friends Collective formed in the summer of 2021 to help Henry Street Settlement celebrate Pride, and we've been leading sold out queer history walking tours ever since. We are educators, historians, and artists with a passion for public history. With partners including Henry Street, Bluestockings Cooperative and Green-Wood Cemetery, we create zines, produce historical readings, and lead walking tours on a wide range of queer histories.

Our collaborative approach, with each tour led by at least two educators, allows us to facilitate meaningful dialogue. Telling stories across time periods and historical identities, we use the past to explore contemporary questions and build queer community.

We've produced zines that have been featured in the NY Queer Zine Fair, the East Village Zine Fair and at our partner bookstore, Bluestockings Cooperative. And we've programmed a variety of public history events, including our annual Valentine's Day Gay Love Letters reading.

We met in the context of a museum field that tends toward the most "tactful" historic interpretation available, which usually means the most heteronormative. The resistance to even entertaining the possibility of queer lives and communities, often under the guise of a commitment to "hard evidence," is as irresponsible as it is ridiculous. So many queer relationships have been presented unironically as "close friendships," despite how false that rings to us.

So the six of us decided to join the growing chorus of queer voices that insist upon seeing ourselves in the past. We use "close friends," "besties," "pen pals," and "roommates" exclusively with a joyful irony, one that hopefully you will join us in finding both silly and liberating.

With a wink and a nod to Margaret Middleton, Saidiya Hartman, Blanche Wiesen Cook and so many others who have insisted on the queer possibilities of the past, we've dubbed ourselves Close Friends Collective.