NYC QUEER HISTORY WALKING TOURS

The Lower East Side is an international crossroads of communities, including queer communities, which existed well before the dawn of a queer liberation movement and have continued into the post-Stonewall period.

The tour will begin at Henry Street Settlement, where you will learn about founder Lillian Wald's intentional community of women, and will end at Bluestockings Cooperative, a Lower East Side queer and trans worker-owned bookstore. In between, every tour is different! Frequent stops include 19th century ballrooms and 20th century watering holes, monuments of queer creativity and cruising, and the homes of icons like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Martin Wong and Alvin Baltrop.

Explore the long and rich history of queer communities in Manhattan's East Village, from the turn of the century to the turn of the millennium. Subjects include bathhouses of the 1910s, homophile activists of the 1960s and drag kings of the 1990s. The tour begins at the Public Theater and ends at Village Works bookstore on Saint Marks Place.

We revisit the final moments, obituaries, and gravesites of LGBTQ+ permanent residents of Green-Wood and consider how their stories have been told in both life and death. Are we, as queer historians, haunted by the gay past?