It’s 4pm on a Thursday at Julius’ in the West Village, “the oldest continuously operating gay bar in New York City” according to Marc Zinaman’s newly released coffee-table book, “Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places.”
If you were at Julius’ in the 1950s, you could have hobnobbed or more with the likes of Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Ah, the possibilities. Tidbits like this are only one of the many joys of encountering this newly released text.
A bigger sales pitch is that if you ever visited the Big Apple or lived there, “Queer Happened Here” will elicit memories of all the times you had to be checked for STDS, were splashed on by a careless popper user, or had your girlfriend break up with you five minutes before you were going to break up with her. But more on that later.
After ordering chicken nuggets while awaiting the author, I recalled Marlon Riggs once wrote, “Silence kills the soul; it diminishes its possibilities to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it’s nothing.”
Fighting that shrinkage is the East-Coast-based Marc Zinaman who has just arrived. Since 2021, he has been pulling together the social media account @Queer_Happened_Here while contributing to other similar-goaled websites and serving on the planning committee for the forthcoming American LGBTQ+ Museum. His latest effort though will cost you $50, less on Amazon, and look quite festive on your nightstand.
Zinaman, your standard, attractively bearded homosexual in his 30s, is decked out with a black baseball cap, UNIQLO jeans, and white Converse sneaks. You at first might not have guessed that in front of you was one of the nation’s top queer bar-storians or disco-ologists. Or as he might insist, “plain old historian” will do.
Wed for three years to a lover he hooked up with on Bumble, the very congenial Zinaman notes that the heated romance has not at all infringed on his historical pursuits. In fact, on his Instagram and Substack accounts, Zinnaman has covered over 1000 gay venues, personalities, and consequential moments of modern LGBTQ history since tying the knot, focusing on the likes of the House of Xtravaganza, Quentin Crisp, and “the trailblazing African American singer and actress Ethel Waters.”
So how and why does one start delving into the queer past full time?
“I came out at 18 in my first week of college,” Zinaman shared. “I went to NYU, which was very good because I had never really met other gay people before, and all of a sudden everyone around me was gay. That was also when I started going out, which was in 2008. I grew up Orthodox Jewish in New York, so coming out familywise was, even though it was 2008, complicated. This was when I really started exploring.”
But most of the venues he’s reported on have long closed before his research began.
“Yes,” Zinaman nods. “There were a few still around when I started going out, but mostly they are all new. The interesting thing is that when I began to barhop, it was just when iPhones and all the tech that we now use all day, every day, was just starting to come out. That really wasn’t quite a thing yet, but definitely it was at the beginning of it. If you go to a bar now, everyone has their phone out, so that feels really different. In the same vein, not to equate it at all, but when I started to come out, there weren’t things like PrEP, which now new people coming out all are on.”
But with no longer needing to spend his time in dives, Zinaman decided to cleverly distill our past in compact essays that are followed by encyclopedic entries on bars, dance halls, bath houses, eateries, and Pride marches. The most consequential moments of Manhattan’s LGBTQ history are recorded with hundreds of photographs of drag personalities, strippers on poles, bare male derrieres, and lesbians embracing.
See shirtless men sweating up the dance floor at The Saint, which was a “gay superclub” known as the “Vatican of disco” in the 1980s. Move a few pages ahead to the 1990s and observe leather-vested gals at the Clit Club that was “conceived as a sex-positive, racially, generationally, and economically mixed space for lesbians, trans people, gays, and everyone in between.”
Prestel, the publisher of art books on Warhol, Banksy, and Art Nouveau, has supplied Zinaman with 304 pages to cite a selection of Manhattan locales and spotlight the often heavily mascaraed personae who peppered them from the Jazz Age onward.
Included are the Harlem-based nightclub Webster Hall in the 1920s that attracted the likes of Langston Hughes and Djuna Barnes, to the Crazy Horse Café in the 1960s that packed in mostly straight audiences with its female impersonation revues that featured takes on Eartha Kitt and Lena Horne.
Straights aside, Zinaman argued, “Still, [the Crazy Horse] served as an important gathering space for many queer people, providing an opportunity to bring joy to others and explore gender identities.”
The final entry of the book opened its doors in 2017. Welcome to actor Alan Cumming’s Club Cumming, where there is a weekly knitting circle titled “Stitch and Bitch.”
But besides the encyclopedic text recording the Ballroom Boom, the birth of early gay rights organizations, and the emergence of AIDS, what really threw Zinaman for a loop during his research period?
“What jarred me in history? When I was 18 or 21, I didn’t have a good idea, but I have a good idea of queer history now. Especially, it’s still really fascinating now to read about the Mafia involvement and how long that lasted, how without the Mafia, gay places wouldn’t have really existed before Gay Pride.”
Yes, without a Godfather or two, there might never have been a Stonewall, and a hundred other bars, and today there might not have been any gay rights to dismantle. Thanks to “Queer Was Here,” we can never look at lasagna the same way.
‘Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places,’ by Marc Zinaman, $50, Prestel/Penguin/Random House
ttp://www.penguinrandomhouse.com
http://www.instagram.com/queer_happened_here/
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