In 1927, actress and writer Mae West stood trial for “Sex” at her scandalous Broadway romp at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, the dazzling Gothic Revival building gracing the corner of Sixth Avenue and 10th Street. Found guilty of obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth, West served 8 days on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island). With the Roaring Twenties coming to a crashing end, the empire struck back, erecting the Women’s House of Detention beside the Courthouse in 1932.
The ominous art deco meets Bauhaus monstrosity loomed over scenic Greenwich Avenue, incarcerating a wealth of political prisoners including Civil Rights activist and scholar Angela Davis, Black Panther and activist Afeni Shakur, and queer homeless rights activist Jay Toole, as well as more fringe figures like radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas, who famously shot Andy Warhol in 1968.
For decades, the House of D, as it was commonly known, was a site of state oppression and queer resistance. Today, the building has been razed from the landscape and the better part of public memory. In its place, a manicured garden blooms, while the Courthouse is now a Library, its notorious past all but buried and forgotten if not for native New Yorker, Marc Zinaman.
A deeper love
Born in the 1990s, Marc Zinaman came of age as the city reinvented itself from the epicenter of radical chaos into a neoliberal playground. While historic locales like Studio 54 and the Stonewall Inn were elevated to icons, most of New York’s queer culture simply vanished into thin air. The Palladium — once the home of Club MTV — was torn down for NYU dorms. The Christopher Street Piers where queer photographers like Peter Hujar and Alvin Baltrop once worked, were destroyed and rebuilt while the beloved nightclub Paradise Garage reverted back to a truck depot.
As Zinaman became aware of an entire history of place hiding in plain sight, he began mapping these histories across New York, amassing an archive of over 1,000 spaces that form an inextricable link in the city’s layered LGBTQ history over the past century. With the publication of Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places, he crafts a richly layered living history that explores the evolution of queer culture in Manhattan between 1920–2020.
Seamlessly weaving photographs by James Van Der Zee, Fred W. McDarrah, JEB (Joan E. Biren), David Wojnarowicz, Steve Eichner, and Linda Simpson with first person stories and compelling research, Zinaman chronicles New York’s illustrious LGBTQ scene decade by decade, tracing the thread of resistance that sparked a global liberation movement.
Everybody, everybody
A natural born raconteur with an eye for detail, Marc Zinaman takes us on an extraordinary tour through the New York underground, charting the role of community spaces as a place of collective joy and resistance. At a time when queer and trans identity was criminalized, nightclubs, bathhouses, speakeasies, tearooms, private halls, and even Central Park provided spaces of refuge from public persecution.
Others like the Los Angeles’ based Mattachine Society opened their New York headquarters in 1958, with the aim of taking matters into their own hands. They partnered with San Francisco based Daughters of Billie, which was also opening its New York offices that year, building a movement that would transform gay liberation for decades to come.
As Queer Happened Here illustrates, joy and resistance go hand in hand, whether fighting in the streets for Gay Liberation or coming together as a community in the fight against AIDS. But perhaps what is most affirming about Zinaman’s work is how it illustrates the power of strength in numbers. Whether you are a leather man, drag queen, go-go boy, stud, club kid, queer activist, or you just follow the music, Queer Happened Here is a timely reminder that “Field of Dreams” is for everyone: if you build it, they will come.
Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places is published by Prestel and available for $50.
