[music]

Tiffany Hansen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Alison Stewart. When you think of famous sites that make up New York's LGBTQ+ history, what are some of those sites that come to your mind? The AIDS Memorial on Seventh Avenue, Stonewall Inn. Yes, there are many more. This city is actually full of landmarks that tell the unique and complex history of LGBTQ+ life in New York.

Now there is a walking tour that highlights some of these sites. The Queer History Walking Tour is organized by the Close Friends Collective, a group of historians committed to amplifying stories of the LGBTQ+ community, and the group has joined forces with The Henry Street Settlement, a social services organization based on the Lower East Side to operate the tours. The collective takes walkers to the Lower East Side where queer activists, artists, politicians, entrepreneurs have been congregating and collaborating. Giving us an overview of the Queer History Walking Tour is Katie Vogel, public historian of the Henry Street Settlement and a member of the Close Friends Collective. Hi, Katie.

Katie Vogel: Hello. Thanks for having us.

Tiffany Hansen: Absolutely, and Salonee Bhaman. Did I say that right, Salonee?

Salonee Bhaman: You did.

Tiffany Hansen: Great. You are also a historian and a member of the Close Friends Collective. Welcome.

Salonee Bhaman: Thank you for having me.

Tiffany Hansen: Jimmy Fay, also a historian and a member of the Close Friends Collective. Welcome to you as well.

Jimmy Fay: Thank you. Good to be here.

Tiffany Hansen: All right. Jimmy, let's talk about the Close Friends Collectives. Just tell us what it is, when it was founded, the mission.

Jimmy Fay: Sure. Close Friends Collective is a group of six public historians, the three of us, and then three other members as well. We had been working in public history in different capacities, largely on the Lower East Side. We were commissioned by Henry Street Settlement in the summer of 2021 to make a walking tour for their Pride Month programming. We did that and it went well and we liked working together, so we kept doing it.

Now we have a walking tour of the Lower East Side, a new walking tour of the East Village, which is debuting today, actually. We have a reading series at Bluestockings. We have zines we table at zine fairs. We're basically a group just committed to queer history, queer narratives you might not have heard before in New York City.

Tiffany Hansen: Salonee, there are a lot of narratives that people might not have heard before and locations in the city that people walk by. Everybody at this point has probably heard of the Stonewall Inn, but there is a lot more out there that folks just don't know about, right?

Salonee Bhaman: Absolutely. Something that I noticed when you were doing your intro is that many of the sites we think about as archetypally queer history sites in New York are in the West Village. They tend to be in that Greenwich Village area. We really try to bring about a broader understanding of what counts as queer history by talking about queer history in relation to labor history, social welfare history, art history, and try to bring in both a geographic and subject matter diversity.

Tiffany Hansen: Queer history is history.

Salonee Bhaman: Exactly.

Tiffany Hansen: Katie, I'm curious where this idea for a walking tour actually came from.

Katie Vogel: Absolutely. In 2021, we wanted to do a walking tour about queer history for Henry Street staff actually, and we were looking around for one that already existed. I think there is one of the West Village, but we didn't find one of the Lower East Side. With some of my colleagues I had already worked with teaching Lower East Side history, we actually put together our own walking tour.

The importance of that is going to these sites that are relevant to queer history where queer people may have lived, where there may have been a protest or an action that took place. Actually being on that site and feeling where those people were in the past is different than just learning it in a classroom or learning it a different way. Actually being at the site has some importance.

Tiffany Hansen: Do you view it as a way to preserve history?

Katie Vogel: Absolutely. Yes. Some of our sites on the tour are the original buildings that we're talking about, but also some are not. In that way, I definitely consider it preserving the history by invoking in in that space, standing there. Also, I'll mention that Henry Street Settlement, it's a social services organization that continues that work in the present day, but also is a historic LGBT site and actually has that status as a landmark historic site, which just happened about a year or so ago. I think that's really important to have that site as a landmark site. That building can never get torn down. It also is always going to be attached to LGBT history.

Tiffany Hansen: Jimmy, you mentioned there's one tour that's starting today. I'm just curious. Obviously you haven't heard from folks that have taken that tour yet, but there are other tours that have already happened. What do you hear from participants?

Jimmy Fay: That's a really interesting question. I think for me, one of the most rewarding parts of this work is seeing the ways that people-- the conversations that we have on tours with people, we make it very clear that we share authority with the people on the tour. It's not just the three of us just because we're historians, it's we want to hear other people's stories. Often some of the best feedback that we get is when people share the stories of their own lives, the stories of their families.

Another story that comes to mind in terms of feedback, I guess, is that every February we have a gay love letter reading at Bluestockings. This past year, the year before, we had this queer and trans love letter reading, and then we got a DM on Instagram from somebody who said that afterward, them and their partner got engaged, and that was so sweet. They saw the event as an opportunity to celebrate their own queer love. That was lovely. I think that what we do is really rooted in community building for queer people in the present in addition to discussing queer history, queer communities of the past.

Tiffany Hansen: I'm curious, Salonee, how oral histories in general played into how you're thinking about setting up these tours and how you're thinking about the places to go on these tours because a lot of queer history is in the oral history.

Salonee Bhaman: That's a great question. Maybe I'll say a little bit about our name, The Close Friends Collective.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes. Good point.

Salonee Bhaman: Well, we call ourselves that in part because often in the archival record, as you might traditionally think about it, queer people are sometimes described as close friends rather than lovers or girlfriends. There is a great deal of hand-wringing among academic historians about whether it is appropriate to call someone a lesbian, for example, who would not have used that word vernacularly in their time, even though they may have had same-sex relationships or exist in a milieu that we would recognize as queer now.

One of the things we really sought to do was to validate the heterogeneity of experience that exists, but also give it language that's resonant with people today. Some of that is bringing together how people perceive history, oral histories, we talk a lot about an artist named Alvin Baltrop who is often remembered as the photographer of the Chelsea Piers. He lived on the Lower East Side for many, many years. Very little was actually preserved about him in a traditional formal historical record because he didn't achieve tremendous artistic success, but his friends remember him and have said a great deal about his legacy, his work as an AIDS educator, his role as a safe person for young people on the Lower East Side and on the piers.

In integrating that with what we know as formal history, whether that's why the piers existed, the West Side Highway collapsing, the fiscal crisis and putting that oral history within a traditional historical context, we hope to ground it as real history, not just hearsay.

Tiffany Hansen: Katie, I'm wondering, you talked a little bit about, oh, everybody has already heard about the West Village and how it is centered around the West Village. Why haven't the stories of the East Village and the Lower East Side, do you think, why haven't they been heard so much or talked about so much, or celebrated so much?

Katie Vogel: I'd love for my colleagues to jump in as well, but I think the Lower East Side, for hundreds of years, has been a very vibrant neighborhood and just so much art connected to the Lower East Side, so much immigration history connected to the Lower East Side, but it's also been a very impoverished neighborhood. I think the stories of working class people and working class queer people are not, in a lot of ways, preserved. Do you all want to add to that as well?

Jimmy Fay: Yes. I think in public history there is a model that our colleague Daniel describes as the Hall of Fame model of public history and of historical interrogation in general in which it's only the people you would have already heard of that you want to talk about. On our tours, almost at every stop, we're introducing people to someone that they've never heard of before, but whose story nonetheless has a lot to teach us about the history of queerness, the history of arts movements, labor movements, everything like that.

Tiffany Hansen: Let's talk about the tour then, Jimmy. Where does the tour of the Lower East Side start?

Jimmy Fay: The tour of the Lower East Side has an epicenter, which is Henry Street Settlement. We always start there, we always end at Bluestockings. These stops are actually different on every tour. We have an arsenal of stops that we all know how to give, and depending on who's giving the tour, access needs or the weather that day, we'll pick how many stops and which ones to do. I can name some of the ones that we do. We have Henry Street Settlement. We stop outside of the former Essex market, which formerly had a jail and a police court in it where we talk about someone we would today identify as trans or a gender non-conforming individual who was arrested and brought there in 1856. We call that the Charlie Stop. That's the person's name.

Tiffany Hansen: Yes, I want to talk about that. Tell us a little bit more about Charlie.

Jimmy Fay: Sure. All the record we have of them, it's pretty minimal. It comes through some arrest records and a very kind of unusual--

Tiffany Hansen: Because we're talking about late 1800s at this point?

Jimmy Fay: Mid-1800s.

Tiffany Hansen: Mid-1800s. Okay.

Jimmy Fay: 1856. Yes. We have an arrest record and we have a very strange article in the New York Times describing this person and the arrest. They were 19 years old at the time they're arrested and brought to court. They were arrested for vagrancy, so that's a law that was pretty intentionally left vague, that was often used to arrest gender nonconforming people. Charlie in this case was brought in for wearing men's clothing. Yes, we know that they were sent to a workhouse for two months following that. We know very little else about their life. It has been up to us as historians to delve into the archive basically to find out more, as much as we can about not just their life, but the other trans-masculine lives and communities that would've surrounded them.

Tiffany Hansen: Salonee, Charlie was brought in, arrested under this masquerade law. Do you guys talk about that? Do you talk about laws and things like that on the tour as well?

Salonee Bhaman: We do. We talk about laws and things on the tour. It's funny you bring up the masquerade law because we just did a tour actually talking about Governor Hochul's suggestion that we bring back the same masquerade law and talk about different ways that laws are written versus how they're interpreted and actually used often to police queer life. We talk a lot about laws, we talk a lot about contemporary politics and how they apply. We talked a lot about the Walking While Trans ban and lifting that ban while we do the Charlie stop.

We give a stop about STAR House, which was a cooperative living mutual aid, I guess that's maybe how we describe it, home today that was founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson in the early 1970s. We talk a little bit about how that on the Lower East Side is a very different vision of what pride might look like than what's happening at Christopher Street at the same time. We play a little speech by Sylvia Rivera called Y'all Better Quiet Down, which was actually given at the 1973 Christopher Street Day Parade, where she's essentially shouting at the audience and imploring them to consider the Jefferson Market Courthouse that's right down the street.

All of the queer and trans people, women who are incarcerated there, who are not part of the pride celebration, despite burning their things and throwing them out the window during Stonewall, despite being oftentimes arrested for being queer people, participating in queer life, sometimes under the masquerade laws or sometimes arrested for selling sex and other non-normative behaviors that were heavily criminalized in police. In some ways, our tour makes the argument that when we look for queer life in the past, we have to expand our scope beyond just people who may have entered the historical record in kind of traditional ways.

Tiffany Hansen: Katie, we got a question via text here. Any Jewish sites on the Lower East Side?

Katie Vogel: Yes, there are a few. With Henry Street Settlement, Henry Street was started by a queer Jewish person, Lillian Wald, who I'm happy to talk about more. Also, Henry Street was not set up just to serve a Jewish community and it wasn't religious, it was a secular settlement house, but a lot of the people who attended Henry Street were also Jewish at the turn of the 20th century. Yes. What about other stops on our tour?

Jimmy Fay: The political funerals stop, I would say. It has a lot of history of ACT UP, which there's a lot of really rich Jewish history there. Yes.

Salonee Bhaman: We talk a lot about an artist and ACT UPer named Jon Greenberg, who in addition to being a prolific AIDS activist and I obviously did not know Jon Greenberg, but a very funny person, talked a lot about his Jewish identity and how it related to his motivation to speak truth to power and talk about the AIDS crisis as something that was organized neglect on the part of the government.

Tiffany Hansen: Jimmy, let's talk just for a second about the East Village tour here so we don't neglect that. One of the spaces you include is the Performance Space New York formerly called PS 122. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jimmy Fay: Yes, I actually might kick this over to Salonee or Katie. They're going to know a lot more about this than I will.

Tiffany Hansen: Let's kick it over to Salonee.

Salonee Bhaman: Yes, well, PS 122, it's fun. I'm going to bring in some WNYC history too.

Tiffany Hansen: Let's do it.

Salonee Bhaman: If you haven't listened to Blindspot, the most recent season of Blindspot, it's excellent. What we talk about at PS 122 a little bit is the founding of the HIV Law Project, which was founded by Terry McGovern early in the HIV/AIDS crisis, and played a enormous role in changing the definition of AIDS to include symptoms experienced by women. We talk a little bit about that space as where a lot of that organizing happened, and a lot of that organizing happened because incarcerated women with HIV who had been organizing inside were able to come outside and speak their experiences out loud, were able to relate to each other, and able to see a pattern in the way that they were systematically being denied Social Security benefits. This massive lawsuit is mounted. I really highly recommend listening to Terry in her own words on Blindspot. That is our PS 122 stop.

Tiffany Hansen: Got it. Before we go, Jimmy, you mentioned the Bluestockings collective living history. Let's talk about it really quick here.

Jimmy Fay: Absolutely. Our partnership with Bluestockings is really valuable to us. Bluestockings is a queer and trans worker owned bookstore on the Lower East Side, and it's also a community center. It's like a city designated heating and cooling zone. They have harm reduction, they have Narcan trainings, they have a free store where people who need things like snacks or socks, everyday goods, can go and get those things no questions asked. It's a place that residents of the Lower East Side can spend time without having to spend money. For that reason, it's really valuable. Yes, they host our reading series as well.

Tiffany Hansen: There are other contemporary sites on the tour, bookstores, for example.

Jimmy Fay: Yes. For the East Village Tour, we're going to end at Village Works books. Right? Yes.

Tiffany Hansen: Great. Yes, I had Village Works books. Okay. I guess that was it. That's all I had. Good. Glad we checked that off. All right. Katie, tell folks how they can get in on this tour.

Katie Vogel: Absolutely. You can get tickets through Henry Street's website, so henrystreet.org/queerhistory and we have tickets right now for our Lower East Side tour that we have some more tour dates in July and also our New East Village tour. The one tonight is sold out, but we have other dates in July as well.

Tiffany Hansen: How can people participate with the Henry Street Settlement's programming?

Katie Vogel: Oh, you can also go to henrystreet.org and Henry Street has over 60 programs in older adult services, education, employment, arts, programming, and much more.

Tiffany Hansen: People are going to come out. They've got their fans and their-

[laughter]

Tiffany Hansen: -their water bottles, and it's the end of Pride Month. I'm just going to go around and say, what do you hope the people that come out to this tour, let's say today or tomorrow, the end of Pride Month, what do you hope they'll take away, Salonee?

Salonee Bhaman: Oh, well, the pride is political, and that there's a usable queer past that they are invited to be part of and seek inspiration from. I really hope that they take away a great sense of community and what it means to actively build and sustain community and have a vision for not just being a queer person, but the obligations towards justice that being a queer person demands of us.

Tiffany Hansen: Jimmy.

Jimmy Fay: Yes, I would say I want queer people to see themselves in the past, to understand that who they are is not something new. I would also want people to understand that histories of queerness are inextricable from histories of things like mutual aid, which to me is a narrative that's really counter to corporate pride. I think I share this value with all of us, that pride can come from the top down. I think it has to come from the ground up, from the people, the queer and trans people living in the past and living today.

Tiffany Hansen: Katie, really quickly.

Katie Vogel: Also likewise that queer people were in parts of all activist movements over time and that queerness, they were also bringing to those movements and I think that is really an important part of our tour.

Tiffany Hansen: Great. Katie Vogel is a historian with the Henry Street Settlement. She's a member of the Close Friends Collective. Other historians and members of the Close Friends Collective that joined us today, Salonee Bhaman and Jimmy Fay. Thank you so much to all of you for coming in.

Salonee Bhaman: Thank you so much.

Katie Vogel: Thank you so much.

Jimmy Fay: Thank you so much.

Tiffany Hansen: Stay with us. Coming up next hour, last day of school for New York City's public schools. We'll talk about how to keep those kiddos entertained. We've got some music and we've got books next hour. Stay with us.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.