History, Natural History & the Arts
Staten Island photographer Elizabeth Alice Austen (1866–1952) is best known for her street photography and intimate depictions of women’s lives and relationships in the Victorian era.
“New Eyes on Alice Austen,” a groundbreaking permanent exhibition at the Alice Austen House Museum finally puts her into an appropriate LGBTQ+ history context with respect denied her during her lifetime. [Read more…] about New Eyes on Alice Austen: Queering the Museum
The month’s episode of the A Minute in New York History podcast tells the story of the Equal Suffrage League, an organization founded in Brooklyn by Black American women.
The Equal Suffrage League was a pioneering late-1880s organization founded by Sarah J. Garnet and Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward. As a prominent Black suffrage group, it tackled both gender and race discrimination, later affiliating with the National Association of Colored Women, which also took on the evils of Jim Crow and lynching. [Read more…] about The Equal Suffrage League & Black American Women’s Vote
People have gathered in taverns to drink, relax, socialize, and do business for hundreds of years. For just as long, critics have described taverns as sources of individual ruin and public disorder.
In Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Dr. Wood argues that men integrated taverns into the nation’s growing transportation network and used them to raise capital, promote businesses, practice genteel sociability, and rally support for favored causes — often while drinking staggering amounts of alcohol. [Read more…] about Taverns in the Early United States
As Lower Manhattan’s elected representative for 35 years, Deborah Glick has been a leading advocate for civil rights, reproductive freedom, animals and environmental preservation, the arts, and tenants’ rights.
Glick was the first openly LGBTQ+ member of the State Legislature when elected in 1990 and a leader in the fight for marriage equality. [Read more…] about New LGBTQ Oral History: Assemblymember Deborah Glick
The Stonewall Inn, a state and national historic site, is the most well-known place in LGBTQ American history. In June 1969, following a routine police raid, patrons at the Mafia-run Stonewall Inn, as well as young queer and trans people who lived or regularly congregated in Greenwich Village, spontaneously erupted in multiple nights of protest.
The event was a turning point in the ongoing LGBTQ rights movement and sparked its growth in New York City, New York State, and across the nation. Organizations and groups formed around the country to promote LGBTQ rights, and thousands of people became active in the movement. [Read more…] about Lavender Hill Commune: LGBTQ Liberation in Central NY
Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025) by Molly Beer is a women-centric view of revolution through the life of Angelica Schuyler Church (1756-1814), the eldest daughter of General Philip Schuyler and Catherine Van Rensselaer.
The Van Rensselaers of the Manor of Rensselaerswyck were one of the wealthiest and most politically influential families in what was then the still heavily Dutch-influenced Province of New York. [Read more…] about Angelica Schuyler Church: A Woman at the Center of Revolution
Arriving at a critical moment in the struggle for transgender rights, A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States (SUNY Press, 2025) is the most comprehensive history of transgender medicine to date, as told by more than forty scholars, physicians, psychologists, and activists from trans, gender-diverse, and allied medical communities.
Gender-affirming care is considered the gold standard for treatment of gender dysphoria. Endorsed by every major medical association in the United States, including the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, and the Endocrine Society, its modern roots date to the 1920s. [Read more…] about A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States
Charles Ranhöfer (1836-1899) was born in 1836 in St Denis, a northern suburb of Paris known for its Abbey-Basilica, the burial place of French Royals. Charles would become a “king” in his own right. As his father owned a restaurant and his grandfather had been a noted chef, it seemed natural to follow in their footsteps. The family descended from the Alsace. [Read more…] about Culinary History: Charles Dickens, Delmonico’s & A Club of Angry Women
Katharine Bement Davis (1860-1935) was a force for women’s rights and social reform.
As one of the first women in the U.S. to earn a PhD, she became the first superintendent of New York’s Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills, Westchester County (now the state’s only maximum security women’s prison), and later, the first female Commissioner of Corrections for New York City, where she instituted critical reforms and quelled a major uprising. [Read more…] about Katharine Bement Davis: A Force for Women’s Rights and Social Reform
On July 24, 2011, Niagara Falls was lit in rainbow as Kitty Lambert and Cheryle Rudd became the first same-sex couple in the state to wed under New York’s Marriage Equality Act. A new interpretive sign at Niagara Falls State Park commemorates this watershed moment.
Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Marriage Equality Act in June 2011. When the Act went into effect on July 24th, New York became the sixth state to recognize same-sex marriage. [Read more…] about New Sign Marks First Same-Sex Couple Wedding Under NY’s Marriage Equality Act
Weaving in his own experience as a scout and journalist, Mike De Socio’s Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts ― and America (Pegasus Books, 2024) is a deeply-reported narrative that illuminates the decades-long battle for LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). [Read more…] about Morally Straight: How LGBTQ+ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts
Bringing forth the basic operations of capitalism, Michael Zweig’s Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism (PM Press, 2023) reveals what is driving many of today’s most urgent and vexing problems: the common origins of the inequalities of income, wealth, and power; environmental devastation; militarism; racism and white supremacy; patriarchy and male chauvinism; periodic economic crises; and the cultural conflicts that are tearing at US life. [Read more…] about Class, Race, and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism
“Around six o’clock in the evening on July 27, 1919, an undercover investigator boarded the Hudson River Steamboat Company’s palatial steamer, the Benjamin B. Odell, in Newburgh, New York. [Read more…] about Romance & Pleasure on Hudson River Steamboats
The LGBTQ+ Historic Sites Project is conducting a survey to understand LGBTQ+ historic sites in the United States. The goal is to find out who is doing this preservation work on LGBTQ+ historic sites, what they are doing, and where they are doing it. [Read more…] about LGBTQ+ Historic Sites Survey Underway
In this episode of Ben Franklin’s World, Jen Manion, a Professor of History and of Sexuality and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College and author of the book, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021), joins host Liz Covart to investigate the early American world of female husbands, people who were assigned female gender at birth and then changed their gender at some point in their lives to live as men. [Read more…] about Female Husbands: Transgender People in Early American History
Lucy Beaman Hobbs was born in Constable, in Northern New York, raised in Ellenburg and later schooled in Malone. Early in her life she made it her mission to earn her living by the use of her brain, not by the sweat of her brow. One obstacle stood in the way more than others – she was a woman. [Read more…] about Lucy Hobbs Taylor: Northern NY’s ‘Girl Against the World’
Mapping the Gay Guides (MGG) relies on the Damron Guides, an early but longstanding travel guide aimed at gay men since the early 1960s. An LGBTQ equivalent to the African American “green books,” the Damron Guides contained lists of bars, bathhouses, cinemas, businesses, hotels, and cruising sites in every U.S. state, where gay men could find friends, companions, and sex. [Read more…] about Historical Travel: Mapping the Gay Guides
The quick-witted Hugh Ryan has a nose for history, as demonstrated in his book When Brooklyn Was Queer. His latest The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison mines little-known historical sources to point out how a large and vocal population of queer-identified and trans people passed through the old cement monstrosity that used to stand next to today’s Jefferson Market Library in Manhattan‘s Greenwich Village.
Now a community garden, the site is a shout away from the Stonewall Inn, and Ryan writes the story of some of those imprisoned voices left out of the customary tales of the riot. In fact, prisoners set fire to their bedclothes and tossed them from the barred windows overlooking 6th Ave chanting “gay rights, gay rights gay rights.” Even before Stonewall’s impassioned response to police exploitation of gay bars, House of D. queer women, transmasculine people and other women were rioting for their rights in the jail. [Read more…] about Arrested Attention: The Women’s House of Detention
The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells.
Some of these inmates — Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur — were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher. [Read more…] about The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
In the new book Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (NYU Press, 2022) Wendy L. Rouse of San Jose State University reveals that the suffrage movement included individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities. However, owing to the constant pressure to present a “respectable” public image, suffrage leaders publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public. [Read more…] about A Queer History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement
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