Marc Zinaman

The history behind New York City’s queer nightlife is as vibrant, transformative and unique as the city itself. From 1920s gay bathhouses to the discotheques of the 70s and 80s, NYC was, and remains still, a cornerstone of the ways in which the LGBTQ+ community have found solace among one another and increased visibility through the decades. In his new book, Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places (Prestel), writer and NYC native Marc Zinaman pays homage to the underground queer nightlife in NYC by innovatively documenting these establishments, their influence when they were still standing, and any notable events that occurred at them.

Many may be familiar with NYC’s queer landmarks like The Stonewall Inn, Studio 54 or Julius'. But Zinaman highlights the innumerable bars and clubs that received less appreciation: The Hamilton Lodge hosted the first documented public drag event in the United States in 1869, and was one of the few racially-integrated establishments in the early 20th century. Bar Bar Room 432’s Clit Club in the 90s was incredibly influential as the space encouraged lesbians to boldly embrace their sexuality and flirtatiousness.

Aside from breaking down the history behind the mentioned establishments, Zinaman also tracks the societal and political influences on the queer community as a whole throughout each decade. His book has mentions of queer figures, whether they be artists, writers or activists, so that readers can get a glimpse at not only the places that shaped NYC’s queer environment, but the champions of this community and their impact.

Coupled with engaging photography, the book will lead you behind the scenes of the evolution of gay nightlight in NYC. Zinaman does not brush over the inherently political nature of the LGBTQ+ community and society’s marginalisation and discrimination of queer people. Each decade includes key political events of that time-period.

In this interview, Zinaman breaks down his journey with creating and writing the book, and discusses the importance of underground nightlife for queer people to find safe and fun environments with like-minded individuals.

Hey Mark, so to get started, I know you have an Instagram account (@queerhappenedhere) where you do similar work to your new book. I'd love to just hear a bit more about how you got into this, what inspired you, and a brief evolution of the work you've done in highlighting New York’s queer spaces.

Yeah! I think I started the Instagram account around 2021, and I've been running it ever since. Before that, it all started as a personal project which was initiated after I watched two back-to-back documentaries about Studio 54. While I knew a lot about Studio 54 going into those, what caught my attention in those films were these brief, fleeting mentions of some insane-sounding nightclubs in New York that I had either never heard of or knew very little about, and that's despite me being a native New Yorker.
Some of those places, and they made it into the book, were GG'S Barnum Room, which was this short lived 70s disco that had transgender trapeze artists doing acrobatics above the dance floor. Another one was Crisco Disco, which has this giant Crisco can as a DJ booth that people just danced around. That’s when I started to dig deeper, and that became this daily ritual where every morning I would wake up and research two or three places.

What did your initial research look like?

I would track down an address or a year of operation, try to look at old photos and whatever other scraps of history I could find. Then, I started pinning them to a simple Google map that I made. Then, the pandemic hit and that kind of turned into this crazy habit and obsession.
One day during the pandemic, I sat back and realised I had like a thousand places on my map, but it was really for my eyes only because it was this private Google map. I started talking about it with friends and other queer folks around my age, and that’s when I realised so many of these places were not known about by other people or forgotten about.

Where did you go from there?

That sparked this idea to launch the social media account. I would share the images and stories that I started to uncover, but it was also a way to connect with others who were doing similar work, and also with those who had photos and memories and stories from these spaces that they could share online. Then that account grew, and it became clear that people were looking for this and were interested in it. That became the foundation for this book, which is hopefully a more permanent and alternative form of doing this archival work.

“There’s something liberating and indescribable about being in a space that’s dominated by only people in your community. Sometimes you don’t want to feel like the only lesbian couple at a bar or the only trans person on the dance floor.”

Referring to the archival work, you said you talked to people that have a similar interest in uncovering these queer spaces, as well as people that have had experiences at these places. How much of people’s oral histories played a role in creating your book?

Oral histories played a huge role in going into the kind of research aspect, especially since so many of the spaces in the book are nightlife, queer spaces. Historically, those existed off the grid by necessity, and they were typically not written about in mainstream media or preserved in official archives. That gave me trouble because it means difficulty in verifying exact dates of operation, or who was involved, or correct addresses. That’s when I started to think about what is actually the best way to not only document these kinds of spaces and nightlife spaces, but also make them feel interesting and exciting and personal and alive. That's when oral histories and interviews came into play.
I wanted to hear stories from the people who worked there or the people who danced there, and so that's how I started reaching out to people. The book includes, as a result, quotes from legendary nightlife figures like Susanne Bartsch, but also just from everyday people who love to go out and be themselves. That felt like an important mixture, telling this complete, nuanced story.

I imagine hearing people’s accounts was really cool, and I’m sure at times emotional and just identifying the act of resistance that some of these places hold. Can you talk a little bit about some of the emotions that came up for you in this process or in sharing those stories with others?

For one, that was something I hadn't really done before. There weren't opportunities for me to reach out to and connect with queer elders. I feel like my generation is the first to have an older queer generation of people who survived, who survived and got to live lives that were out and about more publicly. That felt very special and important, and I’m grateful to do it because I made some great friends from it too.
You also hear the full gamut of stories. You get people telling how they had these whole crew of friends that they went out with in the 70s but they’re the only one who survived the AIDS crisis. It got really emotional at times. I can’t imagine my entire friend group that I worked so hard to curate for a decade being completely wiped out within a few years. So, you’re balancing these challenging stories with some incredibly fun, filthy, drug-fuelled, sex-crazed stories.

That sounds very intense. So, you had your Google map that you made with all these different places. Were you able to spend time at any of the places that are still in existence or the buildings they were located in? If so, what was that like?

I wish I could have. The book spans from 1920 to 2020, and I only came out in 2008, which is when I went to my first gay club. That means most of the places in the book were not only long gone before I was alive, but also before I was able to go out and start exploring for myself. That said, there's definitely a couple of older historic places in the book, like Julius’, which are thankfully still around and which I go to all the time and love.
Then there's some, like the Pyramid Club, which I got to see a few times towards the end of its life before it closed down. Barracuda’s in the book, which was a really important spot for me to see drag early on when I was coming out, that just tragically closed down last month. I'm glad I covered it, but I also was hoping it would still be around. There are places like Cubbyhole, which are still open, and I still go to and were important when I was first coming out. The few that are still around, yes, I go to and spend time at.
Coming back to some of the oral histories, some of the coolest interviews I did were with queer elders who insisted that we meet right in front of a long-gone space that they wanted to talk about. For example, one guy I talked to, he wanted to tell me about his favourite club, which was 12 West. The original building had been demolished I think in like 1985. So, we were just standing on the sidewalk in front of this totally different, much newer building, and then, he was still able to recount the entire floor plan of the club and remember all these super specific interior decor details, even though this club was from like fifty years ago. It was an amazing experience watching him draw in front of me this very detailed, architectural rendering. I thought, how do you remember all that? I can’t even remember what the bar I went to last week looks like. So that was another way to kind of experience these spaces without being able to go.

Sophia Lamar, Amanda Lepore, and Richie Rich, circa 1990s. © Linda Simpson.

Referencing how many of these places have shut down and some of them continue to, and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, it’s important to have queer spaces where fun meets resistance. With you being a native New Yorker, doing all this research, having your own experiences, how do you feel visibility and nightlife for the queer community intersect?

That’s a good question. I think we can see from the book the third space, especially nightlife spaces, are where so much of queer life and history has unfolded. That was out of necessity because they were all we had, and they became these catch-all places where we were going out to dance and have fun and meet paramours. But they were also places where we built community and organised protests and things like that. That all came out of the fact that, historically, queer people have been fleeing persecution and running away from their homes to find a chosen family.
Especially the further back you go, these underground bars, after hours nightclubs, dark piers, or corners of parks become spaces of gathering and safety and resistance. These venues helped generations of queer people find physical space to just be in. I think that is still continuing today. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly in New York City, we’ve achieved a lot more acceptance and visibility. It's nice to be able to walk into a restaurant or bar and be able to kiss your same sex partner or hold hands without having to think about your personal safety.
There’s also something very liberating, special, and indescribable about being in a space that's dominated by only people in your community or your tribe. Sometimes you don't want to feel like the only lesbian couple at a bar or the only trans person on the dance floor. You want to feel like everyone else is the same too. Obviously today is an interesting time. The queer community is still fighting for rights, and so we still are using and need these spaces for resistance and organising and fundraising. I think it’s important to have designated queer venues, and that's why we continue to see places thrive and flourish and also new places pop up.

Totally. That makes a lot of sense. Now, when you were doing your research, what was the main reason why a lot of these places have disappeared? I'm sure in recent years it's a little bit different, especially post Covid, where everything is kind of unpredictable. But would you say most of the places that existed in the 20th century and that aren't around anymore, did they shut because of gentrification or sort of policing?

There are a lot of different reasons, but I think one of the main players is always real estate. The book sort of traces that. We can see queer venues and creatives get pushed out. First the West Village, then the East Village, then Chelsea, and even Hell’s Kitchen due to gentrification and things like rising rents. The book doesn’t cover the outer boroughs, but that sort of leads to a shift of people moving to Brooklyn and Queens. Today, we can see spaces in Brooklyn having to move further out to Bushwick. It’s interesting to try to guess what the next cool queer neighbourhood would be. So, it’s definitely gentrification of real estate.
Then, not so much today, but certainly in the past, policing was a huge part of it, with raids and surveillance, and the changing of zoning laws and noise complaints often targeted queer venues disproportionately, particularly ones that were for people of colour or trans people. The book even shows you that those crackdowns often increased when a neighbourhood was getting ‘cleaned up’. That is what happens to places like the Meatpacking district in Times Square, which today look completely different than what they once were.

In learning about all these places, especially the ones that are shut down, if there's any one place that you could go to or resurrect in some way, which one would it be? Was there any location that you felt really drawn to?

Yeah, there are so many, from The Sage and Studio 54 to Limelight, that all sound incredible and amazing that it's hard to choose. If I have to pick one, I think one that stands out is Paradise Garage. It may not have been the fanciest or flashiest or architecturally significant, but the vibes of it and the way people that I interviewed who went there still talk about it to this day and how it changed the music and nightlife scene forever. That just feels very special, incomparable. There’s this Paradise Garage reunion party that happens every year that I try.

“I hope readers can look at this book and realise queer history has been here all along, and it’s hidden right in plain sight. It’s true in New York City, but it’s true anywhere you go if you look hard enough or close enough.”

Really?

Yeah. I recommend it, it's one of my favourite nights of the year. It has great music. It sometimes has some of the original DJs who played there, but it attracts this great mix of younger queer folks who just want to have fun and then these Paradise Garage OGs. Some of them are showing up with their canes or walkers, but they’re still out there dancing. They’ll sometimes mosey up to you on the dance floor and start telling you their stories. That’s the closest I’ll probably get to Paradise Garage.

You were talking about the archival work and how hard it is to access information because there wasn’t a lot of recording on some of these places because they were more underground. How did you balance historical accuracy in your storytelling?

As we sort of touched on, a lot of this history is not in the textbooks, it's not in traditional archives. You have to start to think about, where is it? It’s in things like nightlife ephemera, like club flyers that weren't meant to last. That’s where the oral history stuff comes in. It’s in people’s memories and their tall tales and their juicy gossip and salacious, one night stands and things like that. Even some of the more historic and iconic things, like the Stonewall Uprising, is well covered, but it's shaped by competing narratives of who was there and what truly happened and political agendas.
During this process, at some point, I had to step back and realise this is storytelling and there’s no black and white answer, no perfectly accurate narrative. That becomes more about honouring the complexity and experience. That’s how I got to blend the academic with the frivolous. It’s pairing serious photography with playful, intimate, personal snapshots and weaving together historical facts and these delightfully salacious personal stories. That’s a unique way of telling history.

Can you tell me a little bit about your intentions for the book as well as your thoughts on how queer history could potentially be more incorporated into today’s world?

Given the current political climate, I hope readers can look at this book and realise queer history has been here all along, and it’s hidden right in plain sight. It’s true in New York City, but it’s true anywhere you go if you look hard enough or close enough; queer people are everywhere and making history. So, that's an important message and hopefully people can get out of it.
I don't know if this is a school book per se, but people can find stuff much easier these days with the internet and whatnot, so I think it's an important book for younger queer folks to learn. It can be helpful to learn and see this stuff early on when you're young and trying to figure out your identity and then realising all these queer people came before you. Some schools do it now, but queer history is still not being taught. We all have to find our own way of learning our own history. This book is sort of educational, but also, fun and accessible, and I think that's a great way for young people to learn.

Inside NYC’s Queer, Underground Nightlife