Where to learn about LGBTIQ+ history? Pride Month, Transgender Day of Visibility, or any other day.
Although the Stonewall Inn is famous for its queer history, many other sites nationwide have contributed.
Learn about LGBTIQ+ history in the US at these seven coast-to-coast sites. Discover key figures, events, and locations of the queer liberation movement.
New Orleans’ Dixie’s Bar of Music
New Orleans’ queer community partied at Dixie’s Bar in the 1950s and 60s. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal frequented New Orleans’ pioneering gay bar, Dixie’s. After the city’s first gay Carnival ball was raided in 1962, Miss Dixie allegedly took all the cash from the register and bailed everyone out.
NOLA’s gay community and artists mixed at the bar during live music. Our 29-foot painting of over 60 1940s musicians was damaged by Katrina. Dixie’s mural was restored and unveiled at the New Orleans Jazz Museum in 2018.
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Washington, DC’s Dr. Franklin E. Kameny Residence.
Doctor Franklin E. Kameny pioneered gay civil rights in government and medicine. Kameny and allies pressured the US Civil Service Commission to end gay employment and security clearance discrimination in 1961. Kameny challenged the APA’s mental illness definition of homosexuality and worked to remove it from government security clearance determinations. LGBTIQ+ civil rights activists visited his Washington, DC home after it was designated a historical site in 2011.
Leather Museum and Archives Chicago
In 1991, homoerotic photography pioneer Chuck Renslow founded the Leather Archives and Museum in Chicago to preserve leather, kink, fetish, and BDSM history and culture, especially in the queer community.
The Leatherbar and A Room Of Her Own, which examine leather’s role in women’s sexuality, are queer-friendly exhibits at the Museum. Former Meatpacking District BDSM gay leather pub and sex club Minshaft archives are in the museum.
The San Francisco Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church
This San Francisco parish offered LGBTIQ+ support groups and sermons during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. The church is a popular historical site and place of worship for those seeking inclusion.
NYC’s Jacob Riis Park
Jacob Riis Park, also known as Riis Beach or Riis, has been a queer hangout since the 1940s. Gay New Yorkers have sunbathed nudely on Riis, a mile-long section of Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, for decades because they were excluded from more crowded beaches. This NYC beach is popular with LGBTIQ+ people, especially during Pride weekend and summers.
The NYC Audre Lorde Residence
LGBTIQ+ culture lovers visit Audre Lorde’s Staten Island home. While living in this house from 1972 to 1987 with her partner and two children, Lorde wrote Sister Outsider and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, and spoke at the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
QTPOC scholars and organisers founded The Audre Lorde Project two years after Lorde’s 1994 death to honour her advocacy for marginalised groups. In 2019, “Audre Lorde Way” signs were placed on St. Paul’s Avenue and Victory Boulevard near her former home.
San Francisco GLBT History Museum
The GLBT History Museum, San Francisco’s “queer Smithsonian,” holds a vast archive of LGBTIQ+ history in the US, focusing on Northern California and San Francisco. The Castro district museum covers LGBTIQ+ life in the city from 1850 to the present.
