Members FAM: Harlem Pride -- Queer History in Harlem

FAM: Harlem Pride -- Queer History in Harlem
with Kevin Lawrence

In celebration of Pride Month, this tour focuses on the importance of a NYC neighborhood too often overlooked in favor of a focus on the queer history of Greenwich Village, the East Village, or Chelsea.

Home to early ballroom culture since the turn of the 20th century, Harlem has been a haven for our BIPOC queer brothers and sisters and has continually played a critically important role in both inspiring and shaping NYC and American queer history. This tour will celebrate the queer places in Harlem and queer people who called Harlem home and hopefully enrich guests' perspective on the diversity and richness of queer NYC history during Pride month. The Queer Civil Rights movement looked to the Black Civil Rights movement for guidance and inspiration and much of that was specifically coming from (and intersected in) Harlem. The tour is also an opportunity for participants to share queer stories and perspectives from other communities and neighbors around this great city -- Pride is an opportunity to celebrate our presence in every community and neighborhood!

This tour is also meant to be in conversation with another proposed FAM tour given during Pride, "Queer Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," which will look at queer representation in the current special exhibit, "Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism." As the literary critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates once noted, the Harlem Renaissance was “surely as gay as it was Black, not that it was exclusively either of these.” While participating in both tours is not mandatory, of course, it would nevertheless be helpful if participants make an attempt to catch the Met's outstanding exhibit to have a fuller conversation.