This week Oscar Wilde Tours is announcing its 2015 season, including the first ever gay history tours of New York City. Who’d have thought? Until just a few months ago, I was planning to start a series of gay history tours of London and Paris this year. But people kept asking, When are you going to do New York? So after a while, I thought, Well, New York certainly has a ton of gay history, so let’s see what we can do at home!
Calvin Klein
So late this fall, I started organizing tours of New York. And frankly I thought, There’s just too much to deal with. Think about the list of gay celebs who have called NY home: Walt Whitman, Cole Porter, Bessie Smith, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, Leonard Bernstein, Rudi Nureyev, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, Calvin Klein… The list goes on and on. Which is of course great—except when you have to put it all together. Because nobody ever has. There is a wonderful book called Gay New York, but it is more about the history of sexuality in the late 19th/early 20th century, while I need to show people why New York is special: how, from the late 19th century on, despite official attempts at repression, it was a center of sexual freedom and a mecca for LGBT people from more repressive parts of America—and how the gay people it attracted had a profound influence on its development as a great cultural center. New York is not as important in American life as Paris is in France or London is in England. But New York was America’s Paris for gay people. In fact, you might say it was gayer than Gay Paree.
And this has created a lot of work for me over the last months. Think of the stacks of biographies I have had to read! Plus books about worlds in which gay people have been important: the Harlem Renaissance, the foundation of Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway and New York’s ballet companies, the Beats, Pop Art, etc.
And books about strikingly “gay-friendly” people like Mae West, Dorothy Parker, and Billie Holiday. Not to mention the history of gay sociability: baths and bars and drag shows. And the story of the political movement for gay liberation, including the most famous gay event in New York’s (or America’s?) history—the Stonewall riots. A vast amount of work for a vast city.
Truman Capote
But I think it has paid off. I started off intending to plan a one-day gay history tour, but instead I have four tours which we will offer regularly. There is a bus tour that covers the whole of New York’s gay story, from Harlem to Brooklyn Heights, and two walking tours, of the Village and the East Village, each packed with gay history, from bars, baths, and drag shows to a startlingly long list of gay artists and celebs.
I have also designed a tour of homoerotic art at the Metropolitan Museum, modeled on tours Oscar Wilde Tours has organized at the Louvre and the Vatican Museums. The Met is a conservative institution, but packed with homo-erotica and gay history….
So take advantage of my research; come learn about the gay history of America’s great gay city. There’s all kinds of fun information on these tours: they will give you a new angle on New York, a new view of gay history, and an interesting encounter with a long list of fabulous personalities….
