The Roxy, Splash, Disco 2000, MEAT, Pyramid, Limelight … take a visual tour through the dizzying rise and demise of these legendary queer NYC clubs and parties with journalist and historian David Kennerley as he discusses his new book, GETTING IN: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s. Revisit dozens of bars, dance clubs, sex clubs, and other nightlife venues that provided a refuge during the AIDS crisis through eye-popping flyers from Kennerley’s collection.

The event will be hosted by Ken Lustbader, co-director of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, who will highlight nightlife spots from the pre- and post-Stonewall period.

About the Speaker

David Kennerley is a journalist and historian specializing in LGBTQ culture. For two decades, he has been an Arts & Entertainment reporter for Gay City News. Examples from his ephemera collection were shown in the “Letting Loose and Fighting Back” exhibition at the New-York Historical Society honoring the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. He currently lives in the West Village neighborhood of Manhattan and occasionally still goes clubbing. His latest publication is GETTING IN: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s. (buy here)

About the NYC LGBT Historic Site Project

The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project is a nonprofit cultural initiative and educational resource that is making an invisible history visible by documenting extant historic and cultural sites associated with the LGBT community throughout New York City. For more, visit www.nyclgbtsites.org, or follow on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

This event is funded, in part, by grants from Consolidated Edison, New York Community Trust, New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and New York City Tourism Foundation.

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from the Washington Post

Steve Ostrow, who founded the trailblazing New York City gay bathhouse the Continental Baths, where Bette Midler, Barry Manilow and other famous artists launched their careers, has died. He was 91.

Ostrow opened the Continental Baths in 1968 in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, a once grand Beaux Arts landmark on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that had fallen on hard times.

He transformed the hotel’s massive basement, with its dilapidated pools and Turkish baths, into an opulently decorated, Roman-themed bathhouse.

The multi-level venue was not just an incubator for a music and dance revolution deeply rooted in New York City’s gay scene, but also for the LGBTQ community’s broader political and social awakening, which would culminate with the Stonewall protests in lower Manhattan, said Ken Lustbader of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, a group that researches places of historic importance to the city’s LGBTQ community.

“Steve identified a need,” he said. “Bathhouses in the late 1960s were more rundown and ragged, and he said, ‘Why don’t I open something that is going to be clean, new and sparkle, where I could attract a whole new clientele’?”

Read the full story by the Washington Post.

Featured thumbnail of Steve Ostrow onstage at the Continental Baths in 1972. (Pierre Venant/WWD/Penske Media/Getty Images)

from the AP

Privately-run bathhouses proliferated in the 1970s, offering a haven for gay and bisexual men to meet during a time when laws prevented same-sex couples from even dancing together. When AIDS emerged in the 1980s, though, bathhouses were blamed for helping spread the disease and were forced to close or shuttered voluntarily.

The Continental Baths initially featured a disco floor, a pool with a waterfall, sauna rooms and private rooms, according to NYC LGBT Historic Sites’ website.

As its popularity soared, Ostrow added a cabaret stage, labyrinth, restaurant, bar, gym, travel desk and medical clinic. There was even a sun deck on the hotel’s rooftop complete with imported beach sand and cabanas.

[Ken] Lustbader said at its peak, the Continental Baths was open 24 hours a day and seven days a week, with some 10,000 people visiting its roughly 400 rooms each week.

“It was quite the establishment,” he said. “People would check in on Friday night and not leave until Sunday.”

Read the full story here.

from Gay City News

Dozens of New York City locations are being highlighted this month as part of a collection commemorating Black History Month — including spots ranging from the late Audre Lorde’s residence to the Mt. Morris Baths, which was a popular bathhouse among gay Black men beginning in the 1920s until it closed in 2003.

The collection is one of the latest works of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, which is part of the non-profit Fund for the City of New York and has long focused on spotlighting the history surrounding important physical locations in the city’s queer community.

Many of the 48 locations have changed in appearance or structure over the years, but the vast majority of the ones included in the collection are still standing. Just two of them — Paradise Garage, a former club at 84 King St., and Hotel Olga at 695 Lenox Ave. in Harlem — have been demolished.

Read the full story from Gay City News.

Featured thumbnail of Marsha P. Johnson State Park. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / MMZACH