The Hotel St. George was a known cruising spot for gay men and also home to many gay residents, including Hart Crane and Tennessee Williams. Truman Capote lived nearby and was also a frequent visitor. The hotel was glamorous and known for its luxe spaces, like the ballroom shown here, as well as its sparkling saltwater pool (featured in our story Stay Cool at Brooklyn Pools). Today the building is home to apartments and student residences as well as a gym where the pool was once located.

Madame Tirza's Wine Bath, a titillating Coney Island entertainment in the 1930s and 40s, was located at one point on this block of Surf Avenue at number 1500. Madame Tirza was queer and is known to have had relationships with women. Her show was also where Rusty Brown, a lesbian machinist who performed as a drag king and was arrested on multiple occasions for crossdressing, met her love of 28 years, a burlesque dancer named Terry. These intersecting stories demonstrate Coney Island's historic importance as a locale for queer community and culture.

The Kingsborough Houses are home to a monumental sculptural frieze titled Green Pastures: The Walls of Jericho. The sculptor, Richmond Barthé, was a part of the Harlem Renaissance and is widely acknowledged as one of the most important Black sculptors of the 20th century. Though Barthé never publicly disclosed his sexuality, his work often depicted Black male nude figures in homoerotic ways, and he was part of an established gay social circle in New York. The Kingsborough Houses frieze was a WPA project intended for the Harlem River Houses, but ultimately installed here in Brooklyn in 1941.

Many people who are familiar with Brooklyn history have heard of F.W.I.L. Lundy Brothers restaurant, which was a beloved fixture on the Brooklyn dining scene from the 1930s to the 1970s. Less well known is the fact that the restaurant's proprietor, Frederick William Irving Lundy, is thought to have been gay. Born and raised in Sheepshead Bay, Lundy never married. He lived above the restaurant, and later in an apartment in Flatbush, with his partner of over 30 years, Henry William Linker.

From 1957 to 1960, Mattachine Society leader Curtis Dewees lived with his boyfriend Al de Dion at 331 Cumberland Street, to the left in this image and a half block from famed Brooklyn poet Marianne Moore. Dewees writes of the building in his self-published autobiography Memoirs of a Gay Rights Maverick, "the entire building was gay." The super created dresses for drag queens and a lesbian couple lived downstairs. This was one of what historian Hugh Ryan refers to as "semi-intentional queer spaces...informal queer communities."

Lesbian activists Renée Vera Cafiero and Nancy Garden moved to 91 Joralemon Street (third from left in this photo) in December 1964. That September, they had both participated in the first public demonstration for gay rights in the United States at the Army Induction Center in Manhattan. Cafiero and Garden were the only women present. They were both active members of the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis, and took part in actions organized by those groups and the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO).

The Brooklyn Heights Press newspaper moved their offices to the building third from the left in this image in February 1965. As the brownstoner movement swept Brooklyn in the 1950s and 60s, a significant LGBTQ community, primarily gay men, began moving into Brooklyn Heights, which already had a long history of gay residents. When the Brooklyn Heights Press introduced homophobic advertising policies in 1965 and 1966, and supported calls from other neighborhood residents to increase policing of homosexual activities in the area, the Mattachine Society of New York and its ad hoc Brooklyn Heights chapter protested vociferously, resulting in a new editor being hired. By 1971, the paper was running a biweekly "Gay Voices" column and endorsed the inclusion of sexual orientation in New York’s Human Rights Law.

A photo of Mabel Hampton, lesbian activist, dancer, and co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (also located in Brooklyn), shows her practicing her dance act in front of this music hall in Coney Island in the 1920s. Hampton cultivated a wide circle of queer contemporaries through her many decades in New York City, documented in her hours of oral history interviews for the Lesbian Herstory Archives. She became a queer icon and a fixture at Pride events later in the 20th century. In 1984, she spoke at the New York Pride Parade: "I, Mabel Hampton, have been a lesbian all my life, for eighty-two years, and I am proud of myself and my people. I would like all my people to be free in this country and all over the world, my gay people and my black people."

The Audre Lorde Project (ALP), named for lesbian writer, activist, and librarian Audre Lorde, was founded in 1994 and has been located at the parish house of this Fort Greene church since 1996 (the parish house, with its crenellated roofline, is to the right of the church in this image). In the organization's own words, it is "a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans and Gender Non Conforming People of Color center for community organizing." It is the only such center in the country, and is an important meeting and organizing space for people of color, including immigrant communities.