Walt Whitman A Glimpse A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word. Walt Whitman lived in Jamaica, Queens during a period around 1840. He held a variety of local jobs, writing for newspapers and teaching. One of the local schools where Walt Whitman taught was Jamaica Academy. Based on his research, Jeff Gottlieb (QC alum; President of the Central Queens Historical Association) believes that the site of that school is now part of the Queens College campus. from Queens College

“Blue” Gene Tyranny Robert Sheff was a composer and pianist who worked under the name “Blue” Gene Tyranny as a solo performer and a collaborator with artists including Iggy Pop, the composer Robert Ashley and the jazz composer and arranger Carla Bley. He lived and worked in Long Island City for many years. A master at the keyboard and an eclectic composer who deftly balanced conceptual rigor with breezy pop sounds, Mr. Tyranny was active in modern music as early as his teenage years. From curating contemporary-music concerts in high school, he went on to participate in the groundbreaking and influential Once Festival of New Music in Ann Arbor, Mich., during the 1960s. He taught classes and worked as a recording-studio technician at Mills College, an experimental-music hotbed in Oakland, Calif., from 1971 to 1982. Arriving in New York City in 1983, Mr. Tyranny worked with Mr. Ashley, Laurie Anderson and Peter Gordon’s Love of Life Orchestra, while also composing his own works. He was also quietly devoted to gay rights, dedicating pieces to the first openly gay football player David Kopay and also to Harvey Milk.

Guido Garaycochea is a Queens-based visual artist. This 2021 work, The Pink Room is mixed media on canvas (24" x 24") and features cut out images from different sources, glue, acrylic, layers of varnish, opaque and transparent layers of oil, other materials. In describing his work, Mr. Garaycochea states, "I question concepts that relate to sex, gendered representation, and nudity and aspects of gender-nonconformity and the societal pressures and imposition of masculinity and manhood. It also looks at how the queer body has had to heal and survive aspects of the status quo, impacted by capitalism and worldwide power dynamics. I am interested in the normalized, binary construction of gender, assigned at birth based solely on body parts. My collages/mixed media/paintings deconstruct preconceived and traditional categorizations of gender, pushing the viewer to expand their minds and consider new ones. It requires many hours of work, not only to find the necessary images and build a story with them. The cut-out images that I appropriate and work with are placed in backgrounds to work with my brushes and oil colors. Transparent layers of oil paint are placed one over the other, perfecting the depth effects' lights and shadows.” states, "I question concepts that relate to sex, gendered representation, and nudity and aspects of gender-nonconformity and the societal pressures and imposition of masculinity and manhood. It also looks at how the queer body has had to heal and survive aspects of the status quo, impacted by capitalism and worldwide power dynamics. I am interested in the normalized, binary construction of gender, assigned at birth based solely on body parts. My collages/mixed media/paintings deconstruct preconceived and traditional categorizations of gender, pushing the viewer to expand their minds and consider new ones. It requires many hours of work, not only to find the necessary images and build a story with them. The cut-out images that I appropriate and work with are placed in backgrounds to work with my brushes and oil colors. Transparent layers of oil paint are placed one over the other, perfecting the depth effects' lights and shadows.”

Artist: Jacqueline Herranz-Brooks Title: All I See (work in progress) “We were interrupted in our relationship with the land” - Gloria Anzaldúa "All I See" contains photographs I took in Forest Park, Queens during the first 8-9 months of the COVID pandemic lock-down in New York City. I designed postcards with those photographs and mailed them to old and new friends and colleagues which allowed me to connect with them during these distanced times. The idea started with my reflection on our relationships to each other coupled with how problematic uses and distribution of space/time can be. In Forest park, I walked to release tension, and I also improvised poetry during those walks: “hablaba como loca”. Or I walked while listening to Suzanne Simard’s podcast about underground collaborations among trees. I found a special place to connect with my orisha, Ogún: “Oke Ogún! Ogún Kobú Aguanilé!". And while I walked and photograph and talked out loud, once I was seen by lovers who met in secret places por los vericuetos de los senderos más delgados del parque and now, me veían escucharles doblemente temerosos detrás de sus mascarillas. I was photographing, recording, meditating while walking on trails in Forest Park that were Rockaway and Lenape territory until 1635 and thinking about the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830’s and the “Indian Removal” that still prevails in other forms of disenfranchisement and cultural annihilation in these United States.

Kew Gardens Streets Where Art and Poetry Meet Curated by Anthony Mavilia A painter and photographer is, Anthony Mavilia is Director of The Abingdon Square Painters a non-profit cooperative art studio in Long Island City. He lives in Kew Gardens with his husband William Jackson who is also an artist and photographer. Mavilia has worked with neighborhood arts activists and the Kew Gardens Council for Recreation and the Arts to create a series of outdoor art exhibitions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, These exhibitions of reproductions of work by local artists, gay and straight, children and adults have brought a sense of hope and engagement to the community during the long months of quarantine. Mavilia's own work may be seen at his Site. Information about the current street show he co-curated may be obtained at: “Kew Gardens Streets Where Art and Poetry Meet"

Kew Gardens Streets Where Art and Poetry Meet Curated by Anthony Mavilia Mavilia's own work may be seen at his Site Information about the current street show he co-curated may be obtained at: Kew Gardens Streets Where Art and Poetry Meet

Margaret Rose Vendryes was born in Jamaica, W.I. while it was still a colony of Britain. Her parents brought her to Queens in 1960 where she completed her primary education. As an adult, Vendryes has lived in several cities, Chicago, New Orleans, and Boston among them. Although visual art was a mainstay in her life, she pursued degrees in art history that culminated with a doctorate from Princeton University in 1997 making Vendryes the first African American Ph.D. in Art and Archaeology from that institution. In 1999, Vendryes began teaching at York College, CUNY in Jamaica. In 2005 Vendryes created the African Diva Project which has grown to over 75 paintings incorporating African masks worn by black celebrities in a celebration of black aesthetics and spirituality.

Chang-rae Lee Author of "Native Speaker". Lee highlights Flushing in his novel. Including an excerpt: "I used to love to walk these streets of Flushing with Lelia and Mitt, bring them back here on Sunday trips during the summer. We would eat cold buckwheat noodles at a Korean restaurant near the subway station and then go browsing in the big Korean groceries, not corner vegetable stands like my father’s but real supermarkets with every kind of Asian food. Mitt always marveled at the long wall of glassed-door refrigerators stacked full with gallon jars of five kinds of kimchee, and even he noticed that if a customer took one down the space was almost immediately filled with another. The kimchee museum, he’d say, with appropriate awe. Then, Lelia would stray off to the butcher’s section, Mitt to the candies. I always went to the back, to the magazine section, and although I couldn’t read the Korean well I’d pretend anyway, just as I did when I was a boy, flipping the pages from right to left, my finger scanning vertically the way my father read. Eventually I’d hear Lelia’s voice, calling to both of us, calling the only English to be heard that day in the store, and we would meet again at the register with what we wanted, the three of us, looking like a family accident, gathering on the counter the most serendipitous pile. We got looks. Later, after he died, I’d try it again, ride the train with Lelia to the same restaurant and store, but in the end we would separately wander the aisles not looking for anything, except at the last moment, when we finally encountered each other, who was not him."

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School in New York City. She lives in Jackson Heights. "A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes, be they ruling or ruled, revere it--yet fear it. Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed." - Opening Paragraph to A Hacker Manifesto

Saving Face a film directed by Alice Wu takes place in Flushing Queens. Saving Face is a 2004 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Alice Wu, in her feature-length debut. The film focuses on Wilhelmina, a young Chinese-American surgeon; her unwed, pregnant mother; and her dancer girlfriend.

P.S. 118 Lorraine Hansberry in St. Albans is named for playwrite and writer Lorraine Vivian Hansberry the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry's writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality in a publication by the nations first lesbian organization called "The Ladder", she wrote under her initials, L.H., for fear of discrimination.

Richard Shpuntoff is a documentary filmmaker and photographer, he served as the official photographer of the Queens Pride Parade from 1993 - 2012, covering the first 20 years of the parade's history. His 2016 documentary film Julio of Jackson Heights narrates the birth of the modern Queens LGBTQ movement starting with the 1990 gay bashing murder of Julio Rivera in the P.S. 69 schoolyard. In the late 90s Shpuntoff held a number of free public exhibitions of his work on the P.S. 69 school fence on 37th Avenue, letting people take photos with them. He is currently working on a project about the Children of the Rainbow curriculum in the early 1990s.

Patricia Silva is a Lisbon-born Astoria, Queens-based photographer and filmmaker who has been documenting LGBTQ+ history sites throughout the borough of Queens since moving to the borough in 1998.