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In celebration of 2017’s Pride Week, countless LGBTQ+ celebrations are happening all over New York City, the largest being the massive Pride March on Sunday, June 25th. In addition to the parade, NYC Pride will also be hosting a multitude of events all week, including a three-day music festival on Pride Island, the first annual Village Voice Pride Awards on Wednesday the 20th, and much more.
There’s also a bevy of lesser-known places, parties, and performances to check out. Nobody celebrates Pride quite like New Yorkers, and no matter what (or who) you’re into, there is something for everyone going on in New York City’s dive bars, underground theaters, and classrooms that is sure to pique your fancy. This list is your road map to this week’s off-the-beaten-path highlights in experimental theatre, queer black short film, vintage photos, queer horror icons, rainbow ice cream, queer astrology, and so much more.
Photo by Fred W. McDarrah
Save the Village hosts walking tours based on the work of photographer Fred McDarrah, whose son Tim McDarrah recently spoke to Untapped Cities about his father’s legacy. In honor of Pride Month, Save the Village is hosting a unique Gay Pride tour in addition to their usual lineup. The new tour will focus on places McDarrah photographed in the West Village that were meaningful or significant to the LGBTQ+ community, including Washington Square Park and the Stonewall Inn.
McDarrah was a seminal photographer of the 1960’s, and he often captured instrumental moments in queer history, photographing luminaries like Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. His photographs capture an verve and intensity singular to 1960s New York, when early American gay rights movements were gaining serious momentum, radical movements were blossoming, and the city was one of the rare places where everyone could express their true selves.
Register for a tour here.
Photo by Mike Scully
Titled America’s first playground, Coney Island was a small strip of sand on Brooklyn’s south coast that became synonymous with the burlesque, the bizarre, the outlandish and the corrupt. This weekend, join, author, playwright and Untapped Cities tour guide, Justin Rivers, on our new tour: The Secrets of Coney Island: Past, Present, Future, & Unknown. You’ll see what Coney Island was like at the height of its mid-century popularity, unearth old secrets of many long-gone amusement parks and learn about what’s in store for the contested future development of the island.
Tour the Secrets of Coney Island: Past, Present, Future, & Unknown
Experimental art festival FRIGID New York at Horse Trade is presenting a jam-packed week of queer performance art as part of their annual Queerly Festival, which runs from Friday the 23rd to Saturday, July 1st. The shows will be performed at East Village‘s Kaine Theatre. The festival’s website describes the event as a “gender-liminal, super-gay, non-conformist, totally butch, aggressively femme and subversive AF celebration.” Performances will include “Lezzie with a Z,” a queer cabaret of musical theatre classics, and WITH YOU!, a queer sports rom-com about a rugby team’s love for each other, both on Friday the 23rd. The lineup also features Sparkle Hour, a musical about a wizard who gets pulled into a black hole called Grindr, MikeyPod LIVE!, a curated selection of queer musicians and performers, and much, much more.
Sure to be dazzlingly entertaining, with no shortage of shimmer and wit supplemented by intersectionality and biting commentary, the festival will host multiple shows per night during its run. For more information, check out their website.
On Thursday, June 22, the classical music radio station WQXR will be hosting a new installation of “The Opera Party: Pride Without Prejudice,” an event that is part-party, part-cooking-show, part-opera, and all celebration in honor of Pride. This event, with a conglomeration of events so multifaceted that it glitters, is part of a new opera-party series in the Greene Space in Greenwich Village, Manhattan that fuses social gatherings with classical music.
The “Pride Without Prejudice” edition of The Opera Party will feature delicious eats and festive gallivanting alongside acts by artists including the performance artist and author Justin Vivian Bond, tenor Anthony Dean Griffey and a host of others. To ice it all off, baker Elizabeth Homes will be creating a cake in real time inspired by the music.
Check out the Facebook event page here.
Every Thursday this June, Park Slope’s Brooklyn Museum, located at the edge of Prospect Park, will be presenting a set of new short films by queer, black, young, female-identifying artists. All together, the films run for 2 hours and 50 minutes, and they will be shown on a loop starting over at 11:00 AM, 4:oo PM, and 7:00 PM. Featured films include “black *enuf” by Carrie Hawks, which describes memories of searching for acceptance, and “This Ain’t a Eulogy” by Taja Lindley, which focuses on making a society where black lives matter.
The series borrows inspiration from the Combahee River Collective, a black lesbian organization founded in 1974, and is presented alongside the museum’s exhibit “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85,” which will be on view through September 17th.
Baba-yasssss: On Sunday, June 25th, East Williamsburg‘s Tilt BK is hosting a queer horror storytelling session inspired by a dearly beloved gay icon, the Babadook.
If you’re lost—legend has it that once upon a time, Netflix posted the successful 2015 horror flick “The Babadook” in its LGBTQ+ section. The Internet’s queer community immediately took ownership of the film’s central monster, a top-hat-wearing, spiky-haired, long-nailed ghoul. Now, the Babadook has become the queer icon nobody knew they needed but cannot imagine life without.
Although it functions mostly as a lighthearted meme, the Gay Babadook also has some deeper undertones. The story arc of a creature that is first feared, then suppressed, and finally relegated to a basement by a heterosexual family is one that some LGBTQ+ people can unfortunately relate to. The Babadook’s reclamation into a symbol of joy and pride, then, is truly an act of queer defiance.
Check out the storytelling event’s Facebook page here.
Beat the heat, celebrate Pride, and help out a great cause: what could be sweeter? For the month of June, Ample Hills Creamery, with locations all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, will be offering a rainbow-colored sugary treat entitled “Baby I Was Churned This Way.” The company will be donating $1 from each purchase to the LGBT Community Center. The flavor itself features a smattering of crunchy rainbow-colored sunflower seeds on a bed of salty hazelnut creamed ice, and is sure to bring a burst of flavor to your Pride.
You can also order a batch of your own personal Churned This Way online.
As fun and important as it is to douse yourself in rainbows and glitter this week, Pride Week is not only about celebration: it’s also about history, and it is a time to consider the future of a movement that has experienced as many setbacks as successes. On Sunday, June 25th, at the same time as the Pride March, the organization Collectively Free is hosting their own march entitled “No Justice, No Pride.” This march is intended to raise awareness about the ways marginalized groups, such as trans and non-binary people, people of color, and Native American and indigenous peoples, are silenced during Pride. The march will start from 39th Street between Park and Madison at 5:00 PM.
If you want to get even more involved in preparation for the march, on Sunday, June 25th at 5PM, organization Hoods4Justice is hosting a conversation about the place of trans, non-gender-conforming people of color and other particularly marginalized groups in the complex business that Pride has become. In recent years, Pride Month has often been commodified and used as a marketing tool for companies looking to score points with the social justice crowd, and the Pride March has been accused of undervaluing the queer community. This conversation, location TBD, will focus on elevating the voices of groups that have often been excluded from mainstream Pride celebrations in preparation for the march later in the day.
You can find information about the brainstorming session here and the march here.
On Saturday, June 25th, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe and Autostraddle are partnering to host a free event dedicated to creating a space for LGBTQ+ youths to celebrate Pride. The party will feature performances by Be Steadwell, Julia Weldon, and the youth slam team from Urban Word NYC.
The Everyone is Gay & Autostraddle All-Ages Pride Party was founded in 2012, in part as a response to the multitude of alcohol-fueled, corporate-centric parties that its founders noticed were forming the bulk of Pride events. The party is committed to bringing queer youths and their families and allies together for an inclusive celebration that features all queer and non-gender-conforming performers. One of the first NYC Pride events dedicated to creating a space for youths, the event acknowledges and honors the importance of unity and support in the lives of young LGBTQ+ kids, and provides a vital space for people from all walks of life to celebrate their identities. Festivities will occur from 2 to 4 PM.
Spend a Saturday attempting to decipher nature’s sparkliest creation—the stars and planets that surround the earth—in the company of members of the queer and non-binary community. Queer Astrology is an organization that connects queer astrologers, fosters community bonds, and delves into the secrets of the stratosphere.
For NYC Pride, Queer Astrology has put together a program starting at 10:30 AM on Saturday, June 24th at the Players Theatre in the West Village, Manhattan. It will begin with a lecture on Innanna, Sumerian goddess of romance, by Joanne McDonough, followed by a talk on Persephone by Samira Bechara and a play entitled “Letters to the Universe” by Shaunga Tagore. The programming will run through 4:15 PM. Other lectures include “Witchcraft 101: Astrology” and “Mercury and the Alchemy of Gender Nonconformity,” which will focus on Mercury’s duality and the dualities that queer and gender-nonconforming people often experience.
There’s also “Exploring Pluto’s Exposing Us,” will focus on parallels between the queer identity and the planet Pluto, emphasizing Pluto’s harsh and transformative environment and its symbolic significance, and many more. No matter how you feel about astrology, we can all learn something by looking deeper into ourselves and further out into the stars. Purchase tickets for the event here.
Lakeside Prospect Park‘s LeFrak Center will get a rainbow spin this week when the Big Gay Roller Skate rolls in this Wednesday from 6 to 10 PM. Come for the music, stay for the drag show on skates, and make sure to wear something that fits with this month’s Pride theme—colors of the rainbow, unicorns, neon, glitz, and glam are all viable options.
The event’s hosts are organizing several other events this Pride Week, including a Lez Swim event on Thursday the 22nd and a Pride Pool Party on Saturday the 24th. Check out Guy Social and Girl Social‘s websites for more information about upcoming events and more ways to let your queer star shine, in whatever form that takes.
Pride Week is a chance for LGBTQ+ people of every kind to celebrate and come together. In contrast to a society that is still resistant to and often terrifying for the gay community, New York City has always been a mecca of freedom, and this year should be no different. Especially in light of new political challenges, this year’s Pride is a vital opportunity for the LGBTQ+ community to revel in the love and lust for life that it has always been defined by.
To learn more about Pride and queer history, check out this article: 10 influential figures of the LGBT rights movement, and this one: NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project Begins Archiving Sites Across the Five Boroughs.
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