The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project has produced an interactive map featuring their work to exhaustively identify and document sites in New York City pivotal to LGBT history. The project’s founders, Andrew Dolkart, Ken Lustbader, and Jay Shockley, have spent 25 years in research and advocacy and sought to contextualize events and places that had an impact on LGBT lives and progress.
Including sites such as Christine Jorgensen‘s childhood home to Julio Rivera Corner to pre-Stonewall activist gathering spaces, the Project officially began in August 2015 and actively seeks input from members of the community for suggestions and feedback. They described their mission to local NYC site DNAInfo:
Of the 92,000 sites on the National Register of Historic Places, about a dozen are listed for their association with LGBT history.
The historic sites project hopes to change that.
Six LGBT landmarks across England have been given special status to celebrate England’s Queer History. The locations include the London home of Oscar Wilde and the house where Benjamin Britten lived with his partner Peter Pears.
It comes as a result of Historic England research project Pride of Place, which aimed to record and preserve the history of LGBT people. As an outcome, the grave of pioneering lesbian writer and Egyptologist Amelia Edwards was today granted listed status by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Five other places with queer histories have also had their landmark status bolstered to recognise their unique importance to LGBT history. Among them is London’s Burdett-Coutts Memorial, which commemorates Chevalier d’Eon – an 18th century transgender spy who lived as a woman inside the Empress of Russia’s court.