Camilo Godoy: In this minisode of the Artists Among Us podcast, I'll be sharing a few highlights from the Whitney's queer history walk. The full tour is available as a Museum audio guide, and often on summer Friday evenings, you can take a guided tour in person too. Just check whitney.org for dates and times.

Hello, my name is Camilo Godoy and I'm one of the Educators at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This queer history walk takes place near the Whitney Museum, located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. It’s close to the land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called the Sapokanikan or tobacco field.

This queer history walk covers different sites that were important for the development of queer community. In this neighborhood, dominated by industrial life as well as the meatpacking industry, there were very few homes and very few people lived here.

Across the highway would have been Pier 52. Built in the early twentieth century, piers that stretched from downtown Manhattan to midtown Manhattan, during the period of the 1960s and 1970s, were left abandoned due to the financial crisis of New York City. These dilapidated infrastructures became the site for artists and queer people to make art, to live, to have sex, and enjoy themselves.

Underneath Miller's Expressway, trucks would be lined up and parked. The backs of the truck trailers would be left open for ventilation because during the day they transported meat across New York City. The truck trailers were used in the evenings by people seeking sexual contact. The act of cruising, or inviting a person into a sexual encounter, is described in the book written by Samuel Delany, The Motion of Light and Water. He describes his discovery of the trucks in the 1950s as both betraying the stereotype of gay people living in isolation, but rather engaging in collective public sex. In the darkness of this space, in anonymity, many people who were in the closet or not out would come to celebrate their sexual desires and the possibilities of sexual politics.

So as hundreds of people gathered in this neighborhood, different venues for sexual expression emerged in this period, such as the Mineshaft. Located on the corner of Washington Street and Little West 12th Street, the Mineshaft was an S&M private sex club started in 1976. It catered to a very specific segment of the gay community specifically in highlighting the culture known as the clone type, in which gay men wore boots, leather, jeans, and tight shirts to address their masculinity.

The Mineshaft—in the 1980s during the height of the AIDS crisis—became a site for sexual education and information. Unfortunately, with the homophobic health codes of this period, places like the Mineshaft were shut down in order for the city to control the spread of the HIV virus, impeding the dissemination of sexual education at this venue. 

The same year in which the Mineshaft was closed, Florent became a thriving food, party, and dance space for the community in this neighborhood. Opened in 1985 by the artist and French immigrant Florent Morellet, this 24-hour restaurant served food for the various communities of the neighborhood, from workers in the meatpacking industry to people leaving the sex clubs to people headed to the piers. 

The marquee signs at the top of the counter were used to address contemporary queer politics of the 1980s as well as his own lived experience as a person living with HIV. The menu included jokes related to war, political slogans, as well as Florent's T-cell count. Seeing the numbers 235 would indicate to patrons of the restaurant that Florent was not doing very well. Florent used his business to destigmatize people living with HIV and AIDS.

Just north is a building where a party called the Clit Club was hosted. Started in 1990, this party catered to a thriving queer community of women of color that saw the Clit Club as a party for celebration and for artmaking. On many of the monitors in the Clit Club, lesbian porn would have been presented and photographs by different artists displayed. In the basement of this building, a stairway led to a dark room where a pool table was located and sexual play took place. The Clit Club was a site for the celebration of queer women of color, but also the dissemination of AIDS activism in the early stages of the AIDS crisis.

The sites in this queer history walk are the closest to the Museum. However, we are in a neighborhood that holds the memory of many aspects of queer history, identity, and belonging.