Marc Zinaman is a writer and queer historian based in New York City.
Queer Happened Here
NYC's queer history is everywhere, but rarely is it visibly documented. I grew up not knowing that James Baldwin once lived down my block or that the building I walked by each day once housed the gay bathhouse where Bette Midler got her start. This project is meant to map out and document the oft forgotten LGBTQ history of NYC in an accessible, visual format.
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Recent Writing
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Berto Pasuka
Arriving in Britain on the eve of the Second World War, Berto Pasuka stands as one of the most innovative and overlooked figures in twentieth-century performance. A queer artist from Jamaica, he entered a cultural landscape that left little room for Black dancers or Black creative leadership, yet he refused to be restricted by the narrow expectations and offerings of his time. Instead, he insisted that Black movement, Black stories, and Black aesthetics belonged on major stages, and pushed to create a dance language rooted in the rhythms, histories, and expressive traditions of the African diaspora.
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Sarah Hegazi
What does it mean to insist on visibility in a place where visibility is criminalized? In 2017, Sarah Hegazi — an Egyptian writer, lesbian feminist, and self-proclaimed socialist — tried to answer this with a single gesture. She lifted a rainbow flag high above a Cairo crowd and, for a brief moment, made queer visibility possible. For that singular act, however, the Egyptian state caged her, segments of society shamed her, and the subsequent trauma of it all shadowed her exile, leading to her untimely and tragic death by suicide at the age of 30.
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Luis González de Alba
A provocative dissident, writer, psychologist, and early advocate for sexual diversity, Luis González de Alba was among the most fearless and multifaceted public intellectuals in modern Mexican history. Though less internationally known than many of his contemporaries, he helped bridge the worlds of political resistance, literary innovation, and queer visibility at a time when being openly gay in his country remained both dangerous and transgressive.
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