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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Justin Chin
Born in 1969 in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Justin Chin came of age before establishing himself in San Francisco in the 1990s as a poet, essayist, and performer. Over the course of his career — cut short in 2015 following a stroke linked to complications from AIDS — he developed a body of work that persistently examined how the languages surrounding sexuality, race, and identity are produced and circulated through culture.
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Herculine Barbin
Herculine Barbin’s life is often introduced as a “case” — a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide what, exactly, made a person male or female. Born in 1838 in France and raised as a girl within Catholic schools and convents, Barbin would soon become the subject of medical examinations, legal judgments, and public scandals aimed at determining her “true sex.” The historical significance of her life, however, is not just tied to the ambiguity of her physical body but also to the extraordinary paper trail she managed to leave behind.
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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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