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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Kagendo Murungi
A Kenyan feminist, LGBTQ+ rights activist, filmmaker, and producer, Kagendo Murungi consistently returned to a central question throughout both her work and life: who produces images of African people, who controls their circulation, and who is allowed to appear within them? For Murungi, these were not just abstract concerns but urgent political stakes, inseparable from broader struggles over power, representation, and survival.
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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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