New York

New York has more than two hundred LGBTQI+ venues, spread across three Manhattan neighbourhoods — Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village — plus a good few in Brooklyn and Queens. Each has its own character.

Chelsea is the gym and circuit-party one, the neighbourhood that coined the Chelsea Boy, with big bars like The Eagle and Gym Bar. Hell's Kitchen is the next generation, more casual and with more restaurants, such as Industry and Hardware. Greenwich Village is the historic cradle, though tourism now weighs more than the neighbourhood itself, and that is where Stonewall, Julius' and Cubbyhole are. East Village leans alternative and drag, with Phoenix and Club Cumming. And in Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Bushwick carry the DIY end, with 3 Dollar Bill and House of Yes. The scene runs seven days a week, and even on a Monday or a Tuesday there is somewhere to go.

The NYC Pride March is held on the last Sunday of June and runs down Fifth Avenue from Midtown to Greenwich Village, past the Stonewall National Monument. Heritage of Pride has organised it since 1984. The record still belongs to 2019, when the city hosted WorldPride on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall and gathered some four million people at the march and five million visitors in Manhattan.

The first march was on 28 June 1970, the Christopher Street Liberation Day, the source of every Pride that came after it. The calendar does not stop there: Brooklyn Pride and Queens Pride, in Jackson Heights, also fall in June, joined by PrideFest and the Drag March the night before. The whole month works as Pride Month, with events every day. Hotels go up between 200% and 400% that week.

New York does not have a gay neighbourhood. It has at least three in Manhattan and several more off the island.

Greenwich Village is the cradle. The Stonewall Inn, at 51-53 Christopher Street, was the site of the June 1969 riots that started the modern movement, and in 2016 it became the first LGBT national monument in the United States. Chelsea, around Eighth Avenue, took over in the eighties and nineties, tied to the gym and circuit culture that coined the Chelsea Boy. Hell's Kitchen, along Ninth, arrived in the 2000s as the third wave, younger and more casual. Beyond Manhattan there is Jackson Heights, in Queens, with the Latino LGBT community, and Williamsburg and Bushwick, in Brooklyn, with the DIY queer end.

A good part of the LGBT organisational network that now works nationwide was born in New York. The LGBT Community Center, at 208 West 13th Street, opened in 1983 and is one of the largest LGBT community centers in the United States. GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis), founded in the city in 1982, is the world's oldest HIV/AIDS organisation. GLAAD, Lambda Legal and Callen-Lorde, an LGBT-specific clinic since 1983, are all headquartered here.

On health, Callen-Lorde Community Health sees patients in Chelsea, Brooklyn and the Bronx on a sliding scale, with PrEP, trans hormone care and treatment without insurance. The city health department, NYC DOHMH, hands out free condoms and PrEP to residents. The Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine is a national reference. For memory there is the AIDS Memorial at St. Vincent's Triangle, in the West Village, opened in 2016, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in SoHo, devoted to queer art, with its own collection and temporary shows.