Queer Newark Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community

EDITED BY WHITNEY STRUB

EPILOGUE BY ZENZELE ISOKE

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunityfilled destinations for LGBTQ migrants from across the country. Yet there are many other queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations that receive far less attention. Though just a few miles from New York, Newark is one of these cities, and its queer histories have been neglected—until now.

Queer Newark charts a history in which working-class people of color are the central actors and in which violence, poverty, and homophobia could never suppress joy, resistance, love, and desire. Drawing from rare archives that range from oral histories to vice squad reports, this collection’s authors uncover the sites and people of Newark’s queer past in bars, discos, ballrooms, and churches. Exploring the intersections of class, race, gender, and sexuality, they offer fresh perspectives on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, community relations with police, Latinx immigration, and gentrification, while considering how to best tell the rich and complex stories of queer urban life. Queer Newark reveals a new side of New Jersey’s largest city while rewriting the history of LGBTQ life in America.

WHITNEY STRUB is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark, where he co-directs the Queer Newark Oral History Project. His many books include Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right and Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression

Table of Contents

Introduction

Whitney Strub

Chapter 1: Sodom on the Passaic: Excavating Early Queer Histories of Newark, 1870s-1940s

Peter Savastano and Timothy Stewart-Winter

Chapter 2: The View from Mulberry and Market: Revisiting Newark’s Forgotten Gay and Lesbian Nightlife

Anna Lvovsky

Oral History excerpt #1: John

Chapter 3: Toward a Queer Newark Left: Sexuality and Activism in the New Left and Black Power Eras

Whitney Strub

Oral History excerpt #2: Yvonne Hernandez

Chapter 4: Glitter on Halsey Street: Queer and Trans World-Making in Newark, 1970s-present

Kristyn Scorsone

Oral History excerpt #3: Angela Raine

Chapter 5: Project Fire: AIDS, Erasure, and Black Queer Organizing in Newark

Jason Chernesky

Chapter 6: Ballroom Interlude

The Queer Newark Oral History Project

Chapter 7: At Home in the Hood: Black Queer Women Resisting Narratives of Violence and Plotting Life at the G Corner

LeiLani Dowell

Oral History excerpt #4: June Dowell-Burton

Chapter 8: Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby!: Queer Newark Oral Histories, La’Raine Magazine, and the Politics of Sex in the Archive

Dominique Rocker

Chapter 9: “Temos Muitas Coisas Pra Fazer”: Market Identities and Queer Community Building in the Brazilian Ironbound and Greater Queer Newark Yamil Avivi

Oral History excerpt #5: Alicia Heath-Toby

Chapter 10: “Newark Police Don’t Do Nothing for Me; They Don’t Protect and Serve”: Policing LGBTQ+ Communities

Danielle M. Shields and Carse Ramos

Chapter 11: “I’m Walking Here”: Reframing Queer History Through a Walking

Tour

Mary Rizzo and Christina Strasburger

Epilogue: Remembering Sakia, Remembering Ourselves

Zenzele Isoke

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Notes on Contributors

Index