Early 1900s Harlem — sans the cigarette smoke — greets New York Historical guests on the second floor of the Upper West Side museum and library until March 8, 2026. Titled “The Gay Harlem Renaissance,” the exhibit showcases the LGBTQ+ roots of the hallowed Black cultural movement that occurred roughly 50 blocks north and a century ago. Since the show’s doors opened on Oct. 10, folks seem to love it.
“It’s been overwhelmingly positive in my own experience giving tours in the gallery,” said the exhibit’s lead curator, Allison Robinson. “It’s been a range of emotional reactions, from just joy at discovering something new [to having] people tear up on my tours learning about this history … it means a lot to me that this has touched people in a really deep way, and particularly given the fact that we worked on this for years.”
The exhibit stems from Columbia University professor George Chauncey joining the New York Historical Society’s board of trustees just under three years ago. He boasted a trove of experience writing and teaching about LGBTQ+ history and suggested examining Black LGBTQ+ life during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s, when he met with museum president Louise Mirrer. Chauncey maintains that uptown’s “Black mecca” was the most gay friendly neighborhood at the time, despite the hallowed reputation of lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village during the same period.
“Harlem was far larger,” he said over Zoom. “There were more clubs, more meeting places. The Hamilton Lodge Ball was the largest drag ball in the city. It was the largest drag ball on the whole East Coast, and had people traveling from up and down the East Coast to come to it. It was the boldest queer scene. [In] Greenwich Village, there were sometimes clubs where you’d see male-identified people in dresses. In Harlem, you had people walking down the streets very well known in the community. It was a more vibrant scene.
“That’s really important for us to realize, and it’s one of the problems of the field of LGBTQ history: it’s primarily focused on white, middle-class people, and in fact, queer life in the ‘20s and ‘30s was much more diverse. As it [also] is today.”
New York Historical ultimately greenlit the idea and paired Chauncey with several curators, including Robinson. Early on, the project assembled an academic advisory committee with experts on Black, queer, and cultural history, along with Harlem’s past. Through such research, Robinson compiled a checklist of objects and photos held by roughly 25 different lenders across the country.
Just one prop exists on display among the artifacts: a prize-winning dress worn by Black drag queen Bonnie Clark at the 1932 Hamilton Lodge Ball. A pencil drawing and a written description are all that remains of the gown’s existence. Based on them, fashion historian J. Leia Lima Baum reproduced the dress following months of meticulous research. The prop considers everything from the color scheme to how the light would have hit the dress almost a century ago.
Robinson says Bonnie Clark’s gown plays a key role in recreating the impact of the annual Hamilton Lodge Ball, where drag kings and drag queens would preen and prance to massive uptown crowds.
But bringing the early 1900s to modern-day New York City meant accounting for how language around gender identity and sexuality changed from roughly a century ago. For example, the exhibit prominently features blues singer Gladys Bentley, who went by feminine pronouns but always felt tomboyish and once penned an Ebony magazine essay about her gender non-conformity. But terms like “transgenderism” and “transexuality” did not exist back then.
“There was a kind of sexual fluidity that is really important to recognize in this period,” said Chauncey. “It was one of the trickiest things that we tried to do, because these are very complicated issues, but it was something we did not want to ignore, that we wanted to engage with and get our visitors to think about.”
He says the exhibit’s capstone, an impressive period room drenched in smoky red light, fills in the gaps through a blues playlist played in the theater featuring songs highlighting LGBTQ+ themes. The music allows figures featured in the exhibit to speak (or more accurately, sing) for themselves, whether in celebration or bewilderment of the Gay Harlem Renaissance.
In order to construct the theater, the curators connected with repositories for materials, and the museum’s exhibition design team brought the vision to life after much discussion. “In order to give our visitors a chance to think of what it would have been like to be in a club listening to Ethel Waters sing and perform, we created this theater to make that part really sink in and come alive for our visitors,” said Robinson.
Other interactive elements include a social media wall with dress-up costumes and a station to create rent party cards, which Black Harlemites used to advertise jamborees held to cover exorbitant housing costs enacted by racist landlords. They offer opportunities for younger guests to engage with the Gay Harlem Renaissance, as education on LGBTQ+ history remains under attack across the country.
“From the beginning, we were working with our education department in our DiMenna Children’s History Museum to try to incorporate elements that would specifically make this show accessible to both younger audiences and also intergenerational families,” said Robinson. “Everything on the wall is content related to our blues queens, who are presenting themselves in terms of gender and sexuality in very different ways. We get a good sense of the range of ways to just express yourself in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. “
“But by adding a social media wall with costumes, it gives children a chance to not only have that content be explained to them, but think about that as they’re dressing themselves and posing in front of a little microphone. And I’m happy to say that I have received a lot of very cute pictures of people and their children posing in front of that wall.”