Queer Newark

Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community

Whitney Strub

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781978829213
  9781978829220
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978829237
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

NJSAA Edited Works Award Winner (2024) 

Histories of gay and lesbian urban life typically focus on major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and New York, opportunity-filled 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. 

 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: Hidden in Plain Sight: Finding and Remembering LGBTQ Newark History
• 1. Sodom on the Passaic: Excavating Early Queer Histories of Newark, 1870s–1940s
• 2. The View from Mulberry and Market: Revisiting Newark’s Forgotten Gay and Lesbian Nightlife
• 3. Toward a Queer Newark Left: Sexuality and Activism in the New Left and Black Power Eras
• 4. Glitter on Halsey Street: Queer and Trans World-Making in Newark, 1970s–Present
• 5. Project Fire: AIDS, Erasure, and Black Queer Organizing in Newark
• 6. Ballroom Interlude
• 7. At Home in the Hood: Black Queer Women Resisting Narratives of Violence and Plotting Life at the G Corner
• 8. Let’s Talk about Sex, Baby! Queer and Trans Black Women and the Politics of Sex Talk in the Archive
• 9. “Temos Muitas Coisas Pra Fazer”: Market Identities and Queer Community-Building in the Brazilian Ironbound and Greater Queer Newark
• 10. “Newark Police Don’t Do Nothing for Me; They Don’t Protect and Serve”: Policing LGBTQ+ Communities
• 11. Walk This Way: Reframing Queer History through a Walking Tour
• Epilogue: Remembering Sakia, Remembering Ourselves
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index