JOIN
DONATE

"New Haven's Closet" Fêtes The City's Queer History

Lucy Gellman | December 2nd, 2024

LGBTQ  |  New Haven Museum  |  New Haven Pride Center  |  History

John_Context - 1

John Allen: “As we know, history belongs to those who write it. And I’m diligently trying to do that.” Lucy Gellman Photo.

A long-adored cruising spot in the heart of downtown New Haven. A performing arts theater that no longer stands, but hosted a gay icon just before the peak of her career. A showdown in New Haven’s City Hall that took place decades ago, and still feels painfully current to those who lived through it.

All of those—and many more—are now part of “New Haven’s Closet: 400 Years of Queer History in the Elm City,” an oral map of LGBTQ+ New Haven history from historian, activist and New Haven Pride Center co-founder John Allen. A decade after building out that history in a walking tour, Allen has put it into presentation form, growing a survey of queer New Haven that jumps from 17th-century hangings to present day College Street.

“What you’re going to be seeing here is my interpretation—looking at our history through a queer lens,” Allen said in a recent presentation at the New Haven Museum, where the lecture now lives in digital form. “As we know, history belongs to those who write it. And I’m diligently trying to do that.” 

The presentation, which criss-crosses the city and includes detours in West Haven and Guilford, has been years in the making. Close to a decade ago, Allen gave his first LGBTQ+ walking tours as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, which years before had helped him bring Sylvia Rae Rivera and Julia Murray, Urvashi Vaid, Jonathan Capehart, and David Knapp to the city. That tour comprised about 20 sites, all located within a mile-wide radius of downtown New Haven.   

But the idea behind it—that LGBTQ+ representation is essential to understanding a city’s full past, as well as its present and future—also starts in 1995, when Allen did the state’s first-ever LGBTQ+ needs assessment during his graduate work in education at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). When he found that there were over 40 LGBTQ+ groups in Southern Connecticut with no central gathering hub, it led him to think about the need for a community center.

“I’m telling you, I was off to the races after that,” Allen said to laughs. Just two years prior, a citywide push for a domestic partnership registry had failed by a single vote, following staunch opposition from Catholic and Evangelical Christians and a showdown at 200 Orange St. that became a “mob scene,” Allen said (Howard Nash, the Catholic priest who led the opposition, was later posthumously accused of sexual abuse of minors). While the state was generally welcoming, it was clear that there was a gap between what LGBTQ+ people needed and what they had at their disposal.

He, with fellow New Haveners Thomas Jackson (now Rev. Thomas Jackson) and lawyer Jane Griffith, sprang into action, working to incorporate what was then the New Haven Gay and Lesbian Community Center (it is now the New Haven Pride Center). In May 1996, the three signed a document making it the city’s first 501(c)3 dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights. Six months later in November, they opened their first offices at 1 Long Wharf Dr. with the help of then-Mayor John DeStefano.

“I want to mention that we live in an amazing state,” Allen said, zooming through about several years of Connecticut history. In 1971, Connecticut made history when it repealed a law criminalizing sodomy, the second state in the country to do so (Illinois was the first). In the 1990s, it added civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ youth and adults, and then ended the decade flying the rainbow flag over the state capitol building in Hartford.

In the years since, it has celebrated gay marriage, added protections for transgender people who are incarcerated, and given state residents the option of a new non-binary designation through the Conneticut Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). In New Haven, the city’s Board of Education has also passed measures meant to recognize and protect trans and nonbinary youth. “We live in a state that celebrates diversity and all of its citizens, including the LGBTQ+ community.”

Maybe for that reason, he thinks of New Haven itself as part of a “Top 10” list of things that make the city a safe and affirming place for queer people, he said. For years, New Haven has laid claim to several gay bars, from now-defunct spots The Pub, Kurt’s, and Neuter Rooster to Partners, Gotham Citi and 168 York Street Cafe. In recent years, organizations like APNH—one of the first of its kind—have evolved with celebrations of LGBTQ+ Black Pride and drag balls that pay homage to ballroom culture.

But that history stretches back, he said. When Allen began his career and activism, it was Mayor John DeStefano who expressed support for the LGBTQ+ community, lending both space and assistance to activists trying to get the space off the ground. When the organization opened its doors at 1 Long Wharf Dr. in late 1996, “all we had to pay was utilities,” Allen remembered. That goodwill, and $500 that Allen himself had donated, got them through the first year. “It was amazing.”

In those first few years, the center moved spots multiple times, relocating from Long Wharf to 50 Fitch St., and later to 14 Gilbert St. in West Haven and 84 Orange St. back downtown (it moved into its current spot at 50 Orange St. at the end of 2023) Throughout all of it, Allen remembered, DeStefano remained an ally, and Pride began to flourish in the city. In 1998, New Haven held its first Pride rally on the Green, thanks in large part to Gotham Citi Café’s Robb Bartolomeo.

That same year, Allen founded the center’s Rainbow Support Group, an affinity group for LGBTQ+ people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Seven years later, DeStefano and Bartolomeo helped move the Pride celebration to Center Street, where it grew and evolved until the Covid-19 pandemic pushed it to North Haven (it is now back in the Ninth Square).

But Allen’s belief that New Haven is Connecticut’s queer capital goes well beyond its legislative and recent LGBTQ+ history. He can’t see the FBI Offices on State Street, for instance, and not think of the agency’s first director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose anti-gay paranoia and litigiousness may have been in direct conflict with his own close relationship with Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson.

For over a decade in the 1950s and 60s, Hoover was an architect of the "lavender scare”—including the arrest, surveillance and persecution of Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin. Rustin was also gay, giving Hoover ammunition to label him a “degenerate” at a time when he and other leaders were striving towards a more equitable vision of the country.

“He [Hoover] was very vindictive and he hunted and intimidated anybody that ever made any reference to his sexuality,” Allen said, remembering a recent trip to Hoover’s gravesite in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Tolson, who died three years after Hoover in 1975, is buried just five headstones away.    

Allen also credited the FBI with a second queer New Haven factoid—the actress Jodi Foster, who came out publicly in 2013, starred in Marsha Norman’s Getting Out in 1981 in New Haven, during her time as an undergraduate at Yale.

At the time, Foster was performing in the little theater at the Educational Center for the Arts, just off Audubon Street. When John Hinkley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan as a way to impress her, ticket sales went through the roof. She went on to play an FBI agent in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs.

Allen turned his attention to the theaters that have populated the city, past and present. There is, for instance, the Shubert Theatre, a fixture of the arts community that has yielded surprise cameos in the campy and well-loved films All About Eve, Valley of the Dolls and Auntie Mame.  There is the former Loew's Poli Theatre, which stood at 23 Church St. and welcomed a young Judy Garland in August 1939, just 14 days before The Wizard of Oz opened in movie houses across the country.

And before it was the FBI building, the corner of Orange and Grove streets was home to the New Haven Arena, where Jim Morrison (“Who we claim, bisexual,” Allen said with a smile and a little triumphant lift of his arm) was famously arrested in 1967, and proudly out and gay musician Elton John closed out the venue’s last show in 1972.

Without so much as a beat, it seemed, Allen pressed on to Yale, which first earned the sobriquet “the gay Ivy” in 1987. When he thinks of LGBTQ+ New Haven, he said, that list inevitably includes artists, writers, and activists who have passed through the university’s doors, from Cole Porter to Pauli Murray (“she has become one of my new heroes”) to AIDS activist, author and ACT UP Founder Larry Kramer.

He also shouted out Medieval historian John Boswell and director Jennie Livingston, the latter of whom went on to make Paris Is Burning after she graduated from Yale in 1983. Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, is buried at Grove Street Cemetary—where Allen and his husband, Keith Hyatte, recently bought a plot of their own.

“We asked to be in the gay section of the cemetery," he said to laughs, returning to Grove Street for just a moment. “Actually, we’re kind of starting the gay section, because our plot is just a few away from the artist Paul Cadmus.”

Allen sees Yale as part of queer New Haven for many of its institutions, he added. In addition to museums like the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), there’s the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which houses the papers of Langston Hughes, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thornton Wilder, Samuel Steward and National Coming Out Day founder Jean O'Leary.

There are also the basement bathrooms at Woolsey Hall, which in 1971 were included in Bob Damron’s LGBTQ-friendly Address Book (Allen likened the guide to the LGBTQ+ version of the Green Book, which let Black Americans know which establishments and neighborhoods were ostensibly safe to visit and patronize). For years, the building’s bathrooms were recognized as safe cruising spots for gay men. Despite light audience laughter, Allen reminded attendees that the story has a heavier underside: people didn’t feel like they could come out of the closet, so they literally hid whole parts of themselves underground. 

“I think that it’s not by chance,” he said. “There’s a lot of privacy there. It’s in a basement. So people could go there and have their physical, um, appointments, and then move on and go back to their wives and children and families. And that’s what happens when people are in the closet. They have no way to meet and to live an authentic life.”

It’s in that vein that Allen also recognized the complex, nuanced and sometimes painful parts of the city’s queer history, too. In addition to alders’ inability to pass a domestic partnership registry—a night that earned an official apology from then-aldermanic-president Thomas Reyes—the city is home to the vehemently anti-LGBTQ (and more recently, vehemently anti-Kamala Harris) Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization that operates nationally.

“There are very powerful forces out there that do not wish our community well,” Allen said. Centuries before, New Haven was also the site of the 1642 execution of George Spencer, who was accused of beastiality. Only 373 years later, in 2015, did Judge John C. Blue grant Spencer a posthumous pardon. It was one of three executions to take place in the state, Allen said.