Sabrina Thaler, Contributing Photographer

In Bob Damron’s 1971 “Address Book,” gay men could find a list of safe, private locations to meet one another around the country. Among the items on the list that year? The men’s bathroom in the basement of Woolsey Hall.

This detail — along with New Haven’s arts and theater scene, rich history of gay clubs and record of championing LGBTQ+ rights — tell the story of a city rich with queer culture, according to historian John Allen.

On Thursday evening, Allen offered an extensive survey of New Haven’s ties to the queer community at the New Haven Museum. In a “New Haven’s Closet: 400 Years of Queer History in the Elm City” talk, he traced history from William Plaine’s execution for sodomy charges in 1646 to Yale’s designation as the “gay Ivy” in the 1980s.

“As we know, history belongs to those who write it, and I’m diligently trying to do that,” Allen said at the beginning of the presentation. 

Among his ranking of the “top 10 queer things about New Haven,” Allen credited community institutions like the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus and A Place to Nurture Your Health, formerly AIDS Project New Haven, for making the city safer for queer people. He also underscored the cultural impact of LGBTQ+ clubs like Partners Cafe.

He enumerated several queer celebrities and artists who have made their way through the city and whose work is immortalized in New Haven’s museums and buildings. At the now-defunct New Haven Arena, Elton John and Jim Morrison gave performances; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library features work by Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde and Jean O’Leary; Pauli Murray College is named for Pauli Murray LAW ’65, who frequently wrote about her gender fluidity and attraction to women.

“We’re in all facets of the business and government and arts and just in daily discourse of New Haven,” Allen said. “And while we might not be out there waving a banner, queer people are everywhere.”

For some attendees, the event offered an opportunity to learn about an unrecognized dimension.

Dylan Lyons and Samantha Gudis grew up in Old Saybrook, a town about 30 miles east of New Haven and Yale’s first official site. Before attending this presentation, they said, they had no idea that New Haven’s queer history went back so far.

“There’s a lot of history in the area where we’re from,” Lyons said. “It’s one of the first colonial settlements in Southern Connecticut. People talk a lot about the history of the town, but I’ve never once heard anyone discuss how queer culture is involved in that history.”

Allen reserved some of his presentation to discuss local opposition to the queer community. He described the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization headquartered in New Haven, which has donated millions of dollars to anti-same-sex marriage campaigns in the 2000s. Allen also described “New Haven’s Stonewall moment” in 1993, when anti-gay protestors violently rallied against a proposal to establish a domestic partnership registry in New Haven.

Allen said that his presentation is especially important amid recent vitriolic rhetoric against the LGBTQ+ community, and following the election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term.

“Over the past week, I have been in mourning, and this has been a bright spot to be able to come in and talk about who we are,” Allen said. “This is my way of being out there and letting people know that we’re a community, that we’re not going away.”

The event also served as an announcement of a new exhibit at the New Haven Museum, “Unfinished Revolutions,” scheduled to debut in 2026. The exhibit will celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence through the lens of historically marginalized groups.

Placed on each chair at the event, a slip of paper invited attendees to submit material that could contribute to the exhibit. According to Cynthia Riccio, director of programs and planning at the museum, “Unfinished Revolutions” may document subjects like New Haven’s queer community, local Indigenous populations and the legal history of birth control advocacy in Connecticut. 

“It will encompass some of these local, lesser-known stories that maybe somebody could say, ‘Wow, I never knew that was a New Haven story,’” said Riccio.

The presentation was an adaptation of the queer history walking tour Allen has offered since 2015 at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. To conduct research for his tours, Allen has pursued the Grove Street Cemetery and examined archival material at the Beinecke, among other local libraries and museums.

In 1996, Allen founded the New Haven Pride Center, which supports New Haven’s LGBTQ+ community year-round.