Few people--straight or gay-- associate New York gay culture and history with neighborhoods other than Greenwich Village or Chelsea. The odd thing about this is that aside from the Stonewall Riots and the Christopher Street Pier, the East Village likely boasts more influential and relevant gay history packed into its narrow streets and avenues than the West Village and Chelsea combined.

Among other things, the East Village nurtured such gay artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe. The urban gay party was born in the East Village in a little place called The Saint. New York's gay sexual revolution, a sexual revolution that changed gay culture forever spilled out of Tompkins Square Park and off Avenue A and Saint Marks Place long before Stonewall. And what was undeniably the most famous and influential drag club in American gay history was "hidden" in the basement of an old tenement at no. 82 East 4th Street, long before Lady Bunny was even a twinkle in her the eye of the sales clerk at the Lane Bryant Plus-Sized Lady's department.



Of course today, thanks to the AIDS crisis and a lack of interest in our own history, almost all of these gay landmarks are not only hidden but mostly forgotten. The Electric Circus, home to Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, is now a small shopping mall. The Saint, the birthplace of the gay mega-club and the circuit party is now a bank. And the most notorious of the gay bath houses, The St Marks Baths, targeted by the media and the city during the early days of the AIDS crisis as a steamy soup of virulence, is now a video rental store. Another famous East Village bathhouse, The Club Baths is now a restaurant.

As it happens, I grew up in the East Village--sort of. It's my "hometown."

"Sort of" means that when I was a kid the East Village didn't exist, it was the northern extremity of the Lower East Side..

Today's East Village is a neighborhood bounded by 14th Street on the north, the East River on the east, Houston Street on the south and Broadway on the west. It lies east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town and North of the Lower East Side. The East Village encompasses the neighborhoods of Alphabet City (Avenues A-D) and NoHo, (Houston Street - Astor Place, Broadway to the Bowery.)

But in fact, until the 1960s, the eastern side of Manhattan between 14th and Houston streets was simply the northern part of the Lower East Side, and shared much of its immigrant, working class characteristics with the area below Houston Street. A shift began in the 1950s with the migration of Beatniks into the neighborhood, and then hippies, musicians and artists in the 1960s. The area was dubbed the "East Village", to dissociate it from the image of slums evoked by the Lower East Side name, and to present the area as the new Greenwich Village, which had been popular with artists, but had become stodgy and middle-class by then.

Newcomers and real estate brokers popularized the East Village name, and the term was adopted by the popular media the by the mid-60s. As the East Village developed a culture distinct from the rest of the Lower East Side, the two areas came to be seen as two separate neighborhoods rather that the former being part of the latter.

By the 1970's the East Village was the established center of alternative cultures, radical politics, a music revolution and a radical gayborhood..

Today, as it is throughout most of Manhattan, gentrification is slowly pushing minorities, artists and revolutionaries out of the area and into the outer boroughs.

A gay landmark tour of the East Village is a challenge and not something that can be done in a day or without research; and I suppose once the old dinosaurs such as myself are extinct you young boys and girls will walk the streets of the East village oblivious to the sequins and sperm that once flowed though its dark and grungy streets.

Being the saint that I am, I invited my friends Sasha (pictured here with his trusty wheels) and Arpad along for just such a tour and thanks to my trusty camera and my unique ability to talk any man out of his shirt, you can now join us on a tour of the hidden gay history of New York's lessor known gayborhood, the East village.

Even today, the East Village holds it own as a gay center with 11 "official" gay bars and a fair smattering of mixed and "gayish" bars compared to 11 official Chelsea gay bars, 15 West Village gay bars and 12 Hell's Kitchen queer watering holes. At the end of our tour a tired and thirsty Arpad (pictured below) impatiently waits for Happy Hour to begin at Urge.

In case you missed the earlier links: click here and tour the hidden and forgotten history of the East Village.

View Gallery: Another Side Of Pride: The Hidden Gay History of New York's East Village

Another Side Of Pride: The Hidden Gay History of New York's East Village Test