Hello!
I am a writer, historian, and curator in New York City. In 2026, I joined the staff of the new American LGBTQ+ Museum as one of the Lead Historians. This is an honor and responsibility I have been waiting my whole life to take on. Mark your calendars now: we open in October of 2028!
I’m also a writer. My most recent book, MY BAD: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE QUEER 90S AND BEYOND, is a memoir in essays that explores how the 90s transformed queer life in America, through my own stumbling, fumbling, and delightful journey through being queer in those years.
My most recent previous book was THE WOMEN’S HOUSE OF DETENTION: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, a queer history of the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. It is the story of one building: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired. It is the winner of the 2023 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle of the American Library Association, as well as the 2022 Warren Johansson Award from the W.A. Percy Foundation.
My first book, WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, was called a “boisterous, motley new history” and “an entertaining and insightful chronicle” by the New York Times, who made it an Editor’s Pick in 2019. It was also received the New York City Book Award from the Society Library. In 2019, I was honored by the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Committee on LGBT History of the American Historical Association, and the Brooklyn Borough President for my work on the queer history of BK.
If you enjoy my work please consider joining my newsletter, a space where I occasionally muse about books, queer history, walking around New York City, archives, politics, culture, and anything else on my mind.
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Previously, I received the 2016 Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, several New York Foundation for the Arts grants in Nonfiction Literature, the 2019-2020 Allan Berube Prize for outstanding work in public LGBT History from the Committee on LGBT History at the American Historical Association, and the 2019 New York City Book Award. I have been awarded residencies at The Church Sag Harbor, Yaddo, and Watermill. Currently, I teach nonfiction in the MFA program at The Bennington Writing Seminars.
A few favorite pieces include my review of Torrey Peters’ Stag Dance (I don’t write for the NYT anymore though, because of their transphobia and terrible record on Palestine), Crush Notes (about the Pulse Massacre, my family, the origins of homophobia, and an 8th century Arabic poet named Abu Nuwas), Downton Abbey’s Thomas Barrow and the Future of the Gay Past (that one’s pretty self explanatory), The Three Lives of Malvina Schwartz (a look at one of the most famous NYC drag kings of the 1940s and '50s), My Year of Sarah Schulman (a deep dive into everything Schulman ever wrote), and Power to the People (a profile of activist and artist Marsha P. Johnson).
I'm delighted to be represented by Robert Guinsler at Sterling Lord Literistic.
In 2010, I founded the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping local communities create engaging exhibitions rooted in their own experience. Through Pop-Up, I’ve curated shows around the country and had the opportunity to give lectures and lead workshops on queer history, AIDS activism, and museum praxis at museums, colleges, community centers, and punk houses of all kinds. The proudest moment of my life might be the day that George Chauncey told me, “You’re making history cool.”
Photo: M. Sharkey
Lectures & Workshops
My speaking agent is the fantastic Leslie Shipman at the Shipman Agency. Contact them for more information.
I know that the erasure of history, while it might seem unimportant in the moment, is in fact always a crucial step on the road to autocracy. Indeed, the specific case of “deleting” trans people from the record is an action with a deeply troubling, almost century-old precedent…