I think we’re so fortunate in New York to have something like that. The other is the LGBTQ Center on West 13th Street. The memorial is beautiful, and it’s set in a peaceful and serene little green space, which is quite rare in the city. One is the New York Aids Memorial - a reminder of a dark time in history, but a really, really important one. There are a couple of underrated sites I’d really recommend. What LGBTQ+ landmarks should we visit in New York? That spirit of freedom and liberation, and being your true, genuine, authentic self - that feeling continues today. They could find love in ways they never could before. People realised they didn’t have to stay in their own little suburb they could go to a place like New York and find community. It was after the Second World War when LGBTQ folks really arrived here in droves. In New York, you have thousands of smaller communities within that larger community. I’ve lived elsewhere and a place may have one centre, for example, that everyone goes to - or that no one goes to, as the case may be. The interesting thing about New York is that there isn’t just one community.
Tell us about New York’s LGBTQ+ community. I went along to my first meeting the next week, and that put me on a whole new path. The group David was showcasing was called Act Up, and after Googling them I found out they still met at the LGBTQ Centre every Monday. I had this amazing, transformative moment: here I was living in New York, and the streets I was seeing in the documentary were the streets I was walking every day. I’m a real history nerd, and when I first arrived I watched a documentary on David France and his activism work during the city’s Aids epidemic in the 1980s. What are your first memories of the city?
I was already out when I arrived, but I was able to find out what that truly meant for me when I moved to this city. Moving to New York as a queer man, I found a new lease of life. It really is an incredible city and I feel very fortunate to be living here every day, even in the midst of a pandemic - and that’s really saying something. Tell us about New York City and your relationship with it.