Those of you who follow the blog on other social media accounts may or may not have noticed this already. But it appears Facebook and Instagram have both removed links to this blog without my consent. Even the link in my profile to this blog’s homepage gets an error message. I’ve tried deleting it and retyping it by hand, but to no avail.

Facebook seems to have removed all links to the blog itself for “violating community standards”. I’m not sure what community standards I’ve violated - the blog does not post pornography or NSFW content. I don’t post hate speech or threats of violence.

Is this because I said John Laurens was gay? Is the ghost of Henry Laurens trolling my Facebook ?

Instagram is even worse. It doesn’t even give me a reason why, and doesn’t give me an option to ask to have this problem reviewed.

I’m looking into the issue now, but as you can imagine, I’m not optimistic about it. Mostly I’m just annoyed and confused as to why this is happening at all. I’m not a “big name” blog so it’s not like I’m losing money on this but I still rely on social media to get people to read this, or else I’d just be screaming at myself in a vacuum.

If anyone has ever dealt with anything like this before please tell me what you did in this situation because I am at my wit’s end.
-Nym

How to Relive the Twenties in NYC...

...while you're waiting for summer to come around so you can go to the Jazz Age Lawn Party again! (No, that will not be on this list, as everyone already knows about it and also it's not accessible for everyone.)

Cue "Rhapsody in Blue"

Look, we're almost in the twenties again, and the scene nowadays isn't entirely dissimilar to 1919. Fascism and nationalism are on the rise worldwide, Europe is in shambles, newly-obtained rights (then - women voting! now- gays marrying!) are making manbabies cry, everyone is broke as fuck, and dada humour is back en vogue.

I'm not saying I want everything in the 1920s to come back. I don't want the Ku Klux Klan to be as powerful as they were back then (though it looks like that may be happening anyway, gross). I don't particularly want Prohibition or segregation to return. But sometimes I do want to take a time machine back just to get kind of a sense of what it was like to live through all that. I can't do that yet but there are ways to get a bit of that jazz age flavour injected right into my veins. Figuratively, of course. And here I've amassed a few of them!

P.S. I'm sorry I do not know the Bronx or Staten Island well enough to include anything from those boroughs; please tell me about cool 20s-esque places there and maybe I'll make a sequel to this post! I did try to include places from Brooklyn and Queens whenever possible

A Self Guided Walking Tour of the West/Greenwich Village

I will be completely honest with you - I have been living in New York for a couple years now and I'm still not entirely sure on what the distinction is between Greenwich Village and the West Village. As someone who mostly frequents the East Village, anything west of Broadway kinda blends all together in my mind. Either way, though, that infamous neighbourhood to the west is known for being quite charming, full of history and quaint shops and brownhouses and winding cobblestone streets that don't match up to Manhattan's grid at all. And honestly, I don't think New Yorkers know the distinction either - I've asked like ten of y'all, and everyone gave me a different answer for what the difference is between them two.

There are, of course, a plethora of self guided walking tours available all over the web. But none were catered to my specific interests. So - with the help of google maps - I spliced them together and added a few things and created my own, with the things I'm interested in - early American history, gay history, cool architectural details, and ghost stories. And after taking it... well, I figured I'd share it with all of you

Pocket Altar 101

Witches and pagans hear me out! Everyone else, ignore this post!

Have you ever been out in the park and suddenly thought "hm I'd really like to do a magical/religious thing right now but all my supplies are at home!"? You've probably already heard of the concept of a "pocket altar" but let me tell you, it is a lifesaver, and if you haven't made one yet then you really should! I mean, far be it from me to tell anyone how to do their own spiritual thing - like, you do you, obviously - but it is a nifty little thing that comes in handy.

First things first, you're gonna need an Altoids tin.

New Alexandria: An Alternate History

This whole post came out of a misremembering of the poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty, a sonnet written by Emma Lazarus called "The New Colossus":

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Well, despite the fact that even the title references the Colossus of Rhodes, my dumb ass remembered the first line as, "Just like the blazing lighthouse of Greek fame" because it was 6:30 AM, the coffee hadn't kicked in, and I was listening to a podcast about Cleopatra ("Timesuck" if anyone is curious)

So I was thinking (until two hours later when I remembered the poem is literally called The New Colossus, for fuck's sake Nym) that it was a reference to another wonder of the ancient world - the Lighthouse of Alexandria.

And it occurred to me that, in a way... it wouldn't exactly be incorrect to say New York City is sort of a New Alexandria. I mean, not for nothing, but certain areas of New York wouldn't look out of place in the classical world:

Alexandria and New York City both have reputations as multicultural metropolises (metropolii?) by the water, but what particularly sells it for me is the fact that Alexandria was one of many ancient cities named for Alexander the Great. And in a way, New York City has its own Alexander the Great in the form of Alexander Hamilton, who was so associated with this city even in his lifetime, that his enemies (Jefferson and his cronies) nicknamed it Hamiltonopolis. (And not for nothing, but I think that makes John Laurens Hephaestion, which is weirdly fitting, all things considering.)

I'm sure Amsterdam and York are both great cities, but perhaps it's time to associate NYC with another city entirely...

I know this was a short, somewhat silly post. But it's food for thought, isn't it?
-Nymicus Lesbianicus

P.S. There's a novel idea in here somewhere, something with Cleopatra as mayor of NYC and Marc Antony and Gaius Octavian both running for governor, but I'm probably not gonna write it anytime soon.

The Museum Girls Visit Rock Hall Museum

On this past Sunday, a group of friends and I went out to Long Island to visit Rock Hall Museum, a historic house from c. 1767 that none of us had ever heard of.

It was so worth the trip, you guys.

From getting to pet chickens to learning about some more Revolutionary War history to conspiracy theory conversations at a kitschy German food hall to having to climb into a building through the window, one thing is for sure - it's never a dull day when the Museum Girls get involved!

NYC's Gay Culture of the 1920s, and the Invention of 'The Closet'

A group of lesbians at NYC venue Webster Hall [Public Domain]

In the popular imagination, most people imagine that gay culture in New York City started in 1969 with the Stonewall Riots. This has always kind of pissed me off as a gay person, if only for the reason that if you even try to bring up the idea of anyone having a gay life before the 60s people just assume it couldn't be possible. As if we as LGBT folk didn't exist until the late 60s as anything other than the occasional person hung for sodomy or something. Condescendingly, many straights imagine that the gays of yore must have become self-loathing and passively spent their entire lives in the closet until Stonewall happened. Not that the Stonewall Riots weren't tremendously important, of course - that's not at all what I am saying - but gay clubs didn't get their start with Stonewall and Julian's and the Duplex, and the systematic suppression of the LGBT community was not due to some age-old, unchanging social antipathy, nor was it a sign of passivity by LGBT people. Anti-gay forces created the closet in the early 20th century.

Believe it or not, there was actually an earlier gay subculture in NYC - and it wasn't some hidden illicit thing! Granted, of course many straight people disapproved, but people were open about this subculture, and it was even written about in papers! And when else could this have happened but in the era of, as Cole Porter (a gay man himself) put it, "Anything Goes" - The Roarin' Twenties?

This was an era of, after all, the breaking down of pre-WWI social norms, as well as cultural experimentation and an overall irreverence for authority. Greenwich Village and Harlem in particular had a huge number of speakeasies that catered to gay men and lesbian women. One such club was known as the Hamilton Lodge. (It wasn't named directly after Alexander Hamilton, but after the neighbourhood of Hamilton Heights where it was located, which was named after Hamilton.)