New york gay beach
Pelham Bay Park & Orchard Beach
History
Orchard Beach, located in Pelham Bay Park, is the only public beach in the Bronx and is sometimes called “the Bronx Riviera.” The beach and the park have prolonged served as a accepted recreational, meeting, and cruising place for the LGBT community, particularly for people of color.
There are several accounts of gay Puerto Rican men talking about the importance of Orchard Beach as a guarded haven when they otherwise did not feel content being openly gay in public or when with their families. Bronx resident Ed García Conde on his website Welcome 2 The Bronx mentions that Hunter Island, a rocky section on the northern end of Orchard Beach, was typically a gathering place for sex. (The island itself had been separate from the beach until the 1930s, when then-NYC Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had them connected via infill.)
During the summer months of the 1990s, organizations such as Bronx Lesbians Combined in Sisterhood (BLUeS) and Gay Men of the Bronx (GMoB) hosted outdoor gatherings at Orchard Beach and Pelham Bay Park. Affirming the significance of
Riis Park Beach
History
Located on a mile-long section of Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, Jacob Riis Park was named after the turn-of-the-20th-century social reformer and photojournalist. Historically, New York Metropolis beaches have been popular public social gathering places for the LGBT society where they claimed certain sections as their own.
In the 1930s the beach was redesigned under the direction of New York Urban area Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. When the park reopened in 1937, Moses hoped that it would be a more democratic version of Jones Beach due to its simple accessibility by general transportation and cars. By the 1940s the most eastern end of the beach had turn into a documented well-known destination for mostly white gay men to sunbathe and cruise. Lesbian women also claimed a nearby area of the beach by the 1950s. By the 1960s, this area became increasingly popular with a diverse LGBT presence including African American and Latino/a men and women.
During the 1960s this area of the beach became clothing optional and was affectionately referred to as “Screech Beach” due to the same-sex attracted presence.
New York’s beaches hold long been a gathering place for the LGBTQ+ people, but Jacob Riis Park, a stretch of Atlantic coastline in Queens, is the most trendy of them all. Originally opened in 1914, the beach is not just a popular sunbathing spot; it also has played an instrumental part in local, cultural and world history as the launching indicate for the first trans-Atlantic flight, a hub of protest following the Stonewall Uprising, and a site on the National Register of Historic Places.
Part of Riis’ explicit purpose when it reopened in 1937 was to be “democratic”—a space that could be easily accessed through public transport—and from the 1940s to 1960s, it grew in both popularity and diversity as a territory for queer group. In the ’60s, new rules made clothing optional.
Today, a technicolored patchwork of towels blankets the sand for miles as beachgoers shift Jacob Riis into a place to gather, be seen, dance and guzzle. To get a sense of how the beach was coming alive this season, I spent Memorial Day walking along the boardwalk—toward the sounds of reggaeton and dembow and the smells of salt and suntan lotion—to survey the drinking scene at “the homosexual beach of Modern York.” Here’
The uncertain future of a historic LGBTQ+ safe space: New York City's People's Beach
The summer season in New York Municipality is informally marked each year by the hoisting of Movement flags on The People's Beach, a queer haven tucked away on the far eastern corner of the city's Jacob Riis Park in Queens.
"When I was a runaway, when I had no community at all, I came and I witnessed something that I never even knew existed: that was a meaning of family," said Ceyenne Doroshow, activist and founder of LGBTQ advocacy group GLITS. "People fed me, people dressed me."
This has been a popular gathering place for the LGBTQ+ community since the 1940s, shaped by its beachgoers into more than just a spot to sunbathe and swim. It's a place of direct and indirect social campaign, where queer joy is at the heart of the jumble of music, umbrella and bodies packed tightly along the shoreline each weekend.
But the land directly surrounding the beach is drastically and quickly changing. The recent demolition of an abandoned building, a $50 million building restoration plan and erosion threaten the future of this safe haven, some activists and beachgoers told ABC