Lavender Line Opening Reception

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Lavender Line Opening Reception

By LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY and NYC Council Member Daniel Dromm

Date and time

Friday, June 9, 2017 · 6 - 8pm EDT

Location

Queens Museum

New York City Building Flushing Meadows Corona Park Corona, Queens, NY 11368

Description

Please join us to celebrate the opening of the exhibit The Lavender Line: Coming Out in Queens in the Panorama Room of the Queens Museum!

There will be refreshments, brief remarks, and a small gift for the first 150 attendees!

To mark the 25th anniversary of the Queens Pride Parade in June, the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY will present The Lavender Line: Coming Out in Queens at the Queens Museum, a multimedia exhibition of the Queens LGBTQ community from the 1990s to the present. Curated by LaGuardia Community College/CUNY faculty Thierry Gourjon and Javier Larenas and LaGuardia’s Gardiner-Shenker Student Scholars, the exhibition uses photographs, flyers, video footage, and audio recollections to illuminate the pride and protests of a community unknown to most New Yorkers.

The Lavender Line: Coming Out in Queens illustrates the evolution of the Queens Pride Parade from a community event in 1993, with some 1,000 marchers and thousands of spectators, to a festival that attracts crowds of more than 40,000 and gains the support of major politicians and corporate sponsors. The parade, a reflection of the ethnic diversity of Queens, remains an opportunity to come out and celebrate amid cheering neighbors, festive music, and colorful floats.

The contemporary photographs in the exhibit, by LaGuardia’s Gardiner-Shenker Student Scholars, chronicle a range of Queens LGBTQ social organizations and cultural institutions. These include centers that offer social and counseling services as well as bars that function as leisure and entertainment spaces.

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, LaGuardia Community College/CUNY and the New York City Council, through the office of Daniel Dromm.

Organized by

The LaGuardia and Wagner Archives was established in 1982 to collect, preserve, and make available primary materials documenting the social and political history of New York City. The Archives serves a broad array of researchers: journalists, students, scholars, exhibit planners and policy makers examining the history of Greater New York. The Archives also produces public programs exploring that history.

Located at Fiorello H. LaGuardia Community College/CUNY in Long Island City, Queens, the Archives holds the personal papers and official documents (on microfilm) of Mayors Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Robert F. Wagner, Abraham D. Beame and Edward I. Koch, the records of the New York City Housing Authority, the piano maker Steinway & Sons, The Council of the City of New York and a Queens Local History Collection.

In 2016, Council Member Danny Dromm donated his papers to the archives, which has inspired this exhibit. 

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