Plenty of Pride to Go Around on the Upper West Side

By Yvonne Vávra

Strolling along Central Park West the other day, I overheard two men in their twenties marveling at the big, proud Pride flag at the entrance of the Universalist Society on the corner of West 76th Street.

“That’s just so cool,” one said. “Yay you, Church!”

I don’t know where they were from. Somewhere smaller than New York, I figure. Wherever it was, it was clearly the first time they’d seen a church so openly and prominently welcome the LGBTQ+ community with a Pride flag.

How quickly we take change for granted once it’s happened. Their reaction was one of genuine surprise and joy, while I usually walk past that flag — just one of many now flying outside congregations across the Upper West Side — like it’s always been there. But the young men were right: it is pretty miraculous. Yeah—yay you, Church!

The Upper West Side has long been home to queer lives that left an enduring legacy with their bright minds, artistic brilliance, and unapologetic passion. Rock Hudson had an apartment at the Beresford, and so did lyricist Lorenz Hart and anthropologist Margaret Mead. Composer Aaron Copland lived at the Hotel Empire, and long before he made history in San Francisco, Harvey Milk called the corner of Central Park West and 96th Street home.

Leonard Bernstein, Judy Holliday, Charles Henri Ford, and playwright William Inge all lived at the Dakota, while Mart Crowley, author of The Boys in the Band, was reportedly denied by the co-op board for being gay. Ironically, the very construction of the Dakota was completed by Alfred Corning Clark, who balanced family life with four children and his love for a Norwegian tenor.

So many Upper West Siders lived loudly in their work, but had to stay quiet about parts of themselves that weren’t safe to share. But this neighborhood was also home to bold voices who challenged the rules about who was allowed to be themselves and who wasn’t. Some spoke out long before the Stonewall Uprising sparked a global movement.

One of them was Tony Segura — a Cuban immigrant living at 23 Riverside Drive near 74th Street, who in 1955 co-founded the New York Area Council of the Mattachine Society, one of the country’s earliest gay rights organizations. Segura had been active in New York’s underground gay rights scene but wanted to fight in an open group to improve the lives of gay people. In the spring of 1958, he made New York TV history, appearing on air as the first openly gay man — granted, under a different name and wearing a hood, for safety reasons.

When Segura left the Upper West Side in 1959, he left behind a foundation for the next generation of activists to build on. A decade later, Stonewall changed everything, and in 1970, more than 10,000 people gathered in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow at the end of the first Gay Pride March, celebrating who they were — out, loud, and proud.

But further uptown, composer Wendy Carlos, who lived at 133 W 87th Street, was still hiding her true self. She won three Grammys that year and would go on to compose the score for Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, all while undergoing hormone replacement treatment. In rare appearances, she hid behind fake sideburns, penciled-on stubble, and a wig. She would later describe those years as a “charade” and “a monstrous waste of years of my life.” In 1979, in an interview with Playboy magazine, she finally broke free and came out publicly as transgender.

Another woman, Joan Nestle, lived just a few blocks north of Carlos, at 215 W 92nd Street. There, around a French peasant dining table in apartment 13A, she met regularly with a growing group of women to build the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which she had co-founded in 1974. On a mission to save lesbian history from disappearing, they collected records of lesbian lives and built a community that’s still thriving  — just now from its Brooklyn home, where it’s been since 1992.

By the 1980s, that grassroots spirit took on new urgency. When the AIDS crisis hit and the government remained silent, the gay community didn’t. On a Saturday in May 1986, thousands gathered in Damrosch Park at Lincoln Center for the first AIDS Walk New York, organized by then-26-year-old Craig R. Miller. “We all know that for years the Reagan-Bush administration has been very, very slow in responding to this problem,” he said in an interview. “So the burden really has been largely on the gay community to take it upon ourselves to educate the public about AIDS prevention and to raise the funds needed to care for people with AIDS.”

The AIDS Walk New York would grow into the world’s largest HIV/AIDS fundraising event, and it all started with a walk through the Upper West Side — to help one another.

The Pride flags on churches and across the neighborhood are here because people marched, spoke out, risked, and refused to disappear. So yes — yay you, Church. And yay you, Tony Segura. Yay you, Wendy Carlos. Yay you, Joan Nestle. And yay you, every Upper West Sider pushing for change where change is due.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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