To research the book, Gieseking interviewed dozens of queer women and trans people who came out between 19. Queer New York establishments and events from 1983 to 2008. Yet it’s just one of the many unexpected spaces that Gieseking includes in A Queer New York, a book and collection of interactive digital maps that chart 25 years of New York City’s lesbian, transgender, and gender nonbinary social spaces. While the co-op is known for its leftist politics and neighborly infighting, it’s not explicitly lesbian.
“Amusingly, participants frequently preferred to gossip about goings on at the Park Slope Food Co-op rather than bars,” writes Gieseking, who himself joined the co-op in the 2000s hoping to meet someone. But if the queer women and transgender and nonbinary people in Gieseking’s focus groups really wanted to catch up on the latest gossip, there was only one place to go: the Park Slope Food Co-op, a collectively owned and operated grocery store in Brooklyn. Sure, participants had fond memories of dancing and flirting at historically lesbian bars. When Jen Jack Gieseking started researching his book on queer nightlife in New York, he learned that one of the city’s hottest lesbian watering holes was not a bar at all.
