Blog

This week Oscar Wilde Tours is announcing its 2015 season, including the first ever gay history tours of New York City.  Who’d have thought?  Until just a few months ago, I was planning to start a series of gay history tours of London and Paris this year.  But people kept asking, When are you going to do New York? So after a while, I thought, Well, New York certainly has...Read More

In the last few weeks, I’ve been planning a gay history tour of New York for the spring for Oscar Wilde Tours. New York is truly one of the great gay cities, along with London, Paris, Berlin, Florence, or Athens. Ever since the days before the Civil War, when Walt Whitman hung out with his Bohemian friends at Pfaff’s Beer Cellar at Broadway and Bleecker, it has been a major...Read More

Here is a video (thanks, Rob!) of a section of my lecture “From Edward II to Sir Ian McKellen” on gay history at the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, filmed at BGSQD on November 21, 2014.  Question:  can we call Shakespeare ‘gay’?Read More

Here is an interesting article about gay history in Tangier.  Oscar Wilde Tours would love to organize a tour to southern Spain and Morocco in 2017.  Southern Spain has a fascinatingly complex history, including a lot of gay history.  Rome’s gayest emperor, Hadrian (whose male lover Antinous appears in museums in New York, London, Paris, Rome, Delphi, etc.) was from a city called Italica, the ruins of which are near modern...Read More

Just spotted this review of a fascinating new book about Walt Whitman and gay sociability in late 19th century New York.  This is very timely for us, because Oscar Wilde Tours is planning a gay history tour of New York, to start hopefully in the spring.  New York is of course one of the richest gay history sites in the world, but there isn’t much information available about the topic: ...Read More