30 L.G.B.T.Q. Artists Look Back on the Pleasures and Pain of Being 30

What’s it like to be 30 and queer and an artist? To try to put something meaningful into the world while simultaneously figuring out who you are? For many, it’s a pivotal year — a time when you start to know yourself with greater clarity and to understand what you want and how you want to pursue it. But beyond that, there are as many answers as there are people to ask. So, this Pride Month, T asked 30 Americans to look back on that age, and the responses constitute both a chronology and a group portrait. This collection of memories — snapshots of a year in many lives — also serves as a multivalent gay history from almost a decade before Stonewall to the day before yesterday. Our oldest participant, the novelist and cultural outlaw John Rechy, turned 30 in 1961, before “gay pride” was a phrase, a concept or much of a possibility; our youngest, the nonbinary poet and performer Danez Smith, reached that threshold toward the end of the Trump administration. The years they bookend encompass the story of a movement, an identity, a people, a force — and a culture that grew from forbidden, banned and encoded to ubiquitous, contentious and constantly evolving.

When I was on the national tour of [William F. Brown’s] “The Wiz” [playing the title role], this gentleman approached me after the San Francisco show. He said he was on assignment for Planned Parenthood: They were looking for someone to portray a pregnant man in an ad. I was hot, I was out — I was born out, I don’t have a coming-out story — and he wanted to photograph me. The idea was that men might be more responsible if they had to carry babies. I thought it was a smart idea: “Men, it’s called a condom.”

I thought of my nephews back in Baltimore who just wanted to have a good time; sometimes, the result of a good time is a new life. My youngest sister had a child at 14, so I wanted to help.

We stuffed a sleeping gown with rags, and the photographer taped it so it looked like a burden in the abdomen. I touched it there, how women do. Later, in 2017, I did an Off Broadway play, [Robert O’Hara’s] “Mankind,” about a time in the future when there are no women and men evolved to have children. When we were rehearsing it, I said, “You know, some years ago I did this thing …” and they put the poster in the Playwrights Horizons lobby.

I have a formula when it comes to performing: I had it in “The Wiz,” and I had it in [Anaïs Mitchell’s] “Hadestown” [on Broadway, where De Shields originated the role of Hermes in 2019]. What I bring is my queerness. If you’re not willing to show that part of yourself, you’re missing the target. It’s that quality that scares everybody, that makes people go “Oh!” Bring that to a character? It changes everything. — Max Berlinger

I thought I knew so much and I knew nothing. I had a 29-and-a-half party at the Odeon [restaurant in New York’s TriBeCa] because I was scared to have a 30th birthday. There was this feeling of “Am I ever going to get married and have kids like everybody else?”

I really had no idea [about being attracted to women]. But it’s not like I was hiding it. When I look back, there could’ve been signs. I came to New York City because of [the American photographer and illustrator] Antonio Lopez’s 1982 book, “Antonio’s Girls.” Flipping through, you see him admiring the beauty of Grace Jones, Tina Chow and Marisa Berenson. These women weren’t the kinds of beauties that I saw in magazines. They were interesting for their personality and their style. He made me want something other than my sun-bleached, “Baywatch” California upbringing. (I did, however — and still do — adore Pam Anderson.)

I think if I’d been exposed to [more gay women], it would’ve been different for me. I had no visible references, and certainly no one that looked like me. When I started dating a woman for the first time, at 43, it’s hard to say I had some sort of revelation. I think I was just open enough to try. But in the late ’90s, there were such stereotypes about gay women. A lot of them still exist: There is the [male] fantasy of two hot girls or the idea that gay women don’t take care of themselves — that they aren’t attractive, that they look like men. I spent so much time trying to be beautiful in the eyes of men. That’s not the thing I look for anymore. As soon as I stopped, it changed so much for me. — Jason Chen

I got an offer to go to London, and then I toured through Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Berlin, which I liked so much I stayed for two years. It was a boring city unless you knew where to go. But they loved trans people there. A girl could go and try out her footwork — how to act, her attitude. It was a good training ground. Drag shows and trans shows weren’t a big deal, like in America, where everyone would freak out about them. In Berlin, it was just another form of entertainment.

I had this successful tour where the Police and Billy Idol opened for [her band Wayne County & the Electric Chairs]. It gave me confidence in myself, the fact that people were willing to accept an angry old trans person — we used the word “transsexual” back then — fronting a rock ’n’ roll band. I transitioned in front of my audiences.

I think I opened people’s minds. I believed in what I was doing and my messages: about gender, about what’s gay and straight, the [categories] that are made up [so we can be] comfortable. We overflow those labels. — M.B.

I came to dance late, [after being] an athlete in upstate New York. But I discovered modern dance and had to educate myself about what that was around the time I was falling in love with this man, Arnie Zane, whom I met in my first year at university. He and I were excited about art. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were our patron saints. By 1982, we’d gotten some attention as a [sexually provocative] duet who’d done something no one had done before: a Black man like me, a Jewish-Italian man like Arnie, standing in front of the world and saying, “We are a company.”

Suddenly, Arnie decided that he didn’t “live to dance.” He was an artist first — a photographer, a painter. But “Bill and Arnie” was our primary identity, and while we tried to go do our own things, we [would always] come back together. I’m glad we did, because he had the first bumps on his arm that turned out to be [AIDS-related] lymphoma in 1986, and he died in ’88. I think us coming back together was the triumph of our love that overcame the ego involved in having independent careers.

Right now, I’m sitting in the very room [in Rockland County] that he died in. I’m in this house because he and I bought it together. New York City was where you lost your soul, and we wanted to be closer to the earth. We still had to negotiate the world surreptitiously. We said we were art partners, but we were also partners in life. We knew we were fiercely committed to each other, but there was no gay marriage and we didn’t want to be in a gay ghetto. I learned early on that my strength was in him. Where did that come from? Art! That’s it. We weren’t religious, but we had a church we could be members of. And it was a church of two. — Juan A. Ramírez

My friend, the performer and artist West Dakota, was organizing the first Brooklyn Liberation March [to protest police violence against Black trans people] in June and united a huge group to help — my role was to source and create Black Trans Lives Matter shirts. I still see those everywhere.

I made a lot of new friends through the action. I’d understood community as a concept but had never known how it felt before, and that understanding changed how I moved through the world. Until then, I hadn’t been public about my gender. This group gave me the self-assuredness to know that what I was feeling was real. It wasn’t a delusion: I had to make that jump [to transition], which at the time seemed huge. It felt like life or death, but now it feels almost negligible.

The focus of the next Brooklyn Liberation March was “Protect Trans Youth,” and I remember feeling [many] emotions that day: I cried hearing young and old trans people speak. I felt accepting of the childhood I didn’t have. I felt angry that there were so many kids still not being heard. What became apparent was the frustrating reality that the work never ends, which felt like an adult realization; when you’re younger, you think you can shape the world into something of your own creation.

I wore my beloved Zabar’s T-shirt, which I’d had since 2012, and printed “Protect Trans Youth” on top. That’s always been part of my design process — to topically apply images on top of existing clothing. The march went from the Brooklyn Museum to Fort Greene Park. I live [nearby], so I went home and fashioned my T-shirt into a halter. I scooped out the back, tied the neck and returned to the park, where my friends were waiting. It felt like a bridging of selves and timelines — like being fully alive. — Colleen Hamilton

The two years before I turned 30 were seismic. I came out to my parents, I was performing as Song Liling in [David Henry Hwang’s] “M. Butterfly” on Broadway, and in 1990 I moved into an apartment with my then-partner Richie [Jackson]. I started living more out in the open — even with the fear that it could ruin my career. Richie had this energy for political activism, and I was enamored of his leadership. He wasn’t just complaining, but taking action. We were in this terribly despairing state of loss from AIDS, but there was something very special happening in the theater community, which was openhearted and fearless.

Those were the early days of what would become [the nonprofit organization fund-raising for AIDS-related causes] Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in 1992, which turned into the heartbeat of the whole movement on Broadway. Musicians, dancers, hairdressers, makeup and wardrobe artists — we all took the situation into our own hands. From the beginning, I rarely said no to any invitations to perform at Broadway Cares concert benefits. It was an opportunity for me to be creative and silly. I wasn’t really a musical performer but I had a musical background, and so my best friend [the composer] Wayne Barker would make up new arrangements or medleys that I’d sing to. And these were absolutely not galas — they were scrappy, artistic pursuits by anybody who felt that they had something to share. The vibe was very humble.

No one in the government was going to lift a finger, and homophobia was all around us, so you had to do it. Even today, you can’t just think, “We’ve done it now.” We have to remind ourselves that nothing is guaranteed. — John Wogan

When I came back [to New York from Rome] in July of 1970, my college lover met me at the airport, popped some acid in my mouth and took me on a tour of the city until the wee hours of the morning. There were now all these discos with back rooms and go-go boys. In the ’60s, a bar would open and the same night it would be raided — I was astonished by how everything had changed.

Before long, I got a horrible one-room walk-up for $100 a month on Horatio Street, not far from the Trucks [an area under the West Side Highway, where all the big-rig trucks would park, and where gay men would cruise], which was my main interest: lots of little beasts running around. I was very cute — I had muscles — but to make myself stay in and write, I would hire hustlers [instead]. I had a “madam” whom I’d call and say, “I want a six-foot blond top to come at three in the morning,” so that would keep me home. Of course, the most exciting thing was hearing his footsteps coming up the stairs: Fantasy is always more exciting than reality.

I’d also go down to the Trucks and bring back four, five, six boys for little orgies. In the ’70s, you could still walk around the Village and run into people you knew, by face if not by name. There was a kind of electricity about meeting someone on Christopher and Bleecker and talking about the play they were in or whatever they were working on. But I’m 84 now and don’t have a grasp on that anymore. As you get older, fewer people are interested in you.

People always say, “It must have been so great to be gay in the ’70s,” and I say, “Yeah, if you wanted to be an alcoholic and end up committing suicide.” You’d be having a party and we’d all be having a hoot (as we said then), and at a certain point in the evening, no matter how much fun we were having, a silence would fall over the crowd and you’d look around and say, “Gosh, we’re so sick.” We were all going to psychiatrists trying slowly to go straight. Eventually, I ended up with a gay shrink. — Michael Snyder

I went to Copenhagen to visit a friend who’d recently received a Fulbright, and she introduced me to one of her friends there — a small, unbelievably beautiful Danish artist named Kirsten. I was smitten. She finagled a grant to come to New York, where we cut quite a figure together. I always wore high heels, which made me about six-foot-four, and massive amounts of jewelry and hats. (The most common question I got was “Are you a man or a woman?”) Kirsten was shorter than me and had this impeccable sartorial sense. When we were together, there was no waiting in line at Studio 54 or the Mudd Club.

There wasn’t a term for “performance art” at the time, so one of my teachers came up with the idea that I could use my costumes as illustrations. That’s how I ended up in Ms. magazine. I wore an eight-and-a-half-foot-tall Statue of Liberty costume to the Easter Parade in New York City, and Kirsten came along with me. It was a hit.

I don’t think she’d had a female lover before, and things ended in a stupid way, which I know she regrets. But I also got married that year to my dear friend Chichi. He was on a visa [from Peru] and wanted to stay in New York because he was a fashion designer, but he couldn’t find anyone to marry him, despite the fact that he was offering money. I said, “Well, I don’t want you to leave.” I dressed up in a Victorian dress with embroidery all over it: I honestly didn’t think the [city] officiant would believe us because Chichi was so blatantly gay. I told him I would meet him at the courthouse down the street, but he insisted on picking me up. I heard the horn honking and there he was, lying on top of a long white limousine. We stayed married for eight years so that I could get health insurance. Now we’re both gay divorcés. — C.H.

My mom had me when she was 19, and I always looked at things from that perspective. As I approached 30, there were things I couldn’t believe I was still struggling with — being avoidant; having these fear-based, childlike reactions. A trans friend of mine had worked at New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center and thought I’d be great for a position. I started working with young people there, sharing things I was picking up.

When I was in college, I took classes in mass communication, the Black experience and U.S. history; I saw how tools of mass communication have been used to put forward narratives and contribute to beliefs about ourselves. So, at the Center, we’d make our own films and have movie nights. We thought about how the community organized, and used performance [to discuss] activism. We did an H.I.V.-prevention/harm-reduction program, and I would tie filmmaking components into it.

[When I was] growing up, the media representation of anybody who was trans was all for spectacle: cross-dressing, people pretending to be the opposite sex, men in dresses. There were never real people who lived their lives as who they felt they were. It wasn’t a realistic concept. But I started looking things up and found [the trans activist] Jamison Green’s book, “Becoming a Visible Man” (2004). For once, I was able to read a whole story and just discover this regular dude. Before I started to think about acting, I was like, “First, let me just focus on becoming myself.”

I worked at the center from 2010 to 2013. I turned 30 that January and left in May. I’d been having conversations with young people about following your path and about how, no matter if you’ve never seen anybody doing what you want to do, you can be the first. I realized I hadn’t been doing that for myself, which was to act, perform, create movies and be on TV. I wanted to show up for the kids, but I also wanted to show up for myself, so I took what I was learning from them and put it into my work as an artist. — J.A.R.

My partner at the time, a musician named Don Yowell, began showing signs of immunosuppression in 1981, but people didn’t fully understand what AIDS meant or where it was heading. Before he died in 1984, he lived on North Moore Street, across from “Art on the Beach” — a Creative Time project that transformed a landfill into sandy, rolling dunes in the middle of New York City — so we used to sunbathe there. TriBeCa was being built: A grocery store had just opened and there was a dry cleaner, a video store, maybe two restaurants. Don lived in a two-bedroom with western exposure that cost around $325. While he played the piano, I would look out the windows at the planes circling around New York as the sun was going down and the [old] Maxwell House Coffee sign [across the river in Hoboken, N.J.] was lighting up. It was a very luxurious way to live for people who were impecunious. We would go on all-night walks as entertainment. Lower Manhattan was remote and underdeveloped and the streets were empty. You could fill them with conversations.

There was tremendous interest in those blank spaces as [places] for art. Don had heard about [Agnes Denes’s] “Wheatfield — a Confrontation” (1982), in which the artist planted and harvested almost a 1,000 pounds of wheat [in downtown Manhattan], so we walked down the West Side Highway to see it on the Battery Park landfill. The first time [we went], it had just been tilled. The next time, there might have been sprouts. I went to the Museum School in Boston during the height of the land art and earth art movements in the 1970s, so I understood exactly what the gesture was about: a vast urban landscape of possibility.

If you think of wheat growing in Lower Manhattan as a parallel to being deeply in love, it’s a story about becoming myself as a queer person. I always refer to Don as the first person who loved me back. I had never stayed up all night, every night, talking endlessly about the world and ideas. Other people came to love much earlier; I did when I was 30. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it before then. — C.H.

I’d just gotten out of a long-term relationship and into a new one and, in the midst of all that, was trying to figure out my next step creatively. I was D.J.’ing with Johanna Fateman from [the electroclash group] Le Tigre and starting this new music project that would become [the band] MEN with a bunch of old friends, including [the musician] Michael O’Neill. We were all sharing ideas, a lot of which happened in my railroad apartment on Maujer Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We worked on music all day, every day, and we ordered a lot of food, often the Ranchero pizza from Vinnie’s on Bedford Avenue. It was chicken, bacon and ranch — the thought of it now disgusts me, but at the time it was legendary. We’d eat the pizza in this closet I’d turned into a studio. The Ranchero became this inside joke for us: “We eat the Ranchero pizza. We are different. We are queer.” We ended up using “Ranchero” as a holding title for our song “If You Want Something” (2011), which is one of my favorites, partly because it defies a normal pop structure. There are little moments of spiciness and different flavors, a melding of concepts.

That record felt really queer and sex-positive. It was a great — I would say pervy — era in my friend group and, in terms of visibility and joy, that felt political. Obama won the presidency, and we celebrated a lot, but I think we also felt that wasn’t the end of our woes. Every song is about the collective; I don’t think I say “I” once. It was this egoless moment: There was so much work to be done as a community, and we were always talking about the radical potential of dance music. I cherish those memories of writing when we had time for one another and were creating without hesitation, unconcerned with the response. That might’ve been the last time that happened for me. — Kate Guadagnino

Before winning “Top Chef” [in 2013], I was living my life in a bubble, but everything shifted after that show. I started my first relationship [with a woman] and came out, left my job working at Menton restaurant in Boston, and I was approached to do [the travel and food program] “36 Hours” [based on the New York Times column].

It was a crazy time in my life, trying to figure out who I was. I was also beginning to understand the responsibility I had. I’m an adoptee, an Asian American and part of a [culinary] industry that isn’t always friendly to queerness. The greatest thing that happened after “36 Hours,” though, is that people helped me feel part of my communities — privately, publicly, stopping me in person, through social media. I didn’t have to preach, because simply being out resonated with people and helped them feel seen.

Before that, it was hard to feel like I belonged. As much as I saw queer women on television (the Ellens, the Rosies), I most remember watching a random commercial that showed a [same-sex] couple. I don’t even recall what the commercial was for, but that was more impactful because I hadn’t seen anyone like me — a regular person in a queer relationship — yet. I was terrified of my own queerness, because no one teaches you. — J.W.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been at the Pride Parade, but it was the first time I’d been in the parade. We were really sequestered when we were making [Tony Kushner’s] “Angels in America” (1993) [in which he played one of the leads, Louis Ironson], just focused on getting the [Broadway] production in shape. We opened that May, so it was one of the first times I remember going out into the community and experiencing their appreciation. We all knew that we were involved in something that was a turning point for gay plays but there was no social media, so the way you would feel that was by actual personal interaction. We had this incredible float with a big “A” with a wing on it that Milton Glaser designed for the show’s branding. I seem to remember [most] of the cast was on it, as well as some of my friends. It would’ve been a Sunday, right? So my guess is we did it before our matinee.

When I first moved to New York, in ’84, I was a buddy at G.M.H.C. [formerly Gay Men’s Health Crisis]. You’d be assigned a different person and could do anything: just visit them, run errands for them, go [see] them at the hospital. I was terrified, as a sexually active young man, of the invisible, silent killer, but the way that I dealt with it was by going toward it. In some way, that calmed my anxiety.

To be an out gay actor at that time was a rarity. It’s strange to think of now because, 30-some years later, he’s married [to a man] and has a [teenage] daughter, but David [Marshall Grant, who played Joe Pitt, a closeted Mormon lawyer] wasn’t out at the time, and I remember him being terrified that [being open would] end his career. For me, it was never a question, but I wasn’t risking the same thing: I wasn’t a young leading man in the way that he was. It was also never a question for Stephen Spinella [who played Prior Walter, another lead]. I remember at the Tony Awards, when Stephen accepted his award, he thanked “the husband of his heart” — this man who was his lover. It was the first time I’d ever heard a gay man use that term. I remember really distinctly that word — “husband” — seeming so foreign to me. — J.A.R.

I was living in Houston after [Hurricane] Katrina when I got a call from a promoter who wanted to start a music night back in New Orleans [where Big Freedia was born and raised], at the Club Caesar’s. Nothing was really open, so people were in the club, with their [emergency-assistance] money, their Red Cross money, popping bottles wearing their fresh tennis shoes. We called it FEMA Fridays. The city was a ghost town. It was pitch-black and still smelled like Katrina — spoiled meat. It was time to bring joy back.

On that first Friday, I’d say the club was half-filled, but the next one we were packed wall-to-wall, and there was a line down the block. I remember I had to squeeze through to get from the front door to the stage.

Bounce music is a heavy bass, call-and-response style of hip-hop that originated in New Orleans in the 1980s. It’s party music. When I was on the microphone, it was like I had an auditorium of choir members, and everyone was repeating after the pastor. Bounce had been spreading because we as performers were displaced by Katrina. But it was [also] the perfect way to rebuild the city and recruit people to New Orleans. I could be on the mic in Houston or Atlanta and say to [the audience], “It’s time to come home.” — M.B.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in Los Angeles. I worked as a script reader, a production assistant, an actor every now and then. A job opportunity presented itself in the form of a Motrin IB commercial, in which I’d play a long-distance runner. That was so true to my life because I was a swimmer through college, and then running was part of my L.A. life.

The job let me pay my rent and figure things out for a bit longer. [Staying in the city] also allowed me to meet people who really opened my eyes — friends like [the interior designer] Paul Fortune and [the fashion designer] Michèle Lamy — and showed me the importance of creating my own life. That led me back to New York, where I began playing with tailoring and experimenting with vintage clothing.

That time in L.A. was when I became true to myself about [being] gay, too. I remember my sister visited me and asked if I had something to tell her, and when I asked if it would be a problem if I did, she said, “No, of course it wouldn’t be a problem.” As I was pursuing acting, I never really talked about it, but I wasn’t hiding it, either. Maybe I thought being myself was more important than pursuing something that I had to hide myself for.

Looking back, I think that commercial was an awakening to an important decision: What did I really want to do? As poor as I was, it was a special time in my life for what it taught me about doing work that meant something. — J.C.

I moved into Casa de Estrogen [after] I’d broken up with a longtime girlfriend, my first domestic relationship, and I didn’t have any place to go. These lesbian friends of mine lived on Catalina Street, on the edge of Koreatown [in Los Angeles], in a [1920s] building with eight units. A one-bedroom came up, and the rent was only $500 a month. It had a little patio with an avocado tree, so I could have breakfast there. I stayed for 10 years, until I moved to New York to teach [photography] at Yale.

We called the place Casa de Estrogen because it was known for housing famous lesbians within the community. At one point, [the poet] Eileen Myles lived there; [the model and actress] Jenny Shimizu lived above me. Everybody had motorcycles and went out in leather. We’d ride in a line with fake mustaches on, and that wasn’t something you saw in L.A. in 1991. We were fighting for our ability to play with masculinity, with being feminists, with our sexuality — with everything. It felt like freedom.

My [original] studio was my living room. My friends let me photograph them: A lot of work was made there, half of my early portraits. I was so distraught after my breakup, and it’s the reason I made “Self-Portrait/Cutting” (1993) on my back, in my Casa de Estrogen apartment. Everybody knew that I was really, really broken. And so my friends took care of me. This [kind of] community felt unprecedented to me, and I’ve never been able to have it back. That might be unique to turning 30 — that moment when you’re really trying to be a grown-up, you know? — Nicole Acheampong

I’m on a keto diet, I’m feeling cute. I was at the Saloon, one of the bigger gay bars here in Minneapolis, and met this cute guy. We’re flirting and he’s like, “My partner is a really big fan of your work.” Womp womp. But what gay relationship isn’t open nowadays, so he invites me over. We have a couple of threesomes, and I get this nice little couple to attach to. One day, the partner hits me up on Grindr and shows up to my place alone. This should’ve been my first red flag. They’d been fighting and the next day broke up. I felt like I was a tool used in the breakup, but the partner who came over and I ended up falling into a relationship. We dated in this weird, noncommittal-but-committed, polyamorous-but-way-too-monogamous situation. [After the Covid-19] lockdown happened, I broke up with them, and that’s the end of that chapter. We don’t keep up.

Early next year, I have the most basic of Grindr hookups and, after, we start talking about our exes. We’re telling these stories and things are matching up. I think I was the one who slipped and said their name: We realized our ex is the same person — though we didn’t overlap — and then became a misery support group.

Keep in mind, this whole time the ex is married [to another guy]. So this is all just gay people zigzagging across immigrant statuses: Who’s married for love, or for sex … which is real? That’s the real messiness of queer life; of trying to survive, or be intimate, with somebody in America. What happens when two people don’t love each other anymore, but one’s status is dependent upon the other one’s citizenship? We perform these choreographies that are so complicated, just trying to be gay here.

It’s great to know that your partner hates the same things, but then we had to make rules to stop circling conversations back to the ex. We were trying to parse out whether we actually liked each other or were just wounded in the same way. We’ve been together for three and a half years, married since last August. It was messy, but also indicative of what it means to be a Midwest gay: You’re always two or three degrees of separation. — J.A.R.

New York was one of the places that developed house music, and we could feel that we were in the middle of something — the coolest songs, the coolest producers. We’d walk in the club, throw our coats down and dance until we met someone or the place closed. In those days, there were enough people who wanted to go out and hang out to keep the lights on at places like Palladium and the Pyramid Club in the East Village, where I D.J.-ed.

The group Masters at Work put out “I Can’t Get No Sleep,” featuring the singer India, six months after my 30th birthday. It has those house chords we craved, but it also has different mood swings before going into overdrive at the end. We’d hear it every night, if not twice a night. We’d lip-sync every word. Masters at Work became the soundtrack to my entire 30s.

Half a year after the song was released, Little Louie Vega, who’s one half of Masters at Work, and India performed it at Wigstock, the drag music festival I’d cocreated in the mid-80s. Seeing them arrive, I couldn’t believe it. Tens of thousands came to Tompkins Square Park for the festival that year but, still, they left me star-struck. At the time, ACT UP was demanding better drugs for AIDS patients, and while I didn’t become a politically minded person for another 10 years, it was such a dark time that I felt [Wigstock] could lighten everyone’s load. You have to make demands, but you also need a day to remind yourself of what you’re fighting for, of great dance music and silly things and the way it feels to sashay over to the park with a wig on. — K.G.

I was just out of a three-year relationship with a year-and-a-half of breakup sex; I’d exited my M.F.A. fiction program in Iowa and moved back to New York and was, I think, learning how to just be somewhere. I wanted to write, make money, have sex with interesting people and meet up with friends — if I ran into them. I didn’t want to make plans. I found a column I wrote around this time for Out magazine in which I was like, “I’m trying this thing called dating,” and, in retrospect, I’m like, “You. Were. Not.” I do admit to enjoying a night out at a bar and meeting someone and going home with him. This, I would learn later, is an ancient tradition of our people.

I had a few longstanding relationships of the casual kind, and I even have the books that marked their end. The first — I remember he had a kind face — gave me a first edition of Marguerite Duras’s “The Lover” (1984), but in French. [J.D. Salinger’s] “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction” (1963) came from a man who had a serious partner at home (they had an open relationship). And while I didn’t have a rule that if someone gave me a [book], I had to end the relationship, the presents were a red flag. I’d wanted nothing from these men except friendly, irregular sex. The thing about a gift is that it’s an expression of intimacy. It feels threatening.

I remember that I briefly dated someone in 1995 who told me, when he ended things, that he couldn’t work on a novel and have a boyfriend. I thought it was so stupid, and yet I was very aware when I turned 30 that I hadn’t finished a novel, so it seems I copied him, in my way, because I didn’t have a boyfriend, really, until I had a first draft [of 2001’s “Edinburgh”] in 1999. That boyfriend worked in publishing, so he gave me lots of books … though not until after we broke up. — M.S.

It was a transitional year — I’d just moved back to Boston from Atlanta — and it started with getting right with my family. A big rift had formed between my grandmother and me after my mother died in 1998, but I’d had time to process and felt I needed to reconnect with who I was in order to move forward. I’d also been out for five years at that point, so I was more assured of myself and understood what type of gay person I wanted to be: Making amends with my grandmother was especially important. Being courageous in that way led me to the stage.

I’d always wanted to do stand-up, but I hadn’t pursued it seriously. When I got to Boston, I was working in a mailroom. I was feeling like a loser and I told myself, “Yo, you’re about to be 30, bro. Either you’re going to submit to this life in the background, or you’re going to stop being scared and go for it.” I knew that if I didn’t get onstage, I would regret it forever.

In Boston, Comedy Studio was the place to get in, and in December of that year, I got my shot. The club was in the attic of a Chinese restaurant, so it had low ceilings and was really intimate. It probably sat 120 people, and the laughs bounced right back to you. I did really well my first night, so I got to keep getting up there and grew my name around the city.

I don’t think I killed because the material was particularly brilliant. My first jokes were about the Ninja Turtles. But I was so ready. It was about stepping into my whole self and being authentic, and I still live and die by those principles. — K.G.

I left California, moved to New York City and started my own brand. I bought a one-way ticket and had no plan, just hopped on a plane and never looked back.

I was this kid from Huntington Beach whose life changed almost overnight. At 30, I felt both old and young. Old because I entered adulthood by starting a business, so I had all the responsibilities that came with that. At the same time, it felt like coming out again because I was in the greatest city in the world, restarting my life as a queer man, living in Chelsea and going out to clubs like Splash and the Web and all the Ladyfag parties.

I finished my first collection in the span of a few months, which included this black coat, made of Italian wool felt trimmed with nubuck leather. It’s a symbol of what I wanted 3.1 Phillip Lim to be: the idea that you can have the best, most covetable pieces while still being able to pay the rent. [The name references his age when the line officially debuted in 2004.]

This coat wound up hanging in the window at Barneys on Madison Avenue. I remember it was dusk when they told me about it, and I left work alone to [head over and] give myself a moment. It was an unreal experience, seeing my name and my clothing taking over the windows of the world’s most revered fashion epicenter. I had never seen an [Asian] surname in such a context before. — J.W.

I first went to [New York’s] Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which provides legal support for low-income trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, around 2006, to get my name changed. I thought it was amazing, so I started working there and got involved with the campaign to end the ban on Medicaid [exclusions] for trans people in New York State in 2013. This was when the rate of violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people was really high: Leaving your home and meeting up felt like world-making.

On a sunny day in 2013, a bunch of us went to my friend’s place in Bed-Stuy and painted “NY NEEDS #transhealthcarenow” on a banner. We’d made signs before, but this time we used fabric instead of paper, which made it feel more material. We took the sign to Trans Day of Remembrance, and we brought it onstage at a tech health conference [in Manhattan], where I interrupted the New York State health commissioner to speak.

I was so nervous, but people in the audience yelled in support. The next year, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project filed a lawsuit that helped repeal the ban. Given how contentious health care is in many places, it’s beautiful to be able to point to an instance where we actually changed the policy.

Making the banner was a catalyst for what I do now that I’m an artist and a writer, and it made me part of a lineage. I’m currently writing [the trans activist] Marsha P. Johnson’s biography: She was making banners all the time! — K.G.

My first big starring role in a play was “The Destiny of Me” (1992) by Larry Kramer. “The Normal Heart,” Kramer’s seminal 1985 play, was a howl into the abyss in the face of hatred during the AIDS crisis. This was a sequel about Larry looking back in a way, taking stock through Ned Weeks, who was undergoing therapy [with experimental H.I.V. drug treatments].

This was the first time I was able to express what I felt as a young gay man — Ned was loud and unapologetically excessive when, in reality, I was a minimalist. His rage triggered my own sense of injustice and hurt, since I was coming from a don’t-talk-about-your-feelings kind of place. There was an article [referring to me as a gay man] in The New York Times, and I was only out to my [close] friends and family at that point: When it was published, people said it was the end of my career, but that role and that story were liberating: They helped me to become the person I was.

During my first years as an actor, I got a lot of pressure to be in the closet. That defined my 20s. So “The Destiny of Me” was literally the beginning of my queer writing life. When it was over, I started thinking about making “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” [his musical about a transgender rock singer that debuted Off Broadway in 1998 and became a film in 2001]. Sexuality, in effect, is actually boring. It’s what you do with it that’s interesting. — J.W.

In the years leading up to my [debut solo] show, “A Split During Laughter at the Rally,” at [the New York gallery] Reena Spaulings, trans people were being presented as an analogue of progress, and I felt a bit exhausted by this peak in visibility. The show felt like an opportunity to push back on the commodification of my body.

I didn’t include any figurative representations of myself, except for in this one video where my mouth was articulating a conspiratorial narrative about appropriation in protest and the alt-right trying to control New York nightlife. The show took the premise that conspiracy can be a place of agency. If you look at the history of liberation movements in this country, they all had the mind-set that unless there is evidence to the contrary, there’s probably some sort of harm being organized against you. While that obviously lends itself to a kind of spiral logic, I think there’s something about it that’s very queer, very feminist, very Black.

That show was a big risk, but it opened up space for play and surprise for me. For the opening party, I had them order a bunch of chicken wings and some of my friends D.J.’d and everyone was making out. I hope it opened up space for others, too. Nowadays, at least in New York, I do think there’s more room for nuance and a casualness with which you can just be.

By the time I turned 30, I’d been telling people I was older for years, because I’m not the type to bemoan the loss of my youth. It was pretty easy. I’d had this show, I’d published my first book [“Mucus in My Pineal Gland” (2017)] and it all turned out to be so much more joyful and fun than people said it would be. — K.G.

I lived in a small condo in Silver Lake [Los Angeles] and I’d go back and forth to New York to try and procure work. I wish I could say that I was at the front lines of some big sociopolitical movement, but [2007] just wasn’t that time [for me], and I was dispirited. I’d grown up [in Missouri] on the plays of Tony Kushner, Larry Kramer and Terrence McNally — all these big stories that had such resonance. I wanted to be part of that and didn’t even know how to get my foot in the door. I started to think, “How can I be a more beneficial presence to society?” I even sent out for some applications for graduate school to study psychology because I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll learn how to help people that way.”

I was fortunate to make a living as an actor — I’d done pilots and series — but I was hitting this glass ceiling. I was soul-searching. I visited a swami in the desert. I started taking classes at the [improv school] Groundlings. This group called the Art of Elysium gave me the opportunity to work with kids at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles: I’d do art projects and it was a creative endeavor that took me outside myself.

And then all these things started happening. I met my husband [the Hollywood publicist Simon Halls] and his oldest son (now our oldest son), so that turned my world upside down. And then I got the audition for “White Collar” (2009-2014), which was a dream role, and [everything] changed career-wise. I think that finding love and finding inspiration and finding different paths to creativity helped me to hold my feet to the fire.

I’m so grateful to live in a time when I’m being given the opportunity to play rich, nuanced [gay parts]. That’s become a huge part of what my career is about. You look at [my television roles in] “The Normal Heart” (2014) and “The Boys in the Band” (2020) and “Fellow Travelers” (2024) and it’s about these generations of folks whose shoulders we stand on. I’m so inspired by the younger generation — their lack of shame, their self-acceptance, self-confidence, self-expression. It’s this beautiful lineage, and I’m proud to be part of it. — M.S.

Wildness was a Tuesday-night party that friends and I hosted between 2007 and 2009 at the L.A. bar the Silver Platter, which has long been an important place for queer and trans folks, particularly those from Central and South American immigrant communities. The more I talked to people there, the more I felt there was a story to be told about the bar. So “Wildness” (2012) became my first film, after a four-year editing process.

Initially, I saw the film and the party as separate things, but in the end, both are about entangled relationships formed amid different issues, particularly the gentrification of [L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood]. We were all coming from different social and class backgrounds and trying to make sense of being there together, which wasn’t always easy. At the time, there weren’t so many visible trans stories — if you didn’t want to tell expected stories, the assumption was that you didn’t know how to tell a good story.

“Wildness” premiered at MoMA. I was also in the Whitney Biennial that year. Going to New York felt like this moment of emerging to a wider audience, and then I started to travel a lot. My 20s had been so much about L.A., where, in the early 2000s, there were a ton of queer bars and what seemed to be limitless possibilities for connection. That’s an increasingly fragile thing — there’s currently a campaign to save the Silver Platter from demolition — but, for a time, that was the place where I felt rooted. — K.G.

Before I went to grad school [for writing] at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I had a job working in the communications department at its College of Engineering. It wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but I was writing and editing for a living, and I had a great boss who taught me to take whatever I was doing seriously.

I was in a terrible relationship with a woman who was about a decade older and [also] in academia and well-established: I allowed myself to believe she was somehow better than me. She was super critical — she didn’t like that I swung my arms when I walked, how I washed dishes. There wasn’t a lot of time for romance, because I was always trying to correct the things she found wrong with me. I think it made her feel good to have that much control over someone.

One night, she left her laptop open in bed. I recognize that you’re not supposed to look at other people’s computers, but I asked if I could use it for a second. I was looking something up on Google when she gets a GChat that says, “I wish we were back at the cabin.” I realized that, when she said she’d gone to work on her tenure portfolio, she was also working on this other woman. It was devastating. Worse than the betrayal was losing the hope that I’d found someone who actually wanted to be with me.

Eventually she broke up with me (on Valentine’s Day, via email) and then tried to walk it back. I got home one day and she had left all these beautiful letters throughout my apartment. It was so touching and it made me so angry. Back then, I would’ve taken those scraps and treated them like a feast, but something in my spirit told me, “If you do one thing in your lifetime, say no right now.”

It was the beginning of a version of myself that was less willing to eat shit all the time, and I was able to reflect that in my writing. On the page, I can say exactly what I want exactly how I want: I’m more outspoken than I ever could be in my day-to-day life, much to my wife’s chagrin. — M.S.

I’d just come back from San Francisco, and I was staying at my mother’s in New York’s Alphabet City on Avenue C, sleeping on a cot in the same room as my father. I wanted to get out of there. My mother heard about an apartment [while working] in the beauty parlor she rented nearby. It was across the street and about $150 a month. The people who lived there had been there for 50 years, and you could tell: They had striped wallpaper and there was carpet all over the floor; to me, that was a little classy. Once you got in the downstairs door, it was pretty safe.

In California, I had a lover who insisted on coming everywhere: She was like an anvil around my neck. She was afraid I was going to run off, and I goddamn wanted to. [But in the East Village], I was by myself for the first time in 10 years. I got a job as a waitress at a topless bar, so I was making enough money that I could behave the way I wanted to. I’d drink on the job, and then I’d hop into a cab and go down to the Duchess in the West Village — the most popular gay bar at the time. I made the tiny bedroom into a darkroom; the rest of the apartment had lots of light. I relished being alone there and not having to account for my time.

I took a self-portrait as a business card: I intended to run my name and telephone number along the bottom and have it say, “Portraits, Family Sittings,” that kind of thing. I don’t know what kind of feeling other people get when they look at the photo, but to me it’s a person who’s standing in half light, half darkness, wanting to explore. — Coco Romack

I was working a full-time job at an advertising agency, so whenever I did something that was musical theater-related, I had to scramble. I was doing a concert at Joe’s Pub [in New York] and had gotten into some trouble at work because I’d sent a provocative flier for it through my work email. I’d made this whole shtick out of funny emails: If I had to do this horrible job, I needed to make it clear to everyone that, really, I had this other thing.

At that time, everything was very buttoned-up and safe in theater. Anytime there was anything gay, it was very cute and white, and about being in love and holding hands — not counterculture. I wanted to do something that was out there [with song titles like “Ghosts of Gay Sex (In the 70s)”]. I had no career visibility, so I gathered a mix of people who I knew or were recommended by friends. Most people were initially down to do it, but then I lost one, and another. I was like, “Hey, this concert has lots of out-there, gay-themed songs, so if you’re not into that, you should drop out.” And they did. And then this performer who’d been in an earlier version at [the Off Broadway theater] Ars Nova reached out, asking me to take down a YouTube video of him because his agents were trying to rebrand him. They didn’t want him associated with my music. And then someone else wanted me to not include his name in any promotion because he was worried that if he got Googled, it would have the word “gay” in it.

All of this happened in the span of one week — all these people going, “Too dirty! Too gay!” This was pre-Grindr, pre-PrEP, before marriage equality [in the United States]. After that, everyone wanted to be gay in theater.

The concert was still great: It was one of my weird little shows that was fairly well-attended, and a steppingstone for the years to come. But this experience kind of radicalized me, because I said, “I’m never going to go through that again.” I gave myself a rule that, going forward, before I let anybody do any of my work, I give them all the warnings so that they can’t be surprised later. — J.A.R.

I lived on Hope Street in Downtown Los Angeles, next door to the YMCA. There was a roof where I could sunbathe and sometimes there were men who sent signals through the windows to arrange meetings for later — part of the whole choreography. It was also blocks from the headquarters of gay activity, Pershing Square, where you’d find the really fabulous queens. At the time, drag was an arrestable offense, so it was subtle: blush, lipstick, collars up.

There was a cop — Sgt. Shirley or Sgt. Temple, I don’t remember which — who was like a nasty mayor. I’d been in the city for half an hour when I made my way to Pershing Square for the first time; within five minutes, I was in the interrogation room under the park.

Late in the day, everything would transfer a couple blocks away to Main Street. There was Harold’s Bar and the Waldorf Cellar, which was very grand, like a ’20s speakeasy, with booths and vinyl that had gone ratty and a big mural of palm trees. The Waldorf had a lot of hustlers and businessmen but had a sign that said, “No Femmes,” which was really repugnant. Next door there was a very dingy hotel to rent by the hour. Between the Waldorf and Harold’s was the no-name coffee place where there was the semi-riot [in the late 1950s]: They tried arresting a queen and everyone started throwing coffee and doughnuts.

It was a tattered city, a cauldron of humanity, and it was both exciting and very sad. I never set out to write about that world [before “City of Night” (1963), Rechy’s debut novel]. After, I got labeled a “gay” writer even though I write about a lot of other things. Now a lot of very good writers get separated out into a genre. Picture it: [Jean] Genet and [Marcel] Proust in the “Gay” section of the library!

The tendency is to romanticize things, but it wasn’t romantic. Go back to when I was 30? Oh, no. We lived under constant threat. The hatred is still out there. So much still remains. But there have been a lot of very heroic people. — M.S.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

Hair and makeup by Linda Gradin using MAC at L’Atelier NYC. Bookings consultant: Ian William Bauman at Studio Bauman. Director of photography: Andrew Rothschild. Second camera operator: Aaron Fenichell. Gaffer: Alexa Mignon Harris. Electric: Tim Breuer. Key grip: Monifa LaRena. Digital tech: Zach Miller. Sound: Pablo Diez. Production: Jennifer Pio. Production manager: Casilda García López. Production assistant: Jake DePinto. Hair and makeup assistant: Vika Osyhenko. Postproduction by Haste.nyc. Post supervisor: Jordan Taylor Fuller. Supervising editor: Oliver Rivard. Editor: David Castillo. Colorist: Mary Perrino. Sound mixer: Charles Van Kirk. Still life photo assistant: Karl Leitz.

Digital production and design: Danny DeBelius, Amy Fang, Mariah Kreutter, Chris Littlewood, Jamie Sims and Carla Valdivia Nakatani.