Before the Gayborhood: The Hidden History of Black Gay Philadelphia

November 1951. Philadelphia is a city that does not yet have a Gayborhood, does not yet have a community center, does not yet have a Pride parade. Somewhere in the city, a young Black woman named Anita Cornwell meets another Black queer woman who introduces herself as Zelmar.

Cornwell – later a pioneering Black lesbian essayist – would not record that memory for another forty years. When she finally did, in a 1993 oral history, she spoke of how small the world felt. How few people there seemed to be. How quietly you had to enter it.

That tension – between the fact of Black queer life and the silence around it – is what drives this entire history. Black gay Philadelphia existed long before it was allowed to exist in public. It built itself in apartments, private clubs, coded invitations, and bars on streets most white gay men never walked. Everything that came later – COLOURS, Philly Black Pride, the “Finally on 13th” mural, the Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs – was built on that foundation.

Before we even get to the 1950s, there’s a name worth knowing – one that proves Black queer Philadelphia’s roots run deeper than most people realize.

Born in Philly – Became a Legend Elsewhere

Gladys Bentley

1907–1960 – Philadelphia-born

History remembers Gladys Bentley as a Harlem Renaissance star – the blues singer and pianist in a white tuxedo and top hat who packed gay speakeasies in 1920s New York and publicly married a white woman in 1931. What history often skips: she was born right here in Philadelphia in 1907.

Bentley left home at 16 – fleeing a mother who had dragged her to doctors to “fix” her attraction to women, her refusal to wear dresses, her insistence on being exactly who she was. She ran to Harlem because Harlem was the only place that would have her. Langston Hughes wrote about her performances. Her name became synonymous with Harry Hansberry’s Clam House on 133rd Street. She was, by any measure, one of the most famous openly queer Black performers in American history.

And she started in Philadelphia. The city she had to leave to become herself.

Six years after Cornwell met Zelmar, a group of Black men in Philadelphia quietly formed something called The West Set. Its anniversary materials – still preserved through community archives – place the founding in January 1957. A surviving fifth-anniversary invitation from 1962 is the earliest self-generated document from a Black-led queer organization this research could locate in the city.

Seven years before Stonewall. Fifteen years before Giovanni’s Room opened. West Set was already throwing formals, organizing cabana parties in Atlantic City, doing charity work, and printing invitations – even if the language on those invitations had to stay coded.

Scene – A West Set Evening, c. 1960

A rented hall, somewhere in Philadelphia. Men in suits. Women in dresses. A band, or a record player. Champagne, if it was a good year. Invitations had been mailed weeks earlier, phrased carefully – “a gathering of friends” – to the right people, through the right hands. Outsiders didn’t know about it. That was the point. The West Set held over thirty years of nights like this before the city ever built a rainbow crosswalk.

Photo: The West Set – The Black LGBT Archivists Society of Philadelphia

This part usually gets skipped. The standard queer history jumps from the Daughters of Bilitis to Stonewall to the first Pride march, as if Black queer people were waiting in the wings for a movement to include them. They weren’t waiting. They were throwing parties.

By the late 1960s, Philadelphia had something that looked, from a distance, like a gay scene. Bars were opening. A gay press was emerging. But if you were Black, that scene wasn’t for you.

Tyrone Smith – who would become one of the most important Black gay leaders the city ever produced – remembered being told explicitly not to cross into certain white gay-bar territory. The warning passed through the community directly: the white faggots will beat you up. James Roberts recalled Black bouncers at predominantly white venues hired specifically to keep Black patrons out – enforcing exclusion at spaces that called themselves inclusive.

Scene – A Night on Moll Street, c. 1970

S.K.’s was not glamorous. A bar on Moll Street that nobody outside the community talked about, in a part of the city white gay men didn’t go. The music was loud. The crowd was Black. If you were there, you knew what it meant to be there – the relief of being exactly who you were, with no calculation required. It was precarious. The police knew where it was. You came anyway.

So Black queer Philly built its own map. On the near north side, The Ritz. On Moll Street, S.K.’s. Near 9th and Arch, Smart Place. And in West Philadelphia – along the corridors stretching out from 52nd Street, in the rowhouses and apartments of Cobbs Creek and Wynnefield – an entire social world running on house parties and word of mouth, built by and for Black women who never appeared in any bar guide, any archive, any history book.

An entire queer infrastructure – clubs, bars, social networks, bookstores – that white gay Philadelphia often did not know existed. And when it did know, often chose not to see.

In 1982, a young Black gay writer working the counter at Giovanni’s Room started gathering essays, poems, and letters from every Black gay man he could find in the country.

His name was Joseph Beam. He had grown up in Philadelphia. He would die here, too – in 1988, of AIDS-related complications, at thirty-three. Between those two dates, he changed Black gay literature forever.

The project became In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, published in 1986. The first anthology of its kind – a book of Black gay voices written for Black gay readers. Beam did the work here, at a bookstore on 12th and Pine, in a city that had just enough infrastructure to let him become what he became.

Beam died in 1988. He was not the only one. He was among thousands.

AIDS did two things to Black gay Philadelphia simultaneously. It killed an entire generation of men who would have been the community’s elders. And it forced the survivors to build institutions fast enough to keep the rest of the community alive.

One of those survivors was Tyrone Smith – the same Tyrone Smith from the ballroom scene of the 1950s and ’60s. By the early 1980s, as the epidemic devastated Black gay men faster than any official structure would acknowledge, Smith helped found Unity, Inc. – described by Philadelphia City Council as the city’s first organization established by and for Black gay men.

Unity did what the city wouldn’t: HIV education, services, and housing, built specifically by and for Black gay men. Smith went on to co-found the Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council in 2005. Meanwhile, David Acosta founded GALAEI in 1989 to confront HIV/AIDS losses in LGBTQ+ Latinx Philadelphia, brought the AIDS Quilt to the city that same year, and co-founded the Philadelphia Working Fund for Artists with HIV/AIDS.

The institutions founded or reshaped in this period – Philadelphia FIGHT in 1990, the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania in 1988, Mazzoni Center‘s expansion of its programming – were built on Black and Brown queer organizing in ways that are still, to this day, under-credited.

If Smith’s generation built the first response, Michael S. Hinson Jr.‘s generation built the permanent architecture.

In 1991, Hinson founded COLOURS – built to impact, improve, and empower LGBTQ+ communities of color, with a focus on the African diaspora. Starting in 1997, COLOURS hosted the Crystal Ball: an annual HIV-prevention ball that wove prevention messaging into ballroom competition and fashion. Celebration and survival. Same room. Same night.

In 1999, Philly Black Pride was born out of that same organizing energy. What had started as coded, invitation-only private gatherings for groups like The West Set became a public, annual, citywide festival. Forty-two years later. A long arc.

Legal protection came slowly. A 1974 attempt to add sexual orientation to Philadelphia’s Fair Practices Ordinance failed – with opposition that included some Black ministers. It took until 1982 for Philadelphia to add sexual orientation protections. Gender identity wasn’t added until 2002. The city’s Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs was created by executive order in 2008 and made permanent in the city charter in 2015.

That last line still matters. A Black gay Philadelphian who drives forty minutes in almost any direction can still, legally, be fired or evicted for who they are.

In 2017, Philadelphia made international news for a reason that revealed exactly how unresolved this history still is. The city added black and brown stripes to the top of the Pride flag – a direct acknowledgment that Black and Brown LGBTQ+ people had been systematically excluded from the very spaces and institutions the flag was supposed to represent. The reaction was fierce. Nationally, the conversation turned ugly fast: some people understood immediately; others performed confusion; others were openly hostile.

The flag was a flashpoint. But it was also a diagnosis. It named, in visual language, something Black queer Philadelphians had been saying for seventy years: the Gayborhood was built on land they helped clear, and they kept getting pushed to its edges.

Six years later, the “Finally on 13th” mural went up – a large-scale tribute to Philadelphia’s ballroom culture and to the Black and Brown queer people who built it. The title says what took seventy years to say publicly. Not a side street. Not a community center. The main drag.

In 2024, Level Up Bar & Lounge and Cockatoo – two queer venues owned by people of color – both closed. Pandemic aftershocks, rising costs. It is a specific, repeated pattern: Black and Brown queer spaces open, make their mark, and then can’t survive the financial math of Center City. Progress in Philadelphia hasn’t been a straight line upward. It’s a cycle – build, lose, rebuild – and the people absorbing those losses are always the same people.

The good news: Philly Black Pride continues into 2026 with a full week of programming. William Way is planning a new headquarters with affordable apartments. Marsha’s, a queer-owned sports bar on South Street, opened in 2025 as an explicit community anchor. None of it is permanent. None of it was permanent in 1957, either.

The earliest verifiable date in this story is November 1951. The earliest surviving document is a 1962 party invitation. Neither is the beginning – they’re just the oldest evidence that managed to survive.

If you’re holding any of the rest of it – a photograph, a letter, a story nobody ever asked you to tell – find a way to preserve it. The John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at William Way wants to know. The Black LGBT Archivists Society of Philadelphia wants to know. The history of this city cannot be written without you.