On this day in queerstory: a day for looking to the past and the future

Queer history doesn’t just happen in riots or courtrooms. Sometimes, it happens in the steady work of preserving what’s already here — the bars, the archives, the memory walls, and the maps drawn by those who refuse to let their pasts be forgotten.

October 24 has become one of those quietly significant dates in LGBTQ+ culture: a moment for looking around and asking not only who we are, but where we’ve been.

Across the UK and beyond, queer spaces that once hid in plain sight are being rediscovered, documented, and — in some cases — resurrected. On October 24, 2023, the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre hosted “Mapping the Margins,” a one-night exhibition tracing fifty years of queer nightlife across the city.

Visitors followed a timeline of clubs and cabarets that once defined London’s queer geography — from The Gateways Club in Chelsea, one of Europe’s first lesbian bars, to Heaven, the megaclub that rose from a railway arch in Charing Cross. Beside the maps were the names of places that didn’t survive — bars shuttered by police raids, landlords, or gentrification — their loss mourned and remembered in equal measure.

“Queer people built a city within a city,” said curator Alex Hanley. “We danced, we loved, we organized. These weren’t just bars — they were infrastructures of survival.”

Events like this one are increasingly common each October, aligning with the tail end of LGBTQ+ History Month in the U.S. and similar observances across Europe. They highlight a key truth: that queer survival isn’t just a cultural phenomenon — it’s architectural.

On October 24, 2017, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission quietly added several queer sites to its list of protected buildings — including the Stonewall Inn, long recognized as a flashpoint of resistance, and the James Baldwin Residence in Harlem, the home of the literary icon who wrote about Black queer life long before it was safe to do so.

That act of recognition — bureaucratic but historic — helped set a precedent. Other cities followed. In Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sydney, activists used the date to push for similar listings, arguing that queer spaces are as vital to national identity as churches, theatres, or battlefields.

“Preservation is protest,” says architectural historian Dr. Nina Kapur. “Every building that survives tells the story of who was allowed to exist — and who had to fight for it.”

But not all preservation is literal. October 24 has also become a symbolic date for the archivists, librarians, and digital historians who keep queer stories alive in other forms — from underground zines to oral histories.

In Manchester, the People’s History Museum hosts its annual “Queer Memory Night” around this date, inviting members of the public to bring personal artefacts — photos, letters, club flyers — to be scanned and catalogued for future generations.

One attendee last year brought a shoebox of Polaroids from Napoleon’s, a legendary gay disco in the 1980s. “It’s strange seeing your youth treated as history,” they said, laughing. “But if we don’t share it, it disappears.”

There’s no single legislative victory or headline-grabbing protest tied to October 24. Instead, the date has become an anchor for something quieter but no less radical: queer continuity.

Across London, New York, and countless smaller cities, it’s the day for looking backward and forward at once — for acknowledging that queer life is built on spaces that had to be fought for, protected, or rebuilt from scratch.

When a plaque goes up on a bar that was once raided by police, or a new archive opens its doors to the public, that’s not nostalgia — it’s resistance.

“Every photograph, every address, every memory we save is a declaration,” said Hanley. “It says: we were here — and we still are.”