Daniel Walber, Katie Vogel and Natalie Hill are historians with the Close Friends Collective. They’re working with the Henry Street Settlement to give tours of historical sites on the Lower East Side that are relevant in the LGBTQA+ communities fight for equality.

“We have the West Village in the city, which is the most famous neighborhood for queer history in the entire world,” Walber said. ”There’s queer history everywhere. It’s everywhere in New York City. It’s everywhere in the world.”

Henry Street Settlement is an organization that provides social services, health care and arts programming to the Lower East Side, as well as the five boroughs.

It was founded by Lilian Wald, who was known for her contributions to public health in the late 1800s. Wald challenged gender roles while living with female nurses at the settlement.

“What’d really important about it is this whole community of women who started this organization together, lived together, supported each-other like family,” Katie Vogel, public historian at Henry Street Settlement, said.

“We know one woman who she had a romantic relationship with Mable Hyde Kittridge who helped her to start the school lunch program. Making sure everyone that anyone had access to food in the middle of the day,” Vogel added.

Another stop on the tour is the Seward Park Educational Campus. In the 1850s, a court hearing was held at the campus for a person who defied gender roles.

“Charley was a young gender non-conforming person who we know about through newspaper articles that were known about them at the time,” Walber said. “Charlie was arrested for wearing men’s clothes, basically.”

Also on the tour, the Nathan Straus playground. At one time, it featured the work of artist Martin Wong.

“In the 1980s, he painted this handball court. The painting here, it now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Natalie Hill, co-Founder of Close Friends Collective, said.

Hill says Wong’s sexuality contributed to his artwork.

“Martin Wong was an openly gay man. You know, he collaborated with a lot of people who were his friends and lovers and then friends again in the way that like a lot of queer relationships explore those boundaries,” Hill said.

The history tour has been operating for three years, but this summer the offerings are being expanded — adding the East Village tour.

“We’re really excited because there is so much queer history in the East Village,” Walber said.

These stories offer a window to the past.

“Queer people get to participate in the conversation about who we were in the past and what queer life was like in the past,” Walber said.

For more information on the tours, visit henrystreet.org.