In honor of Pride Month, Traveler asked some of our favorite writers to pen love letters to the spaces—explicitly queer or not—in New York City that have made them feel completely at home. To plan your own trip, check out our ultimate LGBTQ+ guide to New York.
When people find out I got married at The Strand Book Store, the typical response is “You got married in a bookstore?!” But the real shock is that I got married at all. Growing up in Hawaii, I never thought about marriage. Like boat shoes and taking IPAs very seriously, marriage was a thing for straight dudes. Plus I was low-key Buddhist, so what does “forever” mean anyway?
But one sleepless night, after four years of dating, Adam turned to me in bed. “I think we deserve the rights and protections that married people are afforded,” he said, looking me in my eyes. “I want to bury you.”
It was a proposal I couldn’t refuse.
Suddenly, we were tasked with planning a wedding, a life event most people are programmed to envision since childhood, and one that neither of us had previously considered. We waded through an infinite sea of scenarios, from a late-night function at a Brooklyn nightclub to a gazebo overlooking a Hawaiian waterfall. We were sure we wanted to spend our lives together. Far less clear was how we wanted to celebrate that decision.
After arguing about our different ideas, we toured the Strand’s rare book room. Located on the third floor, the handsome space sells limited-edition books by day, before transforming into an event space for book launches and private parties at night. On first glance, it managed to feel sacred but not pious, sentimental without being hokey, and utterly New York (aside from the fact that it was somehow reasonably priced). This is where we would get married, we decided, amongst friends and family and an $800 first edition of Ulysses.
Though gigantic—2.5 million books, both used and new, organized neatly across four sprawling floors—the Strand is still an independent, family-owned bookshop. It was founded in 1927 by a 25-year-old Lithuanian immigrant named Ben Bass, who borrowed $300 for a lease on a stretch of Fourth Avenue formerly known as “Book Row.” During the depression, he slept on a cot in the store’s basement. In 1957, Ben’s son moved the Strand to its current location, two blocks south of Union Square on the corner of 12th Street and Broadway. Of the 48 bookstores originally on Book Row, the Strand is the only one left standing. In the age of Amazon, its status as a literary cultural institution in the heart of New York City feels like a feat of magic.
So does finding love in this city, or planning a wedding for that matter. It’s not like there’s a template for a gay wedding in a bookstore between a Japanese writer from Hawaii and a Jewish artist from Toronto, a vastness that left us daunted, but also granted us permission to play. We mostly wanted to throw a party, one that reflected the contours of our relationship. So on the night of our fifth anniversary, in a room full of rare books, a friend sang Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro,” from the opera Gianni Schicchi; another read an original poem that referenced Michelle Branch lyrics, Corinthians, and Yoko Ono’s tweets; and another lip-synched Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” in full-blown wedding drag, before DJing songs by The Pointer Sisters and TLC. We ditched a dress code, urging guests to come however they felt best, which meant I wore a second-hand Comme des Garçons jacket studded with black pom-poms and a white ginger lei. Dinner was a pile of pickled pineapple, spam musubi, dashi-soaked brisket, and a surprise 10:30 p.m. delivery from Williamsburg Pizza. Our friend Hector, a queer Buddhist with a Rubeus Hagrid-esque beard, officiated. Standing in front of an arch of balloons shaped like a chain, he started the ceremony by asking everyone to tie a red string around someone’s wrist, an imprint of a vow, both yours and ours. In other words, we all tied strands at the Strand. Everything feels fated, mutated into literary metaphor, if you think about it hard enough.
I first wandered into the Strand bookstore seven years before. I was 23, a recent transplant from Hawaii, aimless and alone. Like the glorious odor of a divey gay bar, I found the smell of the used books comforting. You know the one. Musky with notes of soil and discolored paper, fragrant with possibility.
After strolling, wide-eyed, from aisle to aisle—18 miles of books, as the slogan goes—I bought a copy of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. For the next month, I wrapped myself in the story of two Jewish cousins forging a creative life together in Boerum Hill, the small Brooklyn neighborhood where I happened to be crashing on a friend’s couch. I was thrilled to recognize the street names and guideposts that populated the book, a recognition that made this big new city feel a little bit smaller, and made forging my own creative life in Brooklyn feel a little more possible. As I struggled to piece together a life from that couch, I took the literary coincidence as a sign that I was exactly where I needed to be.
Throughout the years, the Strand became a rest stop, a meeting place, and a guiding light. It’s where I bought my grieving coworker The Year of Magical Thinking after her best friend died. Where I sourced Pema Chodron’s pocketbook during my Saturn return, cheered on friends at their book releases, and discovered queer writers like Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Eileen Myles, and Alexander Chee, who provided roadmaps in the dark. It’s where I purchased that emblem of New York bookishness, a Strand tote bag, which I see nearly every time I take the subway. There’s a reason those ubiquitous totes are such a popular souvenir for both locals and passersby—they are a comforting reminder that even the more improbable stories come true, even the ones about you.
