In the decades before the Stonewall uprising in 1969, an L.G.B.T.Q. community took shape among New Yorkers on a remote Fire Island hamlet known as Cherry Grove.
There, visitors spent summer weekends sunbathing and partying, forming one of the country’s first gay beach towns when being openly gay could result in ostracism or imprisonment.
Only in 1980 did New York State eliminate most of its laws against sodomy. A new outdoor exhibition in the courtyard of the New-York Historical Society, on view through Oct.
11, features dozens of enlarged photographs that document this history, illustrating how the hamlet allowed visitors “to become their real selves, rather than who they thought they were supposed to be,” according to Susan Kravitz, one.