New York state, a state in the northeastern United States, has one of the largest and the most prominent LGBTQ populations in the world. Brian Silverman, the author of Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day, wrote that New York City has "one of the world's largest, loudest, and most powerful" LGBT communities", and "Gay and lesbian culture is as much a part of New York's basic identity as yellow cabs, high-rises, and Broadway theatre".Silverman, Brian. Frommer's New York City from $90 a Day (Volume 7 of Frommer's $ A Day). John Wiley & Sons, January 21, 2005. , 9780764588358. p. 28. LGBT travel guide Queer in the World states, "The fabulosity of Gay New York is unrivaled on Earth, and queer culture seeps into every corner of its five boroughs". LGBT Americans in New York City constitute by significant margins the largest self-identifying lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities in the United States, and the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village are widely considered to be the genesis of the modern gay rights movement.

As of 2005, New York City was home to an estimated 272,493 self-identifying gay and bisexual individuals. The New York City metropolitan area had an estimated 568,903 self-identifying GLB residents. Meanwhile, New York City is also home to the largest transgender population in the United States, estimated at 50,000 in 2018, concentrated in Manhattan and Queens. Albany, the state capital of New York, is also a progressive hub for the LGBTQ community.

New York State possesses a long history of presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people residing in, and often being convicted in, the state. Sexual relations between persons of the same gender (variously described as "sodomy", "buggery" or "sins of carnal nature") was illegal for most of the history of New York from its days as a Dutch colony through its colonization and independence from British rule as a state in the Union, until such relations were legalized by judicial action in 1981. Activism for the rights of LGBT people in the state began with the rise of protest actions by the first "homophile" organizations in the 1950s and 1960s, although LGBT activism was propelled into a watershed moment in the 1969 Stonewall riots and the later protests against the apathy of civil and political institutions to the AIDS/HIV crisis. Various organizations were established for LGBT people to advocate for rights and provide human services, the impact of which was increasingly felt at state level.

The most recent culminations of LGBT rights in New York include the passage of the Marriage Equality Act in June 2011, granting the legalization of same-sex marriage to New York residents, and the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the New York-originated landmark case United States v. Windsor to strike down key federal prohibitions against the recognition of lawful same-sex marriages throughout the United States.

As of 2017, plans were advancing by the State of New York to host the largest international LGBT pride celebration in 2019, known as Stonewall 50 – WorldPride NYC 2019, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. In New York City, the Stonewall 50 - WorldPride NYC 2019 events produced by Heritage of Pride will be enhanced through a partnership made with the I LOVE NY program's LGBT division and shall include a welcome center during the weeks surrounding the Stonewall 50 / WorldPride events that is open to all. Additional commemorative arts, cultural, and educational programing to mark the 50th anniversary of the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn will be taking place throughout the city and the world; it is believed that 2019 will be the largest international LGBT pride celebration held in history.

1600–1799 From the time of the first European settlements in what is now New York, sodomy was considered a capital offense. The New Netherland colony did not retain Dutch criminal law, but the West India Company, which was given legislative powers, gave the rulers of the colony powers to punish capital offenses, which may have included sodomy due to recorded punishments for the crime.

In 1646, the first sodomy trial in the territory of New Netherland convicted Jan Creoli on a second offense of sodomy and sentenced him to death by strangulation; his body was then "burned to ashes". A second accused, Nicolas Hillebrant (or Hillebrantsen), was scheduled for a trial in 1658, but no further records indicate progress in the trial or an outcome; a third conviction in 1660, that of Jan Quisthout van der Linde (or Linden), who was accused of having had sex with his male servant, resulted in his being tied in a sack and dunked into a river to drown, while the servant was flogged.Shorto, Russell, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (New York, Doubleday, 2004).

This status quo of the death penalty for sodomy would remain unchanged after New Netherland was taken by the Duke of York in 1664, and "buggery" was retained as a capital offense. However, a portion of modern New York fell from 1674 to 1702 within the northern portion of Quaker-majority West Jersey, whose criminal code was silent on sodomy.

In 1796, the state's punishment for sodomy was reduced from death to a maximum of 14 years at either solitude or hard labor.

19th century The area comprising present-day New York City, as America's most populous urban center, nearly doubled its population during the first half of the 19th century (from 1800 to 1820 and again by 1840, to 300 000). The city saw the beginnings of a homosexual subculture concomitantly growing with the population.Edsall, Nicholas C. (2003). Toward Stonewall: Homosexuality and Society in the Modern Western World. University of Virginia Press. Pg. 127–152.

Sodomy laws New York's sodomy laws remained in flux, when an 1801 law raised the punishment to compulsory life imprisonment, with hard labor or solitary confinement as additional attachments; the law was reduced in 1828 to a maximum of 10 years and an expunging of the hard labor and solitude options. The law was again changed in 1881, with sodomy now limited to a maximum of 5–20 years. A revision in 1892 eliminated the 5-year minimum.

The first reported sodomy case in the state's history, Lambertson v. People (1861), resulted in a conviction for buggery. An 1898 case was prosecuted by the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, involving a man to allegedly assist another teenage boy to engage in sodomy with another teenage minor.

Poetic descriptions Continuing the theme of loving male friendship, the American poet Walt Whitman arrived in New York in 1841. He is widely believed to have been bisexual or gay, and was immediately drawn to young working-class men found in certain parks, public baths, the docks, and some bars and dance halls. He kept records of the men and boys, usually noting age, physical characteristics, job, and origins. Dispersed in his praise of the city are moments of male admiration, such as in Calamus—"frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me robust, athletic love" or in poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, where he writes:Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me / approaching or passing, / Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as / I sat, / Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a / word, / Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, / Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, / The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, / Or as small as we like, or both great and small.Sometimes Whitman's writing verged on explicit, such as in his poem "Native Moments"—"I share the midnight orgies of young men / I pick out some low person for my dearest friend. He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate." Poems like these, Calamus (inspired by Whitman's treasured friends and possible lover, Fred Vaughan, who lived with the Whitman family in the 1850s) and the general theme of manly love functioned as a pseudonym for homosexuality.

The developing sub-community had a coded voice to draw more gay and bisexual men to New York and other growing American urban centers. Whitman did, however, in 1890 denounce any sexuality in the comradeship of his works and historians still debate whether he was a practicing homosexual, bisexual, etc. But this denouncement shows that homosexuality had become a public question by the end of the 19th century.

Twenty years after Whitman came to New York, Horatio Alger continued the theme of manly love in his stories of the young Victorian self-made man. He came to New York fleeing from a public scandal with a young man in Cape Cod that forced him to leave the ministry, in 1866.

Other developments In 1888, the Everard Baths, a Victorian Turkish bath, was opened, and would gain a growth in reputation among homosexual men.

In 1895 a group of self-described androgynes in New York organized a club called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, based on their wish "to unite for defense against the world's bitter persecution". The group included Jennie June (born in 1874 as Earl Lind), who described herself as a "fairie" or "androgyne", which to her meant an individual, as she said, "with male genitals", but whose "psychical constitution" and sexual life "approach the female type".

20th century

1900–1949 Early 20th century

Beginning in the late 1800s into the 20th century, people, typically young gay men, known as 'fairies,' were feminine-presenting sex workers. It was believed that sexuality was tied to behavior, and this ideology allowed for straight-identified men to have sex with fairies, but maintain their masculinity and heterosexuality.

Bathhouses in the early 1900s On February 21, 1903, New York police conducted the first recorded vice raid on a gay bathhouse, the Ariston Hotel Baths. 26 men were arrested, and 12 brought to trial on sodomy charges; seven men received sentences ranging from four to 20 years in prison.

The Everard Baths was patronized largely by homosexuals by the 1920s and became the community's preeminent social venue from the 1930s onward. It was patronized by gay men before the 1920s and by the 1930s had a reputation as "classiest, safest, and best known of the baths," eventually picking up the nickname, Everhard. On January 5, 1919, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice encouraged a police raid on the Everard Baths in which the manager and nine customers were arrested for lewd behavior. It was raided again in 1920 with 15 arrests.

Also popular in the 1910s were the Produce Exchange Baths and the Lafayette Baths (403–405 Lafayette Street, which from 1916 was managed by Ira & George Gershwin). American precisionist painter Charles Demuth used the Lafayette Baths as his favourite haunt. His 1918 homoerotic self-portrait set in a Turkish Bathhouse is likely to have been inspired by it. The Penn Post Baths in a hotel basement (The Penn Post Hotel, 304 West 31st Street) was a popular gay location in the 1920s despite a lack of private rooms and seedy condition.

The American composer Charles Griffes (1884–1920) wrote in his diaries about visits to the New York bathhouses and the YMCA. His biography states: "So great was his need to be with boys, that though his home contained two pianos, he chose to practice at an instrument at the Y, and his favorite time was when the players were coming and going from their games."

Drag balls

Lobotomies and sterilization