LGBTQIA+ Alliance

In October 2025, the AIANY LGBTQIA+ Alliance hosted, alongside the Build Out Alliance, a vital conversation on the coalition needed to expand fundamental business contracting programs to more widely include the queer community. The panel dove into how business disadvantage is measured at the federal, state, and city levels for supplier diversity and business certification programs. We examined the impact of these programs on businesses owned by women and racial minorities, and how that compares to other categories like veterans and people with disabilities, and of course, the LGBTQIA+ community. Keep watching this space for more events on this topic focused on how the design, construction, and real estate industry in New York City can join the fight for a more inclusive future. Moderated by Eric Ball, AIA (Henning Larsen) with speakers Barton Jackson II (NGLCC), Patti Harris (LicenseSure), David Kuykendall, AIA (MGDK Architects), and Jackie Aleman (JCA & Associates).

In what has become an annual June Pride tradition in New York, our Alliance joined Amanda Davis and Ken Lustbader, the experts from the award-winning NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, for an LGBTQIA+ walking tour of the East Village. We learned how the neighborhood, shaped by economic forces, became home to some of the most influential LGBTQIA+ artists, writers, activists, and clubs beginning in the 1950s.

Historically part of the Lower East Side, the East Village became a counter-cultural and avant-garde haven that included many LGBTQIA+ figures, from poet Allen Ginsberg to drag queen Ethyl Eichelberger. Its affordable housing drew the likes of young lesbian activist Ellen Broidy, co-planner of the first NYC Pride March (1970), and gay “musical host” David Mancuso, whose egalitarian underground house parties influenced the city’s club scene, including the Saint.

The 90-minute walking tour began in front of architect Louis Sullivan’s Bayard-Condict Building, 67 Bleecker Street, and ended near the Phoenix, 447 East 13th Street, where the group continued. Keep watching for more tours each June!

Our LGBTQIA+ Alliance co-organized an incredible event on December 2, 2025 to build upon the work from the past decade around single stall bathroom compliance in New York.

Alongside the AIANY Interiors Committee the program explored the path to advocating for practical policy as design professionals, using all-gender bathrooms as a case study. It also referenced the article in the Summer 2025 Teamwork Issue of Oculus magazine, A Stall for One, A Stall for All. The discussion focused on how AIANY approaches advocacy for design professionals, the path for pursuing legislative action to remedy a persistent design challenge, and the process for making the case. In conversation with local and state legislators, practitioners, business owners, and advocates, the panel examined the bill to amend the plumbing code to enable the design of multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms, making it easier for design professionals to meet client’s requests for inclusive design.

We highly encourage you to watch the full conversation of the panel here.

Hosted by Cholula Lemon at the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center designed by EDG, our Alliance celebrated June 2025 Pride in New York City in full force.

The benefactor was the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, an organization that fights to make equality, equity and liberation a reality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQIA+) people. As the nation’s largest LGBTQIA+ civil rights organization, they drive impact by inspiring, engaging and mobilizing millions of pro-equality voters and supporters to elect pro-equality leaders and to demand equity-based policies and legislation; changing hearts and minds through programming that increases understanding, visibility and support for the diverse LGBTQIA+ community in all aspects of our identities; and transforming the institutions and systems that shape our everyday lives by advancing LGBTQIA+ inclusive policies and practices in schools, workplaces, hospitals, communities and beyond.

We celebrated our 2nd year in action with a focus on how the community represented within the room was focused on the work still to come!

In June 2024 in Washington DC, our AIANY LGBTIA+ Alliance joined the first programming dedicated to discussing industry issues which impact the queer community and our clients at the annual national conference. A first indeed!

The timing wasn’t incidental. The symposium ran the closing Saturday of the conference, the same day as the DC Pride Parade, and attendees moved straight from the room to the march.

The structure was built to move from listening to doing. It opened with Setting the Stage, a panel on the intersection of queer advocacy and the profession, tracing the through-line from pioneers like OLGAD to today’s national organizing. Creating Spaces Within Your Communities followed, putting our Alliance leadership front and center to talk grassroots work at the local component level—the scale where most of this actually happens. The afternoon turned the mic around: a roundtable and collective conversation where attendees, not just panelists, shaped the agenda on queer histories, firm policy, healthcare access, and what a nationally connected community could look like.

We celebrated the CFA Lab: Seeking Refuge and Making Home in NYC exhibition one last time with a farewell gathering hosted by the AIANY LGBTQIA+ Alliance. Just prior to the physical exhibit’s closing on March 23, 2024, members of the Alliance gathered to learn what had been discovered during the interactive installation from A.L. Hu, one of the three residents of CFA Lab.

Queeries: Designing Reality Equitably and Madly (Q:DREAM) leveraged the Center for Architecture’s physical and virtual properties to enact an emergent research-creation process that asked queer people: “What are your definitions of ‘home’?” The project spotlighted NYC’s queer architects, designers, organizations, and places at different scales, with a participatory component for folks to recognize and celebrate the spaces they call “home.” “Designing Reality” refers to the creation of space for imagining worlds where queer folks have autonomous agency over their lives, while “Equitably and Madly” expresses parallel principles of equity of access, pride, and extraordinary imagination. Multimedia storytelling and queer data analysis expand the frame of “home” to encompass queer families, support networks, spaces of one’s own, privacy, security, and stability. Through the course of the residency, Q:DREAM began to build a living archive that documents and celebrates queer designers, their work, and their desires.

Members celebrated through interactive workstations, adding the final touches of colored yarn that spun together their identities with their definitions of home and also wrote postcards to their future selves about what home will look like for them and added them to the collection. We want to thank the Center for Architecture and the three residents, A.L. Hu, Kholisile Dhliwayo, and Karla Andrea Perez for their investigations and contributions to amplifying the voices of minority communities as part of this wonderful exhibition.

In January of 2024, Pride by Design approached the AIANY LGBTAIA+ Alliance about an upcoming exhibition in which they were participating in at the Museum of Design Atlanta. The Please be Seated exhibit invited local artist, designers, and community groups to transform a stool (representing their seat) into a symbol of space, identity, and empowerment. Pride by Design’s piece, titled, “Past, Present, + Future: Witnessing LGBTQIA+ Stories to Build Equitable Futures” celebrates and amplifies the stories of architects and designers within the LGBTQIA+ community across the various points in time. The AIANY LGBTQIA+ Alliance was grateful to be asked and fortunate to provide imagery to be a part of the final installation.

To learn more about this work, please visit Pride by Design’s website for a full description of the process, the piece, and all of the contributors who made our stories possible to tell.

AIA New York proudly launched a new LGBTQIA+ affinity group for the Chapter in 2023. This new group will work to bring together LGBTQIA+ architects, other professionals, and their allies with an aim to create programming, provide networking opportunities, celebrate LGBTQIA+ identity, and offer support around workplace inclusion and other issues.