New Philly Pride Visitor Center a sign of an inclusive, welcoming city
By Jay Nachman
The Philly Pride Visitor Center is a welcoming hub for LGBTQ+ resources and travel-planning services. Located in the Gayborhood at 12th and Locust streets, it is one of the nation’s first LGBTQ+ visitor centers.
The center highlights Philadelphia’s role in the fight for equal rights and offers practical visitor help. Resources include maps, itinerary planning, and queer activities across Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.
“This year, being the 250th anniversary of the country, we expect a lot of LGBTQ+ visitors to Philadelphia. Most other visitor centers don’t speak to those visitors,” said Mark Segal, founder of the Philadelphia Gay News. “They want to come here, and they want to learn about colonial history, of course. But they also want to learn about what is their part of that colonial history. They also want to learn about our present LGBTQ+ community and more about that history. While they’re here, they might want to discover other places they can go, such as businesses in the area that are LGBTQ+. And that’s what we’ve done,” said Segal.
The Mount Airy native, who now lives in Queen Village, is also a longtime LGBTQ+ activist. Segal participated in the Stonewall riots and helped found the Gay Liberation Front. He also served as curator of the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center in New York, which opened June 2024. Segal joined with Neil Frauenglass, chief marketing officer of Visit Philadelphia, to create something similar in Philadelphia.
About 25% of the people who come to the Philly Pride Visitor Center are LGBTQ+ allies and those who want to learn about the queer community.
One of the offerings at the center is a Gayborhood LGBTQ History Tour. Its topics and sites include:
• The evolution of Pride: from protest to parade
• Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Japanese-American author and activist
• The nation’s longest continuously operating LGBTQ+ bookstore
• Barbara Gittings, LGBTQ+ and women’s rights pioneer
• Controversies of racism in the Gayborhood
• Gloria Casarez, civil rights leader and Philadelphia’s first director of LGBTQ Affairs
The center has information about Baron von Steuben, a Prussian army officer who organized and trained the Continental Army for battle. These efforts ensured his legacy in the cause of American independence. Benjamin Franklin, the colonies’ ambassador to France, recommended von Steuben to George Washington.
There is some dispute about whether von Steuben was a gay man. Segal noted the army officer never dated a woman and always lived with men. His will “is a love letter to the two people he lived with, who are men, of course,” said Segal.
According to www.History.com, “Historians also think he was homosexual — and served as an openly gay man in the military at a time when sex between men was punished as a crime.”
The Philly Pride Visitor Center joins The Philly Pride Visitor Center joins national efforts to commemorate the nation’s founding by honoring the diverse communities that have shaped it.
The center includes material about other tourism sites in Philadelphia and the state. “We give LGBTQ+ visitors, and those allies, another place to come, that is centralized in Center City Philadelphia to get all that information,” Segal said.
The Philly Pride Visitor Center is a partnership between the Philadelphia Visitor Center, Visit Philadelphia, Visit PA and the Philadelphia Gay News. Located at 1139 Locust St., it is open Thursday-Monday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. For more information about the Philly Pride Visitor Center, call 267-514-4759 or visit
www.PhlVisitorCenter.com.
Jay Nachman is a freelance writer in Philadelphia who tells stories for a variety of clients.
