Detroit Historic Pride, A Walking Tour

Name: Detroit Historic Pride, A Walking Tour
Start: 2025-10-11T11:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-10-11T13:00:00-04:00
Location: 500 Griswold St, Detroit, MI 48226

Schedule

Sat Oct 11 2025 at 11:00 am to 01:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

500 Griswold St, Detroit, MI 48226 | Detroit, MI

Detroit’s LGBTQ+ history is a story of resilience, resistance, and celebration—from drag parades and publicly out athletes to the underground spaces where people found freedom. In recognition of the Motor City’s earliest recorded queer history, Detroit History Tours is proud to offer Detroit Historic Pride: A Walking Tour, in celebration of Pride Month.
This two-hour tour visits the locations of importance to Detroit’s earliest gay and lesbian communities, from bars to bathhouses, safe havens to protest sites ; and discusses pioneers who fought for liberation, celebrities who became caught up in stings, and everyday people who risked arrest and humiliation to be their authentic selves.
Together with your guide you’ll explore the locations that were Detroit’s first gay spaces, including bars catering to gay men clustered at the intersection of Farmer and Bates Streets around World War II, and learn about house parties and "buffet flats" that supported the Black LGBT community. We’ll explore the trials, fights, tribulations, and celebrations of the community long before Palmer Park, and later Ferndale, became known as regional centers of LGBTQ community and visibility. We hope you’ll join us as we investigate where LGBTQ Detroiters first began connecting publicly, fighting the battles that have given us the freedoms to live, love, and be ourselves.
Meet your guide: Michael Boettcher is an urban planner with experience working for Wayne and Macomb Counties, the City of Detroit, and running a couple suburban downtown development agencies. He has served on the boards and staffs of a handful of Detroit-area community development nonprofits as well. He’s been creating and conducting tours since the early 1990s, having fallen in love with Detroit architecture and urban spaces while getting lost coming downtown in high school. Michael has sung in a handful of Michigan Opera Theater opera choruses, published a couple dozen poems, loves to show off his collection of antique Detroit architecture postcards and is very slowly building a scale model of downtown Detroit in Legos (brick donations accepted). He remembers seeing the Lions at Tiger Stadium and the Red Wings at Olympia. In May 2021, he finally made it to his 50th state.
Tickets are $29.50 per person
Tour starts in the Guardian Building Promenade. Our tour guides will be wearing Detroit History Tours shirts and big ol’ smiles. Parking is available at The Buhl Parking Garage, across the street at 525 Griswold St, Detroit, MI 48226. The costs vary from 10.00-20.00 dollars; on street parking is also available for $1.50 per hour at city meters.