When Gay New York was published in 1994, the issue of gay rights was still highly controversial and contested. Gay rights activists had been visible and active for decades by then, and during the 1960s and 1970s some states had abolished sodomy laws, which practically outlawed gay sexuality. However, sodomy laws persisted in much of the South. By 1990, only three states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) had any laws explicitly protecting gay and lesbian people from employment and housing discrimination, and the federal government provided no protections. Legal recognition of same-sex marriages had yet to be seriously proposed, much less enacted, in any state or at the national level. Although the US Democratic Party came to power in 1992 through the election of President Bill Clinton, he was arguably more conservative in his approach to both economic and social issues than previous Democratic presidents since the 1940s. To that end, in 1993, Clinton enacted a policy known as Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which allowed gay people to join the military as long as they were not openly gay.

Social attitudes toward gay people remained fraught. Although tolerance toward gay people and the appearance of gay characters in popular media rose during the 1970s, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s evangelical Christianity, especially via the activist group the Moral Majority, began to exercise more political and cultural influence.