Hotel Wicker

A collage of archival photos from Hotel Wicker's vast collection of history, featuring LGBTQ+ legends Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Randy Wicker, parties and drugs at their shared home, and the gay piers on the Hudson River.

A new documentary.

Trash or treasure?

Take a time-traveling portal to the Gay World with Devlyn Camp and friends to discover a multi-generational family of choice, including some famous faces, sheltering from the outside world in a gay activist’s apartment. Once inside you will not want to leave.

Meet the glossy but rough characters who haunt the streets of the Gay World. Explore the map with Marsha P. Johnson, learn how to survive here. Hustling from Times Square to Hoboken, from midcentury Gay Liberation to the Y2K-era human cloning craze, from male to female and everything in between, distress and delight in the realest of reality shows that is Hotel Wicker. A complicated patriarch who uses and abuses while providing for his street kids, witness this legendary curmudgeon’s heart grow three sizes. Go to bed with Marsha, put up the Xmas tree with George, panhandle with Coco, cruise the piers with John, hustle midtown with Andrew, create their dazzling annual Xmas letters with Suzanne, fight for the family with Sylvia, and bring David’s garden to life as AIDS decimates their family. The wins are imperative and the losses staggering, but each moment scotch-taped together create an archive of their lives, a sprawling story uncovered in Randy’s apartment 50 years later.

the team

Executive Producers
Devlyn Camp
Jim Mauro
Emm O’Connor
Sara Scully

Parts 1-3 Directed by Devlyn Camp
Part 4 Directed by Devlyn Camp & Sara Scully

Post-producer
Leila Chediak

Director of Photography
Jessica Papayiannis

Devlyn Camp is the producer & host of the podcast Queer Serial: American LGBTQ+ History Before Stonewall (2018-2024) & archivist of Hotel Wicker’s Wicker/Johnson Papers.

Jim Mauro & Emm O’Connor’s Viridian Coast Studios is an award-winning production company founded in 2017 to help independent creatives bring their ideas to the screen. Together they bring over a decade of combined production experience working across a variety of shows including My Next Guest with David Letterman, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, 90 Day Fiancé, The Chew, and Emily In Paris.

Sara Scully is a producer, director, and social entrepreneur: co-creator and executive producer of QUEER CUTS, founder of ACME Screening Room and co-founder of Hopewell Theater. Scully shot the series’ verite archive of the Hotel Wicker family between 2000 and 2002.

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It Didn’t All Start With Stonewall! On the 25th anniversary of Stonewall—Pride month 1994—Uplift Lighting participated in “Windows on Gay Life,” a series of 34 storefront exhibits down Christopher Street telling our comm
Bob Kohler was an early gay activist who took care of street kids in need of housing & resources, from the gay liberation era, through the AIDS crisis, to the end of his life in 2007. He was at the Stonewall riots, manager of the Club Baths, owne
John Klar was a hustler, collector of records, lamp maker, resident of Hotel Wicker, and one of the early employees of Uplift Lighting. He died 34 years ago today in Hoboken of AIDS at the age of 35. John was eager to leave Indiana, PA to live the g
On this night 36 years ago, Marsha had plans, perhaps a show supporting ACT UP, on April 25, 1990 at 11pm. She saved the date on the back of her membership card for The Annex. This was one of her belongings left in her bedroom in Hoboken and now arch
The warm light of Agosto Machado will never go out. He was pure love and every interaction with him was an uplifting conversation. Here are some of his annual holiday cards sent to Randy. Finding these photo shoots tucked away throughout the apartmen
29 years ago today, Randy established the Clone Rights United Front—just 4 days after scientists announced Dolly the sheep was cloned. He saw huge potential for gay families, and even human rights in general. He had survived so much, and people
Happy Valentine’s Day 💘 Marsha & likely her husband Candy. Learn more about their relationship in her biography MARSHA: THE JOY & DEFIANCE OF MARSHA P. JOHNSON by @tourmaliiine
Happy 88th birthday to my sister, @randolfewicker 🎂
The morning after their “deathbed wedding,” the gay minister who performed the ceremony in the Hotel Wicker bedroom was forced to resign from his ministry in Hoboken. Robert Williams was the first openly gay male minister ordained in the
On this day in 1990, Randy & David were married in a legendary “deathbed wedding” at Hotel Wicker. The family put together a huge wedding party in the living room, and a gay minister performed the ceremony in the bedroom. Randy wrot
Quietly longing for a warm summer day… Here is Hotel Wicker’s building in the 1970s beyond the gay piers, second on the right. Photo by Frank Hallam, courtesy LGBT Center National History Archives @friendsofthearchive

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