Book 633: When Brooklyn Was Queer – Hugh Ryan

I’m split on this one. It was better than I thought it was going to be, but not as good as I wanted it to be. I find it very hard for any book to really and truly dig deep into LGBTQ+ history satisfactorily, they’re always scrounging for resources or materials and there are always more questions than there are answers. I reached out to the publisher after I stumbled across this on an LGBT news blog.*

There were times in the book where I kept asking myself, is this really Brooklyn or is it Brooklyn-adjacent or is it “this probably happened” in Brooklyn too (there was quite a bit of this). Ryan was open about there being a lack of primary resources, but I felt that it wasn’t as acknowledged as much as it should’ve been in the introduction and left more to a footnote of the epilogue.

“This book almost certainly just scratches the surface of the real queer history of Brooklyn. I will have missed important stories and got other ones all cocked up. Generations of history come and gone since Stonewall, and those deserve a book all their own. But then, queer history has always been piecemeal and canonless—a mutual endeavor of shared love. I look forward to the book that comes after this, and the one that comes after that, and the one that maybe you’re going to write. I look forward to having a future where we also have a past, and I look forward to creating it with you.” (275, Epilogue)

Ryan kept the bulk of his work to a tight framework described as,

“In the queer history of these areas, five waterfront jobs reoccur again and again: sailor, artist, sex worker, entertainer, and female factory worker. Each of these jobs had particular conditions that made them more available or desirable to queer people.” (21)

And while I agree with this and it operates within the accepted framework of LGBTQ+ historical studies I definitely have to wonder if this is the case as much as it is because of the records left, or because this is actually where sexual minorities lived on the sidelines of society. Ryan parallels the often accepted and reinforced journey of LGBTQ+ identities coming to the modern understanding of them with post-industrial societies providing the opportunity for individuals to get away from the family economy.

“World War II exposed many people to the idea that these feelings meant you were a certain type of person, defined by your sexuality or gender identity. In the immediate aftermath of the war, a select few areas—the Castro in San Francisco, Greenwich Village in New York—would see an explosion of bars catering specifically to queer people. But just as Americans came to understand homosexuality at this time, they also learned homophobia. It’s hard to hate what you cannot even name. After the war, ‘gay life’ would become more isolated, more insular, and in some ways more dangerous—if also larger, more speakable, more visible, and eventually more politically potent.” (223)

He further highlights the creation of the other and the bifurcation of identities. You can’t create homosexuality (or the other) without simultaneously creating what they are being othered from. I found this to be one of the most fascinating parts of Ryan’s work in clearly showing how one anti-vice committee steered the direction of the anti-LGBT+ movement for many decades.

Ryan draws heavily on scholarly work that came before including George Chauncey’s Gay New York and others I read as part of my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I’m incredibly disappointed that in all the LGBTQ+/Women’s Studies courses I took in undergrad (in America) and graduate school (in the UK) I never once heard about The Stone Wall by Mary Casal. That is a major oversight on my professor’s parts. I’ve heard of and read Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and many of the other seminal works by gay male authors, but having never heard of The Stone Wall was shocking.

“Although she uses neither the words homosexual or lesbian, Casal’s book [The Stone Wall] is one of the earliest self-reported records we have of a woman in America who understood herself as a person defined by her sexuality (and not her gender). It appeared in print just two years after Radclyffe Hall’s groundbreaking lesbian roman à clef, The Well of Loneliness, was published in England.” (63)

Like okay, maybe it’s not as groundbreaking (it wasn’t the first) and maybe it’s not as well written, but it seems to me like a mention of it would’ve been made at some point.

The main problem that I had with the book was the condensing of everything from post-WWII to Stonewall into one chapter. I get that LGBTQ+ people in Brooklyn (like everywhere else in the country) had to go underground due to new norms, but it seemed to short shift the rest of the book to condense those two-to-three decades into one chapter when entire chapters were given to decades that had the slightest of content to go on and yet Ryan was able to craft an entire chapter around them.

Recommendation: This was a great read and an important addition to LGBTQ+ historical references. There was so much more that I wanted from this book than it was able to provide and that’s always the case with this type of work. Ryan did a good job of using what he had and did a better job than most books I’ve read of trying to include diversity when resources were available. The writing is easy enough to read and the stories that weave together create a cohesive history of queer Brooklyn.

*I received a copy of When Brooklyn Was Queer from the publisher in return for my honest opinion. No money or goods were exchanged.

Opening Line: “Arm in arm with Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers bursts out of the door of 7 Middagh Street and into the cool, sweet, smoky night.”

Closing Line: “New queer history is being written; old queer history is being restored to its proper place. Let us hope that this time, it is written in indelible ink; in sweat and blood; in hopes and tears; in letters one-hundred-feet-tall that will never be forgotten.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)