When Brooklyn Was Queer

Starred review from January 15, 2019
A century and a half of Brooklyn's queer history.A longtime Brooklyn resident and founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, Ryan pinpoints the establishment of a homosexual presence there in the mid-1800s with the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the development of the area as a major port. Around the turn of the century the proliferation of print media and theatrical performances ushered in a new wave of alternative entertainment and modernized ideas of sexuality. The author pays homage to this era by spotlighting such entertainers as black singer and drag king Florence Hines and "gender-deviant" male impersonator Ella Wesner, who "was praised for offering top-to-toe looks that didn't simply use tailored, masculine-esque clothing to show off her female form." Yet as this visibility increased, so did factions of detractors who called homosexuality immoral and criminal. However, as Brooklyn's population bloomed, so did its ever evolving queer presence, especially in the 1920s, even while police continued to arrest people for cross-dressing. Employing a dynamic combination of meticulous research and impassioned prose, Ryan familiarizes readers with the precarious post-Prohibition-era atmosphere before moving on to World War II, when control and arrests of queer Americans precipitated a great vanishing of the culture in Brooklyn and beyond. The author insists on its overdue appreciation, and he offers a richly evocative chronicle filled with notable queer game-changers. "If this history shows one thing," he writes, "it is the resourcefulness of queer desire, which found ways to express itself long before America even had words for it. With the dawn of the new millennium, queer Brooklyn has rebounded with a fierceness and a cultural relevance that threatens at times to outshine Manhattan." With a sharp eye for detail and a knack for vivid re-creations, Ryan eloquently contributes to an "old queer history" he believes has become needlessly "piecemeal and canonless."A romantic, exquisite history of gay culture.

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February 15, 2019
? Queer history has always been piecemeal and canonless, Ryan writes. Happily, his new book brings many of those pieces together in a fascinating portrait of gay life in Brooklyn from 1855 to 1969. He begins his examination with Walt Whitman and, in that context, introduces his readers to the Brooklyn of the nineteenth century, especially its waterfront, which looms large in Ryan's history as almost a leitmotif. His work proceeds chronologically as it charts the evolution of queer life in the borough. A number of celebrated creative types figure prominently, and Ryan gives generous attention to the likes of poets Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Places as well as people are featured, notably the house at 7 Middagh Street that became home to Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Gypsy Rose Lee, and more. Greater attention is given, however, to those who, once influential, have now been forgotten. Bringing them alive again is one of the valuable services Ryan's fine work contributes to queer history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)