Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER

Hugh Ryan

The never-before-told story of Brooklyn's vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present day.

Hugh Ryan's When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history?a great forgetting.

Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time. In intimate, evocative, moving prose he discusses in new light the fundamental questions of what history is, who tells it, and how we can only make sense of ourselves through its retelling; and shows how the formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Through them, When Brooklyn Was Queer brings Brooklyn's queer past to life, and claims its place as a modern classic.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn. He is the Founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and sits on the Boards of QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Buzzfeed, the LA Review of Books, Out, and many other venues. He is the author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, and is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, and a 2018 residency at The Watermill Center.
Available products
Book

Published 2019-03-01 by St Martin's Press

Comments

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...A romantic, exquisite history of gay culture. (starred review) Read more...

With meticulous research and fierce compassion, Hugh Ryan brings stories and communities almost lost to history to vivid life. Ryan's brilliant work is a thrilling portrait of the endurance, resourcefulness, and indefatigable joy queer people brought to bear upon the challenge of their own survival. This is an essential book, and I'm more grateful to it than I can say. (Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You)

A monumental achievement. (Ira Sachs, filmmaker)

Fascinating.... A number of celebrated creative types figure prominently.... 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.

A delicious, fun, and moving study, cohered and popularized from generations of queer historians and deepened with new and exciting primary research. Hugh Ryan's love for queer Brooklyn is page-turning, intersectional and an engrossing read. (Sarah Schulman, Stonewall Book Award-winning novelist and AIDS historian)

Ryan, founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, debuts with a lively, character-filled portrait and well-researched analysis of Brooklyn's queer social landscape between Walt Whitman's 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass and the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan...This evocative and nostalgic love song to the borough and its flamboyant past offers a valuable broadening of historical perspective. Read more...