When Brooklyn Was Queer: if you don't know you have a past, how can you believe you have a future?
31 May 2019.

by Drew Rowsome -

When Brooklyn Was Queer can be read for all the fascinating gossipy details and stories about our queer ancestors and be a compelling read. Author Hugh Ryan writes with a breezy stylish flare that, despite the copious footnotes, is more novelistic than historical and keeps the pages turning. And what characters he has to work with drag queens like Foley McKeever aka The Great Ricardo, drag kings Ella Wesner and Florence Hines, poets from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane to Harold Norse, burlesque stars Gypsy Rose Lee and Madame Tirza, and fleets of sailors. All queer icons.

Brooklyn wasn't always a suburb of New York City. At various times in history - and Ryan takes the reader from 1855 to 1969 - Brooklyn eclipsed New York City as an important shipping port, industrial centre and entertainment destination. While New York City had Greenwich Village, Broadway and Harlem as queer incubators, Brooklyn had the docks, an ever evolving series of bars and less than legitimate theatres, and Coney Island. Ryan traces how queer life, before there was even a concept of queer, thrived on the fringes.

While the sailors, often situational or gay-for-pay, were a large part of the creation of the history, Ryan also notes how women working during the war was a godsend for lesbians and trans folk. But Coney Island gets a good share of the attention. As the beachfront grew from elite resorts to the massive entertainment complex it became before being considered immoral and tacky and was driven into its current shabby state, queers were always there. Long before Ward Hall, sideshows and burlesque were welcoming to queers and the sexually non-conforming, but Coney Island also had a thriving cruising scene and multiple bathhouses that, while not today's explicitly sexual businesses, were sexual hotbeds. It is absorbing, incredible reading.

Ryan spends a lot of thought on how architecture, urbanization and progress have affected queer life. How the queer experience intersected with other marginalized groups, particularly the black community. And of course sex work is also crucial to the development of the queer world. The docks were home to many sex workers of all genders and persuasions, and there is a particularly vivid visit to a male brothel, with an attendant gay Nazi spy scandal, that flourished briefly. Briefly is the key word.

The cumulative effect of When Brooklyn Was Queer is not just a history of queer life in Brooklyn, it is an incisive examination of how we deal with queer history. So much historical research and writing does not even consider queer. Much of Ryan's research was done reading between the lines in news articles and scouring police reports. Our history is to be found in arrests and scandals. Ryan is able to chronicle the bustling brawling Brooklyn bar scene by finding which bars were busted and why. The trans sex-worker Loop-the-loop, who deserves to be a folk hero, is recorded only because they were a research subject of Dr Robert Wilson Shufeldt who wrote important and scholarly books like The Biography of a Passive Pederast and The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization.

Repeatedly, Ryan is forced to reiterate his point that much of our history no longer exists and even more has been maligned if not actively erased. He begins with an anecdote about Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee who lived at 7 Middagh Street in a shared house with WH Auden, Chester Kallman, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Paul Bowles and other luminaries. He then travels back in time to try to piece together what history he can find. The narrative is not seamless, some stories are lost, some queers will never be remembered the way they should be, but it is never less than exhilarating. 

It quickly becomes obvious that what today would be heroic and admirable, was then immoral and often illegal. And if it wasn't illegal, someone like the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice would find a way to make it so. The winding moral dilemma of the creation of a treatment program for gay men arrested for being caught having sex in the '50s is dizzying. One of the founders was religious zealot, the other a gay man who occasionally consorted with the felons. There are so many ambiguities and possibilities.

So one can read When Brooklyn Was Queer just for fun, or if one has a fascination with what is now, after a long dry spell, geographically a homo hipster haven, or one can marvel at queer resilience and determination. Ryan brings Jane Barnell the bearded lady, Bill the sailor and rent boy and "one of the gorgeous men in 1940s Manhattan," artist and prolific letter writer Mary Hallock Foote, and Thomas Painter who chronicled his search for trade at Coney Island for Alfred Kinsey, to the forefront where they should exist. They are all incredible inspiring people.

Ryan ends When Brooklyn Was Queer saying ". . . queer history has always been piecemeal and canonless - a mutual endeavour of shared love." And the tag line to the pop-up museums, much like the exhibits at the ArQuives, that inspired and accompany When Brooklyn Was Queer, is the succinct "If you don't know you have a past, how can you believe you have a future?" This past is a glorious if scattershot one that is a pleasure to discover. And it bodes well for a stellar future.