When Brooklyn Was Queer.
By Hugh Ryan
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.
In 1855, Brooklyn, Walt Whitman, and homosexuality were all being ignored. Brooklyn was a small suburb of its larger, more vibrant neighbor; Whitman had written for newspapers and published his only novel; homosexuality was all around, but rarely acknowledged. In this excellent social history, Hugh Ryan takes the publication of Leaves of Grassthat year as his starting point and charts with admirable depth and even more admirable zest the history of queer life in Brooklyn.
He uses the word “queer” because he is interested in virtually any deviance from mainstream sexuality. At one point or another he gives detailed accounts of the lives of sex workers, transsexuals, transvestites, effeminate men and masculine woman. The book spends almost as much time on the lives of lesbians as it does on gay men and is wonderfully clear about the different forms their oppression took and their different responses to it.
If there is a weakness in the book it is its tight focus on Brooklyn, which is in service to a thesis that states that Brooklyn – and in particular the Brooklyn waterfront – is key to understanding the history of queer America. There are times when Ryan seems to be bending his narrative out of shape to stay focused on Brooklyn, while his definition of waterfront is necessarily flexible – it includes the docks, Brooklyn Heights and Coney Island, among other places. This focus is not without its merits. Ryan establishes clearly that the Brooklyn waterfront was a vibrant and diverse social scene that quickly – it explodes in the mid 19thcentury after the completion of the Erie Canal – becomes a site for sexual energy and variety that was suppressed in other parts of the city. Likewise, his focus on Brooklyn lends his work a specificity and detail that would be hard to sustain in a broader history. However, some of his characters spend minimal time in Brooklyn (Carson McCullers, for example) and many others live lives that make it clear that – while one can find a distinct queer community in Brooklyn – the borough also acts as part of larger NY community, with many people in the book (including Whitman) moving back and forth across the river.
However, these are minor weaknesses. There is voluminous research synthesized here, and the information is handled with insight and intelligence. Ryan takes on issues of race and sexism throughout while also analyzing how diverse historical phenomena like the development of the subway, vaudeville and public housing affect the queer community. He is especially strong on the ways that World Wars I and II impact sexual expression in New York. A secondary but important idea that accompanies his focus on the Brooklyn waterfront is his refutation of the argument that the trend in queer rights has been consistently towards greater freedom and openness. He provides plenty of evidence that the periods during war provide new freedom and opportunity to both gay men and lesbians and that both world wars are followed by renewed repression.
The chief strength of the book is the clarity and liveliness of the prose. Ryan makes sure his own voice dominates the text and sometimes include asides that bring the reader into his enthusiasm –with disgust at the way queers were treated at some points and with bemused humor at the ingenuity with which the same people found and created spaces to be themselves. For instance, his analysis of how mass transit opened up the lives of queer people includes the idea that “If subway cars were like packed clubs, tossing New Yorkers against one another millions of times a day, then the men’s room was decidedly the after party.”
Ryan picks up on ideas presented in George Chauncey’s Gay New Yorkregarding the 19thCentury belief that sexual activity was distinct from gender expression. In Ryan’s analysis, there is little concept of sexuality as a part of identity prior to about 1910 and the popularization of Freudian notions of sex. According to both Chauncey and Ryan, men and women have always had same sex contact without feeling the need to make that part of their identity. And social approbation was largely reserved for those who challenged gender norms – masculine women and effeminate men: butches and fairies. Ryan is especially strong on viewing this phenomenon through a class lens, providing evidence that the acceptance of same sex activity was far greater among the poor and working class than it was in society’s upper regions. According to Ryan, with the establishment of the ideas of sexuality and sexual identity as fixed concepts – that grow out of both the development of psychology and eugenics – comes the social condemnation of queer life. That condemnation is never stronger than in the decades after World War II when queer sexuality is seen as not just abnormal, but absolutely dangerous.
For both Chauncey before him and Ryan, simply reversing this hatred, so that people who identify as gay or lesbian, trans or queer are accepted and allowed full social participation will not be enough. They implicitly call for a change in the way we think of identity – to divorce it from transitory practices like fashion and sexual contact, to allow everyone to be fully themselves.
If is a challenging idea, presented here with forceful intelligence and panache.
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