What a brilliant way to tell a history.
With specificity and care.
Digging into the flawed archive, giving up the burden of proof.

I have been meaning to read this forever and I was not disappointed. Ryan goes into detail about all sorts of periods in Brooklyn's history: the era of Walt Whitman, the navy yard and the waterfront which was a huge place for queers to meet, the artists who lived there in the 1920s and 1930s, including a commune (Auden, Carson McCullers, composers, singers, etc.), the early Black queer history, the incredible queer life going on during WWII. All of this is interesting, but what makes this book shine is Ryan’s approach to history. He talks about how when he started writing the book, most queers he knew didn’t think Brooklyn had much of a queer history. 

So he digs into it, showing not just that queers lived and thrived there, but talking about how we do history, and how queer history is so often hard to see because of who’s in charge of the archive. So much of the history of queer lives in early Brooklyn, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, comes from police records and arrests, and from medical establishments—doctors interviewing trans people, police raids, etc. This archive is not in the words of queer people, and so in order to find the true history there is so much digging and reworking of the archive you have to do. He is so careful to think about not only his sources but about how they came to him, not only who is talking and remembered but who isn’t.

He also traces a simple but fascinating history of the progression of ideas about gender and sexuality in 20th century America. One thing I can’t stop thinking about is this idea that “gay” and other identifies, i.e. the homosexual as an identify, is quite new, and in the early 20th century it was all tied up with gender and also behavior. There is this idea that it’s hard to live a life if you can’t name yourself, it’s hard to live a queer life if you don’t have access to ideas, and there is truth in that, but the reverse is also true: if something isn’t named, it is harder to hate and legislate against that thing. There was a lot of freedom in Brooklyn before Word War II—cruising, sex workers, gay artists in relationships, working class folks and women in factories, sailors having sex with men—and it wasn’t always remarked upon or punished. All this was happening before “homosexuality” became a thing. When straight people finally started to study queer people and define sexuality as something that defined a person, that was innate, it became easier to legislate against queerness

So a huge part of this book is about the history of ideas and how they affect queer life, and also about how this idea of progress as a straight line is totally false. So much of queer history has been lost or is unremembered and unrecorded—not because it doesn’t exist, but because people didn’t think of themselves in the terms we use today. I love that he gets into this.

This history is more straightforward and direct than Wayward Lives, but I think it is trying to do a similar thing, in that Ryan is looking between the lines, and he’s also using his own vantage point, i.e. taking people at their word, rather than requiring a burden of proof. His ideas and understanding of queernesses is expansive, esp. in relation to people like Marianne Moore or Willa Cather, both of whom were queer but didn’t fit into a lesbian box. And he’s able to use his own vantage to write all of that as queer history without dissecting it or forcing these people he’s studying to adhere to modern understandings of queerness and gender. 

I was so moved by the care he takes to write about people, how he examines his own biases, thinks about the stories he isn’t telling. I also thought it was so smart and interesting how deeply he looked at the built environment of the city and its infrastructure and it affects queer life. The subway and public restrooms created places for gay men to cruise, so queer life flourished. Coney Island was deeply queer, in the spaces it offered, in its working class origins and its bathhouses. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was massively important, as were various same sex environments, like the factories where butch women found work during World War II. The Brooklyn Bridge, which connected Brooklyn to Manhattan. The February House commune and other private apartments that became spaces where queer people could gather. Specific streets known for cruising, sex work, queer clubs. How Robert Moses (evil) helped destroy Brooklyn as a flourishing center of queer life. All of this is to say that this book does an incredible job showing how deeply place, environment, infrastructure, public space, buildings, etc. affect culture and queer life.