In Hugh Ryan's new book, When Brooklyn Was Queer (out today from St. Martin's Press), the historian and frequent them. contributor chronicles the surprising, oft-forgotten queer history of Brooklyn, whose LGBTQ+ past is often overshadowed by that of Manhattan and other New York City boroughs. Yet his work proves that Brooklyn's queer history is as vital as any, tracing the growth and suppression of its queer community and historical figures alongside the story of the 21st century in America. From Walt Whitman to drag king Ella Wesner to poet Hart Crane, from a gay Nazi spy sex scandal to an antifascist queer intelligentsia scene that flourished during World War II, the borough's queer stories are enthralling and revealing. Below, the introduction to When Brooklyn Was Queer lays out how Ryan went about uncovering this history, the unexpected places it took him, and what it says about New York City, America, and queer culture today.
In 1969 — the year of the Stonewall Riots in New York City — Martin Boyce was just 21 years old, part of a pack of young, loud, unapologetic queens who hung out at the Stonewall Inn. The surrounding streets of the West Village were their stomping ground, the one area of the city they could lay claim to. Today, nearly a half century later, Boyce is telling me about those days as we sip cappuccinos and watch those same streets teem with affluent locals out for a walk on the first nice day of spring.
“The late sixties was the last hurrah of the turf situation in New York City,” he says, his fluting voice now gravelly with age. “And it turned out that Christopher Street was our turf. We didn’t even know until the riot occurred and we had to defend it.”
Boyce is voluble and sweet, making his tales of assaults, arrests, and constant, casual harassment all the harder to hear. For every block he recalls another beating, for every neighborhood another gang. He tells me how queers learned to survive, and how that hard-won knowledge, which was literally beaten into his bones, made the Stonewall Riots possible.
“Anywhere you’d go, you’d have to be ready,” he recalls with a sigh. “I was attacked in the Bronx, attacked in Brooklyn. Go to the movies? You’d be attacked. But whatever happened, we’d manage to meet up again, right in the vicinity and safe. That made us excellent urban guerrillas, because we knew how to break and reform. That kept the Stonewall Riots going for hours.”
Days, actually. From June 28 to July 1, 1969, some of the most marginalized people in the country — the homeless, poor, sex workers, drug addicts, people of color, homos, dykes, queers, and queens — became an irrepressible force, fighting back against the routine police harassment they experienced. In that moment, they realized the Village was theirs.
“Nobody was against us, that’s for certain, even if they weren’t joining us.” Boyce talks with his hands, driving the point home. “You could see it in their eyes: ‘I can’t do this, but do it for me.’ And all the straight people that were trapped in it were guided out. Because it wasn’t against straight people. It was against the police.”
For nights on end, Boyce and his friends led the cops on a merry chase, smashing windows, throwing bricks, and rewriting the history of the world. Boyce tells me they knew it, all of them, almost instantly. Afterward, it was in the air. Something had changed.
“I remember going down the street, maybe four or five days after,” he tells me. “I was loud, so they could tell what I was. And there was a sanitation man throwing bags into the back of the truck. He saw me, and he raised his fist in the power salute.”
Boyce pauses for a moment, nodding emphatically to himself, looking at his hand unconsciously curled into a tight fist — memory made flesh. Around us, the clatter of cups and spoons, laptops and ringtones, fades away. I can feel him drifting backward in time, and when he speaks again, his voice is strained and quiet. “Because a lot of people — the ones that were fair in their hearts and minds! — knew that we were really oppressed. To see that man . . . like that . . .”
For a while I think Boyce is done talking, overwhelmed by the memory. The seconds tick down on my digital recorder. Then suddenly he smirks, showing his teeth. “It was amazing.”
These days, Boyce would remind you of nothing so much as a sweet gay Santa, but back then, he was a “scare queen,” which meant he wore just enough makeup to “freak out the straights.” From California to New York (and everywhere in between) it was people such as Boyce — those who couldn’t or wouldn’t hide; the ones black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “the never straight” — who acted as the foot soldiers of the gay revolution. Forever after, those three days in the summer of ’69 have been cited as the birth of the modern gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights movement.
But I’m interested in what came before. If Stonewall represents the start of the modern gay movement, who (and where) were we before? Before Stonewall, before gay rights, before the word gay even meant anything other than “happy”? And my eyes are set a few miles to the east. The island of Manhattan has always been one showy queen, her skyscrapers of sexual visibility casting long dark shadows over the benighted “outer boroughs.” The intertwined stories of three neighborhoods — Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Harlem — have come to stand in for the queer history of the city as a whole. But for the last six years, I’ve been talking to folks such as Boyce, asking them one big question:
What about Brooklyn?
“Brooklyn?” Boyce’s head dips back, considering. He’d seen every part of the city, because his father was a taxi driver. I figured he could give me a good lay of the land. “Brooklyn had cachet. It was the only rival to Manhattan in hipness. Queens was nondescript. The Bronx was nonexistent to us. And Staten Island, of course, was meh. But Brooklyn! Brooklyn boys had the edge. They’d come from Kings Highway in a testosteronic show, with their DAs, and their cars polished to death, every amazing color.”
Cliché as it is, my heart starts to beat faster. Here we go, I think.
But the boys, it turns out, were there for Boyce’s sister, whose name “was dirt in Yorkville” because she dated them — good girls didn’t go Brooklyn back then. So much for my hopes for a gay(er) version of Grease.
Rarely, I’ve learned over the years, do people consider queer, Brooklyn, and history in the same sentence without a bit of prodding. Brooklyn has always been the “sub” to Manhattan’s “urb,” and most accounts of “New York’s gay history” give it short shrift. Moreover, the stereotypical image of “Brooklynites” has always been one of tough broads and street-smart greasers, working-class men and women whose heterosexuality was as pronounced as their broad New York accents. Scratch that straight surface, however, and Brooklyn’s queer history comes pouring out, full of poets, sailors, undercover cops dressed as sailors, brothels, sideshows, communes, rough trade, Nazi spies, trans men, dancers, machinists, pathbreakers, mythmakers, and more. And with every archive I riffle through, that “and more” becomes more, and more, and more.
But it’s unusual that I get the chance to talk to someone who lived through some of the history I’m researching, since I’m mostly interested in the 111 years between 1855 and 1966 — between when Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass and when the US government shuttered the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Those years span the waterfront’s explosive rise, its decades of prosperity, and its precipitous decline — and they coincide neatly with the emergence of our modern ideas of sexuality and gender identity, making it possible to chart one against the other. Boyce, born in 1948, with a direct connection to the most well-known moment in queer New York history, is a rare find. I nod encouragingly and he speeds up, memories coming quicker now.
“Brooklyn had a lore: the Dodgers. The language from the movies of the thirties. Murray the K’s rock-and-roll show. Coney Island!”
Ah, infamous Coney Island: the most libidinous 442 acres in all of New York City, where Mabel Hampton, a black lesbian dancer, found her first real job in 1920. Home to the bathing pavilions where modernist poet Harold Norse had his sexual awakening. The spot where Jane Barnell performed as Madame Olga, the Bearded Lady. The place that most likely inspired Jimmie Monaco’s wacky 1925 song “Masculine Women! Feminine Men!” If anywhere in New York City could be labeled definitively queer — not gay, not lesbian, not trans, but queer; odd and subversive and sexually different — it’s Coney Island.
“Tell me about Coney,” I prompt Boyce.
“Well . . .” He hesitates, grimacing. “That was a sexually permissive area. It had a name, you know? A reputation. Anything could happen at Coney Island. But!”
He stops short, his eyes wide with remembered anxiety.
“There was not one area of Coney Island that we could go to.” He shakes his head. “It just wasn’t ours. Even when all the queens got together — we’d go to the zoo, to the beach, to the museum — we never went to Coney Island. It was inviting trouble.”
Another dead end, I think to myself.
Researching Brooklyn’s queer history is a bit like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole: just when I think I know where it’s going to pop up, it fakes me out. A queer moment in time fluoresces briefly, glows brightly, fades, and is forgotten. The further back you go, it seems, the briefer the shine. Without much in the way of community institutions or even social organizations to pass information around, queer life in Brooklyn, pre-Stonewall, was a many-splintered thing. And in the years before the words homosexuality and heterosexuality existed, that life was a very different experience. Some days, it feels as if I’m trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture will look like. Plus I don’t know how many pieces there are. I’m pretty sure I’m missing a lot of them, and with every new piece I find, the others look a little different. For now all I can do is keep collecting them and hope for some coherency later.
“So… what were the gay places in Brooklyn when you came out?” I ask.
Boyce gives a snorty little laugh. “There was a scene going on in Brooklyn, on the Promenade. A local scene,” he clarifies dismissively. “It wasn’t really hip enough to attract the Stonewall group. You went there once, just to know what it was.”
I bite my tongue, wanting to let him talk, to to hear what he has to say without prejudicing it with what I already know: that once upon a time, Brooklyn Heights — home of the Promenade — was one of the city’s known queer neighborhoods, a fact few people remember (or were perhaps ever aware of). Hints linger, however. According to the US Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey, the three New York City neighborhoods with the highest percentage of same-sex couples are Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and Brooklyn Heights. While the number of conventionally married gays is an imprecise stand-in for the actual size of the LGBT community in an area, it does suggest a long-term, settled community. But by Boyce’s time, that community was almost entirely sub rosa, driven underground by conservative forces in the 50s and 60s, and overshadowed by Manhattan’s wider, wilder scenes.
“How’d you hear about the Promenade?” I ask Boyce. This is the other part of my quest: to find out not just what people knew about Brooklyn, but how they knew it. Before schools taught it, televisions aired it, or books published it, how did people learn about gay life and gay history?
“The older queens.” Boyce laughs. The word obviously hands in the air, unspoken but strongly implied. “They’d relate a campy story at the bar, and then you’d get into what’s behind the story.” The funnier the queen, Boyce remembers, the more likely you were to listen.
After we chat for a little longer, it seems as if Boyce has run out of things to say. It’s amazing how little of Brooklyn’s rich, full, and complicated queer history has been passed down, even among queer people who were in the know. But I start asking about specific places, hoping to jog Boyce’s memory.
The St. George Hotel, where the poet Hart Crane once cruised? “It wasn’t a place you’d go, you know, but it was… known.” Known as what, Boyce can’t quite say, just that it was a place that existed on the queer map of the city he inherited one story at a time; a landmark with no history.
Sands Street? Boyce shrugs; the most infamous red-light district in Brooklyn, where Carson McCullers and W. H. Auden hung out with sailors and queens, means nothing to him.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard? “In decline, but famous in the past.” He smiles and bites his lower lip. “Sailors,” he nods conspiratorially.
The yard was decommissioned in 1966, the last in a series of crippling blows to Brooklyn’s waterfront economy, so it makes sense that Boyce wouldn’t know much about it. Yet perhaps no other single site in Brooklyn has contributed so much to its queer history. There, lesbians found work and economic freedom in the factories of World War II; gay men from all around the country were thrown together in close quarters during their naval service; and queer sex workers of all genders found ready customers and unpoliced streets upon which to ply their wares. This points to perhaps the one constant I’ve found in my research: early queer life flourished where there were jobs queer people could have. Those jobs were often low earning, low skilled, sometimes illegal, and frequently dangerous; but they paid. And often, they were along the waterfront — a pattern that holds true in Brooklyn and Manhattan (as well as San Francisco, Boston, London, and most port cities where anyone’s bothered to do the research).
Later, when Boyce is telling me about his time in the West Village (itself a waterfront neighborhood), he puts that connection into words.
“Whether Brooklyn or Manhattan, the waterfront is always the same,” he tells me. “Cruisy. Dangerous. Lonely. Attractive in that noir way that a lot of gays like — as I do myself.” He grins.
Long after our conversation ends, his words stay with me. Boyce is right: visit any major port city and you’ll find sex along the waterfront, or at least a history of it, usually an unseemly one that no one wants to examine too closely. But “queer sex” and “queer community” are like smoke and fire — see one, and you can infer the other. After all, you can’t have sex until you have two (or more) people who want the same thing.
Over and over as I’ve looked into Brooklyn’s queer history, I’ve found that the trails lead back to the waterfront. It’s true, as the gay liberation slogan says, that “we are everywhere” — but we’re some places a whole hell of a lot more than we are others. Queer life in Brooklyn began by the water, and spread outward.
It’s impossible to pinpoint an exact moment when that happened. Every true story starts in the middle, at the somewhat arbitrary point that the storyteller has chosen. But it is possible, in the sweep of history, to pick out moments that are emblematic, turning points after which something is definitely there, where it may or may not have been before.
For my queer history of Brooklyn, that moment is the 1855 publication of Walt Whitman’s masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn became a major port city thanks to the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825; Whitman — and Leaves of Grass — stands in for an entire community of white men who had sex with other men, who found each other along the waterfront as business boomed in the mid-1800s. However, the economic freedom the waterfront offered was more limited for women and black people in the nineteenth century, and I trace these exclusions as a way of showing how and why white men are often the earliest queer ancestors we can find. Queer women don’t appear in this historical record until author and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote moved to Brooklyn Heights in the 1860s, and the earliest records of queer people of color date to the 1890s. However, by the time the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, Brooklyn was already being described as “the second city of the Empire,” after Manhattan (with which it would united in 1898). Soon, queer people of all kinds would flock to its shores.
From there, I chart Brooklyn’s queer history from the turn of the 20th century onward: The public’s enthrallment with queer performers and the growth of a public conception of “homosexuality” in the late 19th and early 20th century; the eventual backlash against public homosexuality in the 1910s; the growth of queer Brooklyn in the 20s; its subsequent contraction owing to the Depression in the 30s; how the mobilization around World War II in the 40s would create almost limitless possibilities for queer people, and introduce millions to queerness (their own or others) for the first time. Brooklyn itself would become a destination for a global antifascist queer intelligentsia, thanks in large part to an artist commune known as February House. However, the very vastness of this queer world would leave its denziens completely unprepared for the extreme clampdown on sexuality that began with the war’s end.
After 1945, the story of Brooklyn’s queer community is primarily one of diminution, separation, and persecution. Not only was Brooklyn’s wide queer world destroyed, but even the memory of it was erased. In part, this had to do with the larger shutdown of Brookyln’s waterfront, and the growth of the New York City suburbs, both of which starved city infrastructure and drove huge population shifts in Brooklyn. Although new queer institutions and communities would form after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, these were only dimly connected to the vast queer world that existed in Brooklyn before.
Today, Brooklyn is undoubtedly queer again; the borough is redolent with a queerness that is more diverse, more open, and more powerful than it has ever been. What better time to restore our queer past to its rightful place in the history of Brooklyn, the history of New York City, and the history of queer people everywhere. My book traces over 150 years of Brooklyn’s queer history — an incomplete record of a story that is still being written. When Brooklyn Was Queer charts that river and is part of its current.
Excerpted from When Brooklyn Was Queer, copyright 2019 Hugh Ryan, published by St. Martin's Press.
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