Much of the information Ryan gathered was from sources who hated the LGBT community – and increasingly so as it was studied and categorized. Then there is The February House – a Brooklyn townhouse that was once home to WH Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee and which also hosted Salvador Dalí, his fearsome wife and muse Gala, and the writers Paul and Jane Bowles (a cast that would make the most cerebral Celebrity Big Brother house ever).īut the book also excels in uncovering what life was like for “ordinary” queer folk such as Loop-the-Loop, a trans woman and sex worker from Brooklyn at a time when “trans” was not part of the vocabulary (Loop preferred “fairy”) and Coney Island’s working-class gay bath houses. The book is studded with the stories of Brooklyn-based A-list gays of yesteryear: Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Truman Capote.
I used Brooklyn as an example of how things were developing in the world and America generally.” “You could chart the two against each other. “Brooklyn’s growth runs along the same timeline as the evolution of our modern ideas about sexuality,” says Ryan. Shortly before that, the Erie Canal finally connected the city to the Great Lakes, bringing jobs and the urbanization that allowed queer life to flourish – especially along Brooklyn’s waterfront. One recurring theme in his research that fascinated Ryan was how Brooklyn’s rise from rural backwater to New York’s second city mirrored the rise in interest in sex and gender studies and – sadly – the rise in homophobia, bigotry and abuse.Ĭonstruction on the Brooklyn Bridge started in 1869, the same year that human rights campaigner and journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny first used the terms homosexual and heterosexual. “They said to me when you are done with this grant you should have your book proposal written.” Ryan started collecting information and then got a grant from the Martin Duberman Fellowship in LGBT studies at the New York Public Library. It’s probably from the 1970s and all of 10 people have read it. “I thought I’d just go to the library, get the book about queer Brooklyn history. “People just didn’t know Brooklyn’s queer history,” says Ryan. When they decided that they should do a Brooklyn event, they put out a call for information and got little reply. Ryan and his friends had done shows about local queer history in other cities but never in Brooklyn, where many of them lived. The book grew out of Ryan’s other project, The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, a sort-of travelling museum that creates installations celebrating the histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.