Publisher's Weekly Review
Ryan, founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, debuts with a lively, character-filled portrait and well-researched analysis of Brooklyn's queer social landscape between Walt Whitman's 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass and the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. Ryan asserts that queer communities develop where there is available work for queer people and identifies the Brooklyn waterfront as offering appealing opportunities for the "sailor, artist, sex worker, entertainer, and female factory worker." In the late 19th century, Ryan recounts, when culture was highly segregated by gender, sex between sailors and "Boston marriages" among women went largely unnoticed. Queerness became more visible in the decades prior to WWI, when psychologists labeled gay people as "inverts" (i.e., having inner traits of the "opposite" sex), gender-nonconforming behavior was criminalized, and female drag performers challenged gender roles. In the 1930s and '40s, Brooklyn saw the flourishing of a vibrant artistic community whose queer players included magazine editor George Davis, novelist Carson McCullers, and poet Marianne Moore. Postwar, Brooklynites such as Curtis Dewees and Edward Sagarin founded early "homophile" activist organizations. Ryan acknowledges that much well-known history focuses on cis white gay men and is careful to curate available materials about the experience of lesbians and black people, drawing from letters and reading between the lines of reports of crime or deviance. This evocative and nostalgic love song to the borough and its flamboyant past offers a valuable broadening of historical perspective. Photos. Agent: Robert Guinsler, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A century and a half of Brooklyn's queer history.A longtime Brooklyn resident and founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, Ryan pinpoints the establishment of a homosexual presence there in the mid-1800s with the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and the development of the area as a major port. Around the turn of the century the proliferation of print media and theatrical performances ushered in a new wave of alternative entertainment and modernized ideas of sexuality. The author pays homage to this era by spotlighting such entertainers as black singer and drag king Florence Hines and "gender-deviant" male impersonator Ella Wesner, who "was praised for offering top-to-toe looks that didn't simply use tailored, masculine-esque clothing to show off her female form." Yet as this visibility increased, so did factions of detractors who called homosexuality immoral and criminal. However, as Brooklyn's population bloomed, so did its ever evolving queer presence, especially in the 1920s, even while police continued to arrest people for cross-dressing. Employing a dynamic combination of meticulous research and impassioned prose, Ryan familiarizes readers with the precarious post-Prohibition-era atmosphere before moving on to World War II, when control and arrests of queer Americans precipitated a great vanishing of the culture in Brooklyn and beyond. The author insists on its overdue appreciation, and he offers a richly evocative chronicle filled with notable queer game-changers. "If this history shows one thing," he writes, "it is the resourcefulness of queer desire, which found ways to express itself long before America even had words for it. With the dawn of the new millennium, queer Brooklyn has rebounded with a fierceness and a cultural relevance that threatens at times to outshine Manhattan." With a sharp eye for detail and a knack for vivid re-creations, Ryan eloquently contributes to an "old queer history" he believes has become needlessly "piecemeal and canonless."A romantic, exquisite history of gay culture. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Queer history has always been piecemeal and canonless, Ryan writes. Happily, his new book brings many of those pieces together in a fascinating portrait of gay life in Brooklyn from 1855 to 1969. He begins his examination with Walt Whitman and, in that context, introduces his readers to the Brooklyn of the nineteenth century, especially its waterfront, which looms large in Ryan's history as almost a leitmotif. His work proceeds chronologically as it charts the evolution of queer life in the borough. A number of celebrated creative types figure prominently, and Ryan gives generous attention to the likes of poets Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, and Marianne Moore. Places as well as people are featured, notably the house at 7 Middagh Street that became home to Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Gypsy Rose Lee, and more. Greater attention is given, however, to those who, once influential, have now been forgotten. Bringing them alive again is one of the valuable services Ryan's fine work contributes to queer history.--Michael Cart Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FURIOUS HOURS: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep. (Knopf, $26.95.) Cep's remarkable first book is really two: a gripping investigation of a rural Alabama preacher who murdered five family members for the insurance in the 1970s, and a sensitive portrait of the novelist Harper Lee, who tried and failed to write her own book about the case. LOT: Stories, by Bryan Washington. (Riverhead, $25.) This audacious debut collection, set in the sand- and oil- and drug- and poverty- and resentment-soaked landscape of Houston, is a profound exploration of cultural and physical borders. SEA PEOPLE: The Puzzle of Polynesia, by Christina Thompson. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.99.) Mystery has long attended the inhabitants of the Pacific's far-flung islands: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how? Thompson explores these questions, with a particular focus on the early Polynesians' incredible navigational skills. WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, by Hugh Ryan. (St. Martin's, $29.99.) This boisterous history captures the variety and creativity of the sexual outsiders who congregated around the economic hub of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a flourishing center of gay life from the middle of the 19 th century until well into the 20 th. THE GLOBAL AGE: Europe 1950-2017, by Ian Kershaw. (Viking, $40.) In a time of uncertainty and harsh political division, Kershaw's book is a valuable reminder that Europe's recent history was a period of enormous accomplishment, both politically and economically, achieved against obstacles that make many of today's troubles seem minor by comparison. THE PARISIAN, by Isabella Hammad. (Grove, $27.) This strikingly accomplished first novel, set in the early 20th century and modeled in part on the life of the author's grandfather, captures the fate of a European-educated Arab, a man divided, like his native Palestine. NORMAL PEOPLE, by Sally Rooney. (Hogarth, $26.) Rooney dramatizes with excruciating insight the entwined lives of a high school couple as they mature into college students, bringing to light how her contemporaries think and act in private, and showing us ourselves in their predicaments. RABBITS FOR FOOD, by Binnie Kirshenbaum. (Soho, $26.) After a New Year's breakdown, the heroine of this furious comic novel checks into a Manhattan mental hospital and starts taking notes. OPTIC NERVE, by Maria Gainza. Translated by Thomas Bunstead. (Catapult, $25.) In this delightful autofiction - the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English - a woman delivers pithy assessments of world-class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
Ryan, an independent writer and historian, charts the history of queer Brooklyn from 1855 until 1969 through stories of the queer waterfront, the criminalization of queer behaviors and bodies, World War II, and "the great erasure," where the book ends in 1969. This text broadens the queer geography of New York City beyond Harlem and Greenwich Village and extends the queer community beyond the standard binary of gay men and lesbians to encompass an inclusive and expansive assemblage of people. Perhaps more important, the author addresses erasure: the social and political forces between 1945 and 1969 that forced many queer spaces to close and queer people to migrate. Ryan weaves a compelling narrative that enlivens queer history for advanced scholars and undergraduates alike. The book ends on a hopeful note: "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." This is an essential text for readers of all levels. Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels. --Caro Pinto, Mount Holyoke College