When I moved to New York, it was to Brooklyn, like a good millennial queer, in part in search of a sexual community I felt I was missing. But the job I’d found was in Manhattan and I began to explore the city for signs of entry. It struck me as strange, as I walked from one bar in the West Village to another in the East, how the community I was seeking seemed only to exist in a few institutions between these few avenues, and from there had radiated across the world to call me to it. This was of course a ludicrous thing for me to believe—for one thing, there were bars and parties all around my apartment. But as a newcomer, my orientation was toward Manhattan and I couldn’t yet see the borough I had landed in as pertaining to the fantasy of my New York sexual self.

WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER: A HISTORY by Hugh Ryan St. Martin’s Press, 320 pp., $29.99

It is this error that Hugh Ryan’s new history attempts to correct. When Brooklyn Was Queer proceeds on the assumption that my mistake is widely shared. In his epilogue, he recounts how he also once assumed that Brooklyn had no history of queer community to speak of before the new millennium, when people like he and I (that is, the children of suburbanization) began to move there. But once he began to look for it, he discovered a rich past, from lesbian welders in the Navy Yard to queer culture in bathhouses and freak shows in Coney Island. His larger argument is that “the development of Brooklyn would track with the development of modern sexuality” for roughly a century from 1855 to 1965, when the borough’s postwar industrial decline and urban renewal would also bury these communities. The unique experience of queer communities in Brooklyn during this time, he argues, formed the prehistory to the modern gay liberation movement and its signal event, the Stonewall riots. It’s a satisfying retort to the idea that there was nothing queer there before.

A hungry archivist, Hugh Ryan unearths vivid material to populate this story. Taking the Brooklyn Heights publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a starting point—sure, why not?—he depicts early queer lives around the city’s waterfront, from the neighborhoods of Red Hook to the Navy Yard. Brooklyn Heights and the city’s “pulsing heart,” Fulton Ferry landing, are consecrated in verse by a poem of Whitman’s, which, Ryan ventures, might contain the first description of cruising in American literature. “Brooklyn’s waterfront offered the density, privacy, diversity, and economic possibility that would allow queer people to find each other in ever-increasing numbers,” he writes, echoing John D’Emilio’s argument that the emergence of sexual identity reflected the economic transition from family-centered household production to a society where people depended on a wage to support themselves. One result of this was the birth of communities of sexual interest in cities, and port cities like Brooklyn above all.

Whitman kept a daybook listing the working-class men he made sexual advances toward, a record of the cruising spots and practices of 1860s Brooklyn:

Gus White (25) at Ferry with Skeleton boat with Walt Baulsir—(5 ft 9 round—well built) Timothy Meighan (30) Irish, oranges, Fulton & Concord James Dalton (Engine-Williamsburgh)



These cruising spots were informal, collective institutions. They could only be maintained by a widespread knowledge among the men of the city, and by extension, indifference on the part of the city’s repressive forces. At the time, there was no concept of sexuality as a fixed aspect of a person’s being, nor was homosexual conduct being actively policed (Ryan finds a total of 63 people imprisoned on sodomy charges in the entire US as of 1880, of which 5 were in New York). Thus the public and private spaces of Gilded Age Brooklyn were able to host lively cultures of sexual contact.