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[title]As the world comes to New York for WorldPride this month to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that took place in the West Village, it’s worth remembering that not all of NYC’s LGBT history has happened in Manhattan.
In fact, a thriving queer community was centered on the Brooklyn waterfront for almost a century—from the 1840s up until the post-war era. That community is largely the focus of Hugh Ryan’s fascinating new book When Brooklyn Was Queer, Time Out Book Club’s June pick. Ryan recently joined us via Skype to talk more about his historical page-turner, and answer some questions we had about his work.
Our book-inspired cocktail this month is the “O Captain! My Captain” and is inspired by Walt Whitman. It was created by Freehold’s beverage manager Jonas Pelli. “The color is deep green with botanical flavors for the Leaves of Grass-theme,” says Pelli. “[It’s] herbal on the nose and front tongue with a slight citrus and cucumber finish.”
Check out the recipe below and read on for our Q&A with Ryan! Check in next month for our interview with Ben Dolnick on his novel, The Ghost Notebooks, our July pick.
Photograph: Courtesy Freehold
2oz Gin (Hendricks)
.5oz Fernet Branca
.75oz Matcha Agave Syrup
.5oz Lemon
Cucumber
Muddle 3 slices of fresh cucumber in a shaking tin. Add ice and all ingredients. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds. Strain into coupe glass. Garnish with slice of fresh cucumber.
Thanks for joining us, Hugh! Your book covers a lot of history featuring many figures. Why did you choose the figure of Walt Whitman as a starting point?
Well, there were two reasons. One, I knew that people would know who Walt Whitman was and because so much of what I was teaching people about in this book, not only the individual stories but sort of this bigger arc of the development of sexuality in America, was unknown to people, I wanted to start with a familiar thing. So that’s why I started with Stonewall and then with Walt Whitman. The other reason was that although I could find some evidence of individual queer people in Brooklyn pre-Walt Whitman, I couldn’t find evidence of people who saw themselves as connected to a community through their sexuality, through their gender identities. That really is what Whitman did, though. There's clearly the existence of a community in his writing. Whereas, before that point, I have isolated individuals—It’s not the same thing. So for all those reasons, I felt like Whitman made a great way in.
Building off of deciding who or what to include in the book, did you find it difficult knowing who to include when our ideas of sexuality have changed so much? Whether to include someone as part of a queer history or not—depending on whether they would’ve been thought of as that in the past?
What I thought about was what I wanted to mean by the word "queer," and I realized that it was a connection through sexuality and gender identity—but mostly through marginalized existence. So, for example, I include some bearded women who I don’t think would have ever thought of themselves as we today think of queer people. But their existence was marked off by the difference of their gender and so they fit into my kind of expansive defintion of queer. I think in part because of that they really did see themselves as different through their gender even if they didn’t think to themselves, "I'm queer," because of their gender. So that’s how I made those decisions.
How did you discover this link between the growth of the queer community in Brooklyn and the waterfront and what was that connection?
That actually came about fairly early on and was the first major breakthrough in the research. I was finding all of this information about the waterfront: People living on the waterfront, a developing idea of the waterfront... I thought, what is it about the waterfront? I quickly realized that it was two connective things: One: It’s kind of the oldest part of Brooklyn as a city. Two: The reason it’s the oldest part of Brooklyn is because of the economy it produces. What I was really seeing was that the waterfront provided jobs which enabled queer people to live queer lives and to, perhaps, disconnect themselves from their families of origin, or from their religious backgrounds, and express themselves more fully. And also that these areas were industrial, so they were often less policed and full of people passing through. They had that kind of anonymity, privacy and density that all enabled queer people to find each other.
Speaking of the professions and industries that let people lead these lives, another one you highlight is the entertainment world. You describe so many fascinating old venues, things like the Gaiety Theater. Are there many landmarks that you describe still around today?
Unfortunately, a lot of the landmarks have been destroyed over the years or they’ve been repurposed in ways that you wouldn’t recognize them anymore. I write about the brothel on Pacific Street. It’s still there, but it just sort of looks like an anonymous two-story brownstone. There’s a lot about Coney Island, that’s still there, but it’s changed over so many times that you won’t ever notice the history. There are some places, like the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, that was a cruising area in the 1950’s and you can still go and see that. You can see the remains of the St. George Hotel which was a really important gay cruising ground back at the beginning of the twentieth century. But today it’s divided up into a deli and an athletic gym. It’s not what it once was, you know.
At the end of the book, you have a really surprising, interesting thesis about how one of the main factors leading to the end of this Brooklyn queer community was the automobile, as opposed to what other people might think of was the moralizing forces of the ‘50’s, which also played a part. How did the automobile play a role in that?
I actually connect both of those forces. It’s not just the automobile, it’s suburbanization. What the automobile does is it enables us to live far away from the places, these urban-dense centers that make queer life, urban life and modernity possible. In Brooklyn what ended up happening was that people no longer needed to live near these neighborhoods that had once been so important along the waterfront. Then, as container shipping and over-land shipping replaced the kind of shipping that came to the Brooklyn waterfront, they contributed to the downfall of the economy. And once the economy starts to slide all the communities that were supported by it slide along with it.
Last of all, you talk about how the huge queer community in Brooklyn now is separated and distinct from this past queer history. Have you found any surprising ways in which the past history that you’ve discovered has influenced or played a role in Brooklyn’s current queer life?
Absolutely. I think that one of the things that I say in the book is that there’s this really important suggestion that Weeksville, which is an early community of people of color in Brooklyn, was probably really important for queer black people because it gave them the same kinds of freedoms that the waterfront provided for queer white people. That neighborhood, Weeksville, is still majority people of color. It’s not called Weeksville anymore, it’s called Crown Heights. But if you go to Crown Heights, you can see that there has been a resurgence of queer black bars which had been there for so long. And that’s happening right at the time where the story of the waterfront that I’m telling is falling apart. Skylight Lounge opened in the late ‘50’s/early ‘60’s and then a number of other bars open up with it. So you can see that linkage is still there.