#hugh ryan

[makingqueerhistory]

“Because queerness is not a vertical identity, so long as our society sees personal care as something that should mainly come from the nuclear family, there will always be queer people in need of care.” ― Hugh Ryan, The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (Affiliate link)

[librarycards]

If you love something but don’t know how to acknowledge your emotions, try to destroy everything you enjoy about it; if you find yourself back there anyway, perhaps it was meant to be.

Hugh Ryan, Safety Third.

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Nonfiction Books Bracket: Round 2

Choose a book:

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan

Voting ended onJun 13

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Endorsement from submitter: "Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House is the best book I have ever read. It’s, in fact, my very favorite book. It’s a memoir about interpersonal partner violence and abuse in sapphic relationships. Machado frames her abusive relationship as “Dream House.” Each chapter is the “Dream House” told through the framing of a literary device. The Dream House as a limerick, as the erotic, as a choose your own adventure. It is a piece of remarkable writing and functions not only as a memoir but a piece of queer theory and an analysis of sex, desire, abuse, and trauma through a unique lens. It is the book that made me want to write again, it’s one of the books that fundamentally changed me as I am. I cannot recommend it enough."

For years Carmen Maria Machado has struggled to articulate her experiences in an abusive same-sex relationship. In this extraordinarily candid and radically inventive memoir, Machado tackles a dark and difficult subject with wit, inventiveness and an inquiring spirit, as she uses a series of narrative tropes—including classic horror themes—to create an entirely unique piece of work which is destined to become an instant classic.

Nonfiction, memoir, experimental

When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan

Endorsement from submitter: "Queer historical research can be difficult. But the author does his darndest. The book features a lot of research on Brooklyn's role as a shipping hub, especially during the 1940s, and how the port of Brooklyn helped facilitate same-sex relations."

The groundbreaking, never-before-told story of Brooklyn’s vibrant and forgotten queer history, from the mid-1850s up to the present day.

When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. No other book, movie, or exhibition has ever told this sweeping story. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history—a great forgetting.

Ryan is here to unearth that history for the first time, and show how the formation of Brooklyn is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created the Brooklyn we know today. Folks like Ella Wesner and Florence Hines, the most famous drag kings of the late-1800s; E. Trondle, a transgender man whose arrest in Brooklyn captured headlines for weeks in 1913; Hamilton Easter Field, whose art commune in Brooklyn Heights nurtured Hart Crane and John Dos Passos; Mabel Hampton, a black lesbian who worked as a dancer at Coney Island in the 1920s; Gustave Beekman, the Brooklyn brothel owner at the center of a WWII gay Nazi spy scandal; and Josiah Marvel, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum who helped create a first-of-its-kind treatment program for gay men arrested for public sex in the 1950s. Through their stories, WBWQ brings Brooklyn’s queer past to life.

Nonfiction, history

[gatheringbones]

[“Fingerprinting was pioneered on women arrested for prostitution for a few reasons. First, there were many of them, so the police had a large pool upon which to experiment. Additionally, previous anthropometric techniques of tracking criminals (what were known as Bertillon measurements) had been developed on men, and they didn’t work well on women. Most importantly, however, women who were repeatedly arrested for prostitution were considered naturally criminal—like “perverts,” or drunks, or vagrants, or “born tireds.” As their deviant bodies supposedly led them to commit crimes, it made sense to track those bodies themselves.

Thus a stunning perversion of justice was accomplished: recidivism became a stand-in for being born bad. Judges began to base sentencing not on the crimes in front of them but on a biologically based assumption of inherent criminality—the “proof” of which was a previous history of arrests. That recidivism might indicate a failure in the system, or that the arrested individual might be experiencing persistent poverty, societal persecution, racism, misogyny, etc. did not seem to occur to the rich, white, straight men who made the system.

This leads to the final reason fingerprinting was pioneered on arrested prostitutes: they were considered fundamentally disposable, and if it turned out that fingerprinting did not work for identification, “the consequences of an error in a prostitution case was not all that dire.”Unless, of course, you were the arrested person. Soon, fingerprinting would be expanded to other disposable classes of feminine people, particularly abortionists and men arrested for homosexuality. Only after it had been thoroughly tested on these groups would fingerprinting be expanded to common procedure.

Fingerprinting put women like Mabel Hampton at a unique disadvantage: unlike men, they couldn’t give a fake name to avoid outstanding warrants or hide previous arrests. Unsurprisingly, the Fingerprint Bureau found that during the 1920s “the problem of the female offender [grew] increasingly difficult.” In the Department of Correction annual report for 1929, they speculated this was caused by “the comparative emancipation of woman, her greater participation in commercial and political affairs and the tendency toward greater sexual freedom.” Or, they acknowledged later in the report, “the figures may merely represent an increased activity on the part of the police.”]

hugh ryan, the women’s house of detention: a queer history of a forgotten prison, 2022

[closet-keys]

Although today we assume there existed a uniform ignorance and silence around queer identities pre-Stonewall, by the 1920s and 30s, our modern ideas of sexual identity were being developed and discussed openly in some places, including the criminal legal system. […] in the late 19th and early 20th century, social workers, medical professionals, psychiatrists, newspapers, and the criminal legal system spread the idea of "the homosexual": a person attracted to people of the same gender, emotional stunted, morbidly obsessed with sex, predatory, and unidentifiable (perhaps even to themselves). Jen Manion, author of Liberty's Prisoners, one of the few other books to look at women's prisons historically, points out that at this moment, gender nonconformity ceased to be seen as a discrete phenomenon in and of itself. Rather, it was considered a sign of something innately different and pathologizing inside a person, homosexuality. In this new schema of identity, your sexuality was rooted in your mind, so your body was only, at best, a clue to who you were. [...] These ideas were brewing in Europe and eventually America by the late 19th Century. But it would take the popularization of Freudian psychology in the early 20th Century to give them mass appeal. For working class people with little access to higher education or books about sexuality, which were usually banned or heavily regulated, a primary vector spreading these new ideas was the criminal legal system. Because homosexuality was seen as preventable and/or curable, unlike inversion, the work of preventing and curing it became the job of those concerned with the welfare of young women.

- Hugh Ryan, The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

[book51ut]

review of when brooklyn was queer by hugh ryan

i love how tongue in cheek the name of this book is. a real interesting read - a history book of queer new york. i think i knew a lot about new york’s queer history from 1980 onward, but this book ends at around 1970. it’s wild to watch a city develop and see how queerness crops up and around in response to it. there’s also just so much fucking history. that’s a general statement. soooo much history in the world. so many stories ti tell. of all the queer stories mentioned in this book, there are thousands more. this has to be the first time i’ve read the story of a Black crossdressing vaudeville performer in the 1910s, but why is that. i read a lot of queer history and literature. we talk about the richness of queer history but it is so much richer and deeper than we think it is. i’m reminded of deep sniff which is a book about the history of poppers. someone asked me “is there a history of poppers” and like Y E S and u should know it bc (a) it’s fascinating and (b) it is so deeply linked with culture and culture is Everything and Everywhere and All The Time.

i also think a lot when i read books set in new york of my family. obviously im a multi generational new yorker. my families set up shop here when they immigrated, i grew up in queens. but im reading about amazing queer history in the 1930s and 1940s in new york and knowing my grandparents lived through it. it was all around them and maybe they didn’t know it … or maybe they did. there are 100s of photos of them in the 50s at coney island and this book talked about how all the working class straight italians would go down there and cruise. and guess what my family was full of… working class straight italians. and even if they were not participating, my family’s history was happening concurrently. so crazy to just imagine those parallel lines and all the places that maybe they got close or even touched without realizing it.

anyway i recommend the book i think history is good for ur general education level and queer history is better for the soul than a fucking biography or lincoln or some shit.

[theoutcastrogue]

How Queer History Is Buried ❧ Current Affairs

Hugh Ryan, author of “The Women’s House of Detention,” on excavating the stories of LGBTQ+ people from before Stonewall.

The Women’s House of Detention was a prison in the heart of Greenwich Village, at the intersection of Sixth Avenue, Greenwich, and Christopher Street. If you’re familiar with Greenwich Village today, there’s a large, beautiful library called the Jefferson Marquette Library with a big clock tower on Sixth Avenue that used to be the women’s court. The garden next to it now was formerly a twelve story maximum security prison, which sometimes held upwards of 800 people at a time.

But, it’s not the first prison in Greenwich Village—it’s there for a reason. Prisons have been part of Greenwich Village life since the late 1700s and have been constitutional to the area. When the Women’s House of Detention opened up in the early 1930s, it was because the women’s court was already there. The women’s court acted as a courtroom, not for all arrested women, but for any woman arrested at night in any part of New York City—all five boroughs, not just Manhattan where Greenwich Village is—for prostitution or public intoxication. It was a social responsibility court.

The truth is, women, in general, end up arrested not for violent crimes against people or crimes against property—like robbery or arson—but for crimes against the social order, for being the wrong kind of woman, and for crimes that men almost never get arrested and certainly do not do time for in the way that women do. This prison located in Greenwich Village (starting in the 1930s), with this court (built in the 1910s), aggregates women who are improperly feminine every year up to World War II, up to the most homophobic time in America when gay bars are being raided and people are being arrested on the streets. The city is bringing every improperly feminine woman it can arrest down to Greenwich Village, creating the queer vibe of this neighborhood and helping to define what queerness is for America. Greenwich Village, and San Francisco, became the vision of queerness.

So, this prison is incredibly important. It was, like I said, on Christopher Street, 500 feet away from the infamous Stonewall Inn where the uprising happened in June 1969. The women and trans men in the prison could see Stonewall from some of their windows and participated in the riot. They set fire to their belongings and threw them out the windows while chanting, “Gay rights, gay rights!” They had a riot all their own. But this part of the story of Stonewall, like the prison and the women and trans men who pass through it, has been suppressed, ignored, and hidden at every turn.

[qbdatabase]

Daily Book – The Women’s House of Detention

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical p

The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.

Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women’s House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.