Der Autor und Kurator Hugh Ryans neues Buch When Brooklyn Was Queererzählt die verborgene Geschichte von LGBTQ+ des Bezirks von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis kurz vor dem Stonewall-Aufstand. Das heutige Brooklyn ist als vielfältig und queer-freundlich bekannt – aber es war nicht immer so. „Als ich aufgewachsen bin“, sagt Ryan, „würde man daran denken, aus Brooklyn zu fliehen, wenn man darüber nachdenkt. Aber in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren gab es diese Räume, in denen man in Brooklyn gehen könnte, um diese besonders queeren Erfahrungen zu machen.“
Mit WorldPrideum die Ecke haben wir uns mit Ryan getroffen, um über diese Erfahrungen und einige der berühmten schwulen Figuren des Bezirks zu sprechen.
Walt Whitman in the engraved frontispiece from Leaves of Grass, by Samuel Hollyer, 1854
You start your book in the mid-1800s with Walt Whitman, who some refer to as the “Bard of Brooklyn.”
Hugh Ryan:
Whitman’s family moved to Brooklyn by the time he was 4, and stayed there for many years. He moved a bunch but mainly lived in Dumbo and the Brooklyn Heights area. He published
Leaves of Grass
at the Rome Brothers Print Shop, at the intersection of Cranberry and Fulton Streets, which is Cadman Plaza now. The one remaining building he lived in is 99 Ryerson Street, over by the Navy Yard.
Whitman had a very modern sense of himself as a person who was different because of the way he loved others. In reading
Leaves
, you can see he was trying to work out what that means; to try to come up with words for those feelings.
He loved manly, working-class men that he met along the waterfront—and the waterfront itself is a great place of cultural mixing.
Women contemplating the Sands Street entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, c. 1942. Courtesy, Brooklyn Eagle Photographs – Brooklyn Public Library – Brooklyn Collection
Where on the waterfront was he hanging out?
HR:
I would say more the Downtown Brooklyn area—but by the Brooklyn Navy Yard too. The Navy Yard is important to Whitman, and the blocks around the Sands Street entrance in particular are where queer people met and cruised for decades.
Would you call those places you write about on Sands Street gay bars?
HR:
In the early 1900s, there are records of bars on Sands Street where the patrons, when they’re being arrested, say “all the men here are like us.” That’s the earliest evidence of a place we might call a gay bar. By the 1930s, people were coming to bars on Sands Street and the surrounding area to find trade and sailors. Most of these were not strictly gay bars, as women and straight people were also customers. But queer people were going to them for queer experiences. You look at the diaries of [New York City Ballet co-founder] Lincoln Kirstein, and he says he’s bringing Sergei Eisenstein to Brooklyn to find this bar they’ve heard about there.
St. George Hotel, 1943. Courtesy, the Irving I. Underhill photograph collection – Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library – Brooklyn Collection
Another important site in the book is the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights.
HR:
The St. George was one of the biggest hotels in the world in the late 1800s. A lot of the admirals or higher-ups who came to the Navy Yard would stay there. It started to get a reputation as a place where men could meet for clandestine affairs. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was known as a spot where the lifeguards at the pool were available or might know men who were available.
Hart Crane, c. 1920. Courtesy, the Richard W. Rychtarik/Hart Crane Papers; MSS 103; box 1; folder 3; Fales Library and Special Collections
The poet Hart Crane was a resident of Brooklyn Heights for many years too, right?
HR:
He was at 110 Columbia Heights, in the same building as the couple who worked on the Brooklyn Bridge, Emily and Washington Roebling. They’d lived in the same room.
There’s a fascinating story about Roebling in your book.
HR:
When he was courting his wife, Emily, they sent each other a lot of letters. She asked him once if there was anyone he would want to contact via a séance, and he said the only person was this friend from college, who had killed himself because Washington didn’t sufficiently return his affections. Washington had saved the letters this guy had written, which are all full of his protestations of love. This would have been around the 1850s, and it’s clear that Roebling loved and cared for him—even if not in perhaps the way he wanted.
February House. Courtesy, Brooklyn Historical Society
With people like Hart Crane and Marianne Moore living in Brooklyn Heights, it almost sounds like a mini Greenwich Village.
HR:
Starting in the 1900s and up to the 1960s, it’s the bohemian area of Brooklyn, and the architecture is similar too. You get less of a grid, you have these beautiful older buildings and then in the 1950s you have [avant-garde filmmakers] Willard Maas and Marie Mencken living there—the two people that
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
is based on. Then you have the queer filmmaker Kenneth Anger living in their building for a while, when he makes
Scorpio Rising
. And you get the
folks too.
After the waterfront and the Heights, the third part of this Brooklyn gay triangle is Coney Island. How did it become important to queer life in the late 1800s?
HR:
It’s a place where everyone can go; you have a huge portion of the population of New York going to the beach at the same time. So that, combined with this already open sexual culture—you’re wearing less and going to bathhouses—contributes a lot to it. The Washington Baths and Stauch’s had a queer reputation. You also have a lot of acts performing there around gender, whether it’s a bearded woman or a female impersonator or a male impersonator, like Ella Wesner. She had intense sexual and romantic relationships with women, and when she died she asked to be buried in men’s clothing.
What’s your favorite queer spot in Brooklyn today?
HR:
I still think Coney Island is an amazing queer space. One of the folks I became close to when I first moved to the City was Jennifer Miller, who was then performing as the lady with a beard. There’s still this endless beach you can have fun on, and the
is a celebration of costume and fun. The other one is the
in Park Slope—you can just go and do research. The stuff they have inside is amazing.
Am 22. Juni wird Hugh Ryaneine Tour durch den Brooklyn Navy Yardüber seinen Platz in der lokalen Geschichte von LGBTQ+ führen. Sie wird mit Turnstile Tours for WorldPride präsentiert und endet in den Sands Street Gatehouses der Kings County Distillery.