A lot of people forget that Whitman, the grand daddy of American gay<\/a> literature, made his home in Brooklyn and observed many facets of what gay<\/a> life was like in 19th century in his writing. WH Auden, Truman Capote, and Christopher Isherwood all appear but really serve as a backdrop to the real stars: the working class men<\/a> and women<\/a> who lived on the margins and\u00a0 the constant influx of sailors that came through the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Ryan finds other documented stories of queer life in police records for sexual perversion and in the records of doctors who carried out \u00a0pseudo-scientific research on queer (especially trans<\/a>) bodies.<\/p>\n Ryan told Towelroad<\/em>, \u201cThe working class was more open to all kinds of non-marital sex<\/a>, not just same-sex<\/a> or gender nonconforming desires. Many of these communities were predominantly immigrant, and the ratios of men<\/a> to women<\/a> were all out of whack, making marriage less of an option. Men and women<\/a> inhabited separate social spheres, and had little access to private spaces where they could meet together \u2013 but at places like the municipal baths or aboard ships, men<\/a> (and to a lesser degree, women<\/a>) had chances to gather together in semi-private places. Also, new ideas about sexuality-as-an-identity were more common among upper-class people, and those ideas gave an added level of risk to same-sex<\/a> desires, because now not only were you participating in an activity that might be frowned upon, that activity defined who you were as a person.\u201d<\/p>\n Above: Hugh Ryan<\/em><\/p>\n Ryan says the very richness of the queer history of Brooklyn was also a lesson in and of itself about the hiddenness of LGBT history, still to this day.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be honest, I wrote this book because I had a very\u00a0basic\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>revelation one day: though I had a degree in Women\u2019s Studies, grew up the child of New Yorkers in the suburbs of New York City, had lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade, and had worked in the field of queer history for years, I knew absolutely nothing about the queer history of Brooklyn. I\u2019d accepted that the story of queer New York revolved around Manhattan: Greenwich Village, Harlem, Chelsea, Times Square, etc. So discovering that there was (more than) enough history to fill a book was a real eye opener.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n When Brooklyn Was Queer<\/em> comes out in hardcover on March 5th.<\/p>\n You can pre-oder it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The post \u2018When Brooklyn Was Queer\u2019 Uncovers A Hidden History<\/a> appeared first on Towleroad Gay News<\/a>.<\/p>\n