Movg To LGBT Brooklyn? How To Fd Your Perfect Gay Neighborhood!

Contents:

• A GAY UPLE RAN A RAL RTRANT PEACE. THEN NEW NEIGHBORS ARRIVED.
• GAYT PLAC IN OH FOR 2020
• MOVG TO LGBT BROOKLYN? HOW TO FD YOUR PERFECT GAY NEIGHBORHOOD!

A GAY UPLE RAN A RAL RTRANT PEACE. THEN NEW NEIGHBORS ARRIVED.

For five years Hugh Ryan has been huntg queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public librari, among s urt rerds and yellow newspaper clippgs to build a picture of their lost rult is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tenr and disturbg history of LGBT life that starts an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothg and ends before the Stonewall rts started the morn era of gay book grew out of Ryan’s other project, The Pop-Up Mm of Queer History, a sort-of travellg mm that creat stallatns celebratg the histori of lbian, gay, bisexual and transgenr and his iends had done shows about lol queer history other ci but never Brooklyn, where many of them lived. ”One recurrg theme his rearch that fascated Ryan was how Brooklyn’s rise om ral backwater to New York’s send cy mirrored the rise tert sex and genr studi and – sadly – the rise homophobia, bigotry and abe. Constctn on the Brooklyn Bridge started 1869, the same year that human rights mpaigner and journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny first ed the terms homosexual and heterosexual.

GAYT PLAC IN OH FOR 2020

Photograph: Fal RychtarikThe book is studd wh the stori of Brooklyn-based A-list gays of yteryear: Walt Whman, Hart Crane, Tman Capote. Then there is The Febary Hoe – a Brooklyn townhoe that was once home to WH Aun, Benjam Brten, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee and which also hosted Salvador Dalí, his fearsome wife and me Gala, and the wrers Pl and Jane Bowl (a st that would make the most cerebral Celebry Big Brother hoe ever) the book also excels unverg what life was like for “ordary” queer folk such as Loop-the-Loop, a trans woman and sex worker om Brooklyn at a time when “trans” was not part of the vobulary (Loop preferred “fairy”) and Coney Island’s workg-class gay bath of the rmatn Ryan gathered was om sourc who hated the LGBT muny – and creasgly so as was studied and of those groups was the Commtee of 14, a group of morally righteo New Yorkers who drove for prohibn, then agast (straight) prostutn and, on disverg the queer muny, went after them, too. Durg prohibn, gay and straight bars merged while durg the war, queer life flourished as sailors poured to town, tegori were looser than today and – aga wh veats – there was Ryan.

“There was even this perd ‘the pansy craze’ where was fashnable to have limp-wristed men movi who may have been gay or trans or entirely outsi that movi. The repeal of prohibn drove gays and straight apart and the queers went unrground where the police – and the mafia – me after them. In 1942, Senator David Ignati Walsh’s reer was stroyed a sensatnal sex sndal that volved mours that he had equented a gay Brooklyn brothel that was beg ed by Nazi spi.

The New York Post, which had fought for the US to jo the war agast Germany when Walsh was set agast , broke the story which beme known as “Swastika swishery” thks Walsh was probably gay but that the claims he attend the brothel were brothel’s owner, Gtave Beekman, and several others were arrted. “The legacy of all of this is when we get this turn towards homophobia – 45 to Stonewall or the early 80s – there is this really negative ia that gay life is sad, small, limed, dirty, paful, persecuted.

MOVG TO LGBT BROOKLYN? HOW TO FD YOUR PERFECT GAY NEIGHBORHOOD!

Anytime before Stonewall that was what gay life was, when really was jt what gay life was like when gay life was beg speakable most of Ameri and was gettg s history wrten, ” says Ryan.