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When Brooklyn Was Queer, and this writer's novel.
'"Look its Dom's painting."
Dominyka Obelenyte at WERQ: We’ve Been Doing This Our Whole Lives a
Group Exhibition June 8-30, 2019 NOGO
Kendall Thomas, my old hero from ACT UP and SexPanic!
"Look at this amazing #WhenBrooklynWasQueer installation by Aaron Sciandra, currently installed at City Point BKLYN! All #Pride long, I'll be retweeting any portraits taken in front of it - just look fabulous & tag me (@Hugh_Ryan)! (And thanks to Bob Krasner for this pic of me!)"
Caption by Hugh Ryan
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THE
BUREAU’S SUMMER EXHIBITION OPENS ON JUNE 14: Y’ALL BETTER QUIET DOWN IMAGE:
BUTTONS FROM THE LGBT COMMUNITY CENTER NATIONAL HISTORY ARCHIVE Y’ALL BETTER
QUIET DOWN JUNE 14 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2019 OPENING RECEPTION ON FRIDAY, JUNE 14,
2019, 6-9 PM COMPANION EXHIBITION AT LESLIE-LOHMAN MUSEUM JUNE 6 – JULY
21, 2019 CURATED BY NELSON SANTOS AND JEANNE VACCARO
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Plenty Coups
an afternoon in queer brooklyn
All
weekend I read and tried to pull it together for my conversation with Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer,
about Brooklyn Tides, cities and queer spaces.
To be frank, I was floored.
I think When Brooklyn was Queer is
about the best book I have read about Brooklyn. I want to talk about everything.
The invitation for the event situates the conversation:
Hugh Ryan’s 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 queer
women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. 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. That Ryan unearths. Shepard and Noonan’s
work explores similar themes of cultural erasure as spaces of difference are
forced to contend with seas of identical details encroaching. What will become
of Brooklyn? Tracing the emergence of Brooklyn from village outpost to
global borough, Brooklyn Tides investigates the nature and
consequences of global forces that have crossed the East River and identifies
alternative models for urban development, providing an ethnographic reading of
the literature, social activism, and ever ebbing
tides impacting this transforming space. The formation of the
Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible
people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Ryan and Shepard
will discuss a few of these narratives, comparing Brooklyn with historically
queer spaces such as Manhattan and San Francisco, unpacking the cross currents
and cultural tides from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village, East Coast to West,
Fulton to Market Street.
All weekend, I read, preparing for
the Sunday talk.
But before that, the Saturday meeting with the activist informed reading club in Prospect Park.
The day was glorious.
It felt like the whole world was in
Brooklyn.
The farmer’s market was pulsing,
People riding.
Taking in the sunshine.
Making plans.
Darting to and from Brooklyn Pride.
As the activist informed reading group, alternately
referred to as the Barbie Dream House Activist Reading Club discuss Jonathan
Lear’s
Radical Hope:
Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, his investigation of what happens when a culture dies. Lear’s “main subject[is]the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century… tak[ing] as his basic text a statement by the tribe’s great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: ‘When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.'"
Nothing happened?
Stories break,
worlds disappear.
Difference fades.
And knowledge disappears.
It is a story that
repeats itself again and again.
So how do we respond?
What kind of courage
is required when our worlds disappear?
We should be
asking the same thing.
As if it’s a study of the climate.
As if it’s a study of the climate.
Of all of us.
Can any of us act courageously
toward a future of uncertainty?
Finishing our talk,
Caroline was meeting us at
540 President Street,
Where Dom’s painting
was hanging in a show:
“WERQ: We’ve Been
Doing This Our Whole Lives a Group Exhibition June 8-30, 2019 NOGO Arts and the
Brooklyn Art Cluster present a group exhibition with over 30 artists and 60
pieces exploring queer work and labor at the Cluster Gallery in Gowanus. Part
celebration and part provocation, WERQ looks at how LGBTQ artists and art
challenge notions of production effort, and work. NOGO Arts partnered with the
Brooklyn Community Pride Center (BCPC) to promote the open call, and WERQ will
have a special BCPC section of the show...The Cluster
Gallery at Playground Brooklyn 540 President Street – BD Brooklyn, NY 11215”
We stay up late.
The whole city feels alive
And queer.
Sunday I wake up early wondering about
Brooklyn.
Questions popping through my head
with each page of When Brooklyn Was Queer.
Reading about queer spaces and meeting places, jails and piers, waterfronts and saloons, clubs and toilets, literary salons and bridges, Hart Crane and his friends, Carson McCullers and the February
House, queeruptions and communities, anarchists and club kids, bearded ladies and freak shows,
tides and bridges, poets and insurrectionaries,
Mabel Hamilton and Lesbian Herstory Archives, Eve Adams and the tearooms,
Sands Street and a cat and mouse game of
expression and repression reverberating
through time.
“We all do it” confesses Loop the
Loop
Who is the we, asks Hugh Ryan.
It’s a question worth asking over
and over again.
Hart Crane made friends as fast as he lost
them.
Yet, he reminded us a bridge can be
a way of imagining a space in between water
and space, one life and another.
Waterfronts are liminal
spaces.
Hugh and I chat away.
Can Brooklyn be a queer space?
If so how?
Where are queer spaces, or places of difference?
Can it be a heterotopia?
It’s a space for queer practices, Hugh explains,
An archipelago where we connect.
Where sailors and sex workers, entertainers and bartenders,
entertainers and saloonkeepers share space.
Most of the time, the narrator is concealed.
But there are times when he sticks his head into the conversation,
Reminding us his work is an investigation into an ever evolving
subject, with ebbing and ever
shifting definitions from Leaves of Grass to Stonewall.
Early in the book Martin Boyce, a Stonewall
veteran who suggests queer Brooklyn takes countless shapes.
From spaces
where sailors meet, to Coney Island
to the waterfront.
I find myself thinking
of an interview about the
piers in Greenwich village, when a young man, told me there were queer piers in Brooklyn. But
for the most part he hung out at the Christopher Street Piers:
“…the Piers was a place where you
can go no matter what age you were and be you.
If you were flamey or loud or you were boisterous or you couldn’t be
that way where you were from, Brooklyn where I
was from, you came to let your hair down.
You became you and then you transformed back when you were home. I became the way I wanted to be all the
time. But I couldn’t be that way because
of norms of society didn’t allow me to be that way. Other people were being themselves no matter
which way they wanted to be themselves.
Drag queens, transgenders. They
had piercings, tattoos. They had androgynous
people. Everybody not considered the norms could go there and be themselves and
not looked at any other way.”
The implication is that where he comes
from, Brooklyn was not a place where
you could “be that way.” But still, there was another queer pier in Brooklyn.
But where?
It's a mystery.
But where?
It's a mystery.
There are countless queer spaces,
quieter spaces, mythic piers.
Secret places, such as the
Vale
of Cashmere.
But as Hakim Bey points
out in The Temporary Autonomous Zone,
once the authorities discover
a TAZ, it usually disappears or is shut down.
That’s what happened
with Critical Mass bike rides; its what happened with Sands Street.
We’d spend the
afternoon trying to describe that geography.
Cultural archipelago is
a better way of thinking of it, suggests Ryan, reminding us that Mabel Hampton lived in Harlem,
worked in Coney Island, and hung out at
129 McDougal with Eve Adams in the West Village.
Or did she?
In my mind, queer Brooklyn
is everywhere the Rude Mechanical Orchestra plays, or drag performers put in a show
at House of Yes,
Jennifer Miller
organizes a trapeze show,
The Cirkus Amok plays.
It’s a queer place
without a gayborhood
like Castro or West Village.
It's a
space narrated with poems,
of Whitman, Hart Crane,
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
“Walt Whitman and
Brooklyn were intimately connected in Crane’s cosmology,” posits Ryan.
But how did Park Slope
become a lesbian neighborhood,
Asks an audience
member.
Geography,
affordability, accessibility to Manhattan
Or was it one
restaurant some lesbians opened in the 1970s?
Ryan tells us about
several of his favorite characters in the
book, each creating,
resisting, struggling against homogenizing, blandifying tides encroaching?
The 19th
century was about discovering queer selves, the 20th century about
policing and controlling, posits Ryan.
The Committee of 14
policing,
Cracking down on Rains Law Hotels,
Schackno Bill providing
ammunition.
Still queer spaces shift, with theater and friends, subways
to saloons,
toilets and jails where
people connect throughout an
ever expanding, shifting queer geography.
When Brooklyn was Queer
is a prehistory of what we are,
A history of
anarchists and queers, finding
common cause.
Then and now.
Bearded ladies at Coney
Island,
then and now.
Queeruptions at Dumbo.
We all do it…
Are all of us the we?
Sometimes it feels like it.
I feel an affinity with Carson McCullers,
from the Columbus where my mother grew up,
on 1519 Stark Street,
just outside my home town,
escaping the provincial restrictions for a more
abundant world.
Sometimes it feels like it.
I feel an affinity with Carson McCullers,
from the Columbus where my mother grew up,
on 1519 Stark Street,
just outside my home town,
escaping the provincial restrictions for a more
abundant world.
We could have talked
all afternoon.
Riffing on tides and recurrence,
of constituting/creating separate
institutions,
Lesbian Herstory Archives and Occupy Sandy.
A story of a global borough
and cosmopolitan ideas,
does Brooklyn's idea / image of queerness spread?
How is our idea of queerness already changed by global ideas?
Could we ever live up to Whitman’s call for us to create a true city of friends?
Hart Crane made friends as fast as he lost them.
We could only talk so long.
The afternoon passes.
Kendall and Jonathan say hi.
Our city of friends demands we go out and enjoy the sunshine.
Eve's tearoom. 129 McDougal Street
The activist informed reading group in action.
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