On July 17, at the Cherry Grove Community House, the Fire Island Artist Residency presented author Hugh Ryan reading from his new book “When Brooklyn Was Queer” (St. Martin’s Press, 2019). To those of us living in a very queer Brooklyn and questioning the “Was” in his title, Ryan responded that, in the 1920s and ’30s, he found, Brooklyn was considered a gay destination, much as the Village and Harlem were, and wanted to find out why. Focusing on the period 1855 to 1966, from the publication of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” to the decommissioning of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, in his evocative and compelling work of love and archeology, Ryan unearths golden nuggets of queer and Brooklyn history, helping us to reclaim a virtually lost pre-Stonewall legacy. There are so many exciting finds here, as the author not only triumphantly introduces both famous and little-known ancestors and elucidates their stories, but also does not hesitate to acknowledge the tragedies that our community endured and hostility that we inspired. You’ll weep many tears, when you read his text, as Ryan bids you relive anguish that you’re probably somewhat aware of, but also tears of joy, when you discover with him historic figures that you’ll want to embrace, as you celebrate the assertions of self that they made in a distrusting and disbelieving world.
Whitman published “Leaves of Grass,” in Brooklyn on July 4, 1855. In its “Calamus Poems,” he called men his “comrades” or “camerados,” and their affection for each other, “adhesiveness.” Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Ryan writes, “contains perhaps the first description of cruising in American literature … loving those ‘who look back on me because I look’d forward to them.’” Queer writers Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter sought Whitman out. Hart Crane wrote odes to him. Chester Kallman, Harold Norse, Tennessee Williams, George Davis, and Carson McCullers were inspired to move to Brooklyn.
Whitman, writes Ryan, “had a particular fondness for swimming naked in the streams, ponds, and beaches that dotted [Brooklyn’s] landscapes.” Whitman “loved … the ruddy young men who flooded the city looking for work.” One can hardly help jumping ahead to a print of Edward F. Casey’s alluring 1939 painting “Stevedores Bathing Under Brooklyn Bridge,” “which depicts dozens of [naked] black and white men,” “horsing around on Brooklyn’s shoreline,” “toweling off in the bridge’s shadow.”
Putting his tale in the context of national and international events, Ryan points up the 1825 opening of the Erie Canal, and quotes from “The Erie Canal: A Brief History,” “within 15 years of the Canal’s opening, New York was the busiest port in America, moving tonnages greater than Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans combined” and bringing young men to work the waterfront. The presence of sailors looms large in the queer history of Brooklyn. “Sailors have always been a symbol of escape from small towns, and their long voyages, marked by single-sex isolation and exposure to different cultures around the world, provided great opportunity for sexual and gender experimentation,” writes Ryan, noting that “In …queer history …, five waterfront jobs occur again and again: sailor, artist, sex worker, entertainer, and female factory worker. Each of these jobs had particular conditions that made them more available or desirable to queer people.”
Ryan considers Brooklyn’s black neighborhood Weeksville and black queer women there, in the late 1800s, in the black women’s uplift movement, like writer and civil rights activist Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson and the woman she lived with, Victoria Earle Matthews, founder of Harlem’s White Rose Mission, the first settlement house for black women in the city. Delaware black education reformer Edwina Kruse wrote passionately to Nelson, “every thought of my life is for you, every throb of my heart is yours and yours alone.”
We meet “the reigning king of male impersonators” Ella Wesner, performing at the West Brighton Hotel, in Coney Island, and Gaiety Theater, in downtown Brooklyn, singing a song, in vaudeville in 1889, beginning, “Lovely woman was made to be loved,/To be fondled and courted and kissed,” and continuing, “There’s a chap that’s dead stuck on women and wine,/You can bet your old boots that it’s me.” ““Wesner conducted a highly public love affair with Helen Josephine “Josie” Mansfield, a minor actress whose zaftig appeal made her much more in demand off the stage than on it.” Newspapers wrote of their “unnatural attachment” and that “the relationship between them is certainly a singular one … If they want to know where [Josie] is, they have simply to notice where Ella Wesner is playing.”
We get to know black male impersonator Florence Hines, described in the 1890s as “perfection itself,” “one of the best male impersonators on the vaudeville stage.” Hines performed in “The Creole Show,” at Flynn’s Concert Hall in Coney Island in 1894. She “was so in demand that she was able to work in venues that catered to black audiences, to working-class white audiences, and (eventually) to well-off white families … For years, she ‘commanded the largest salary paid to a colored female performer.’” In Cincinnati, in 1892, “she got into a physical fight with one of her co-stars, a singer named Marie Roberts, with whom she performed a duet act. The Cincinnati Inquirer wrote, ‘the utmost intimacy has existed between the two women for the past year, their marked devotion being not only noticeable but a subject of comment among their associates on the stage.’”
Next comes an unsettling, but inevitable chapter called “Criminal Perverts,” as much of what we know of our history comes from what our enemies have reported about us. Here we find Alice Mitchell, who shot her girlfriend Freda Ward “with a revolver in broad daylight on a public street” in 1892. The Brooklyn Eagle wrote, “The two girls had been close and intimate friends and Alice had developed a strange and unnatural fondness for her girlfriend.” In 1909, James Vickers, who had worked as a fireman on an ocean freighter and came to Brooklyn looking for similar work, was raped and murdered in East New York by painter James Hagaman and architect Emerson Colburn—sodomy and obscenity laws were invoked.
There’s Brooklyn transvestite prostitute Loop-the-Loop, who took her name from the Coney Island rollercoaster ride. She was poked, prodded, and written about by notorious eugenicist Dr. Robert Wilson Shufeldt. Frank about who she was and what she did, she brought her musician boyfriend, “an intelligent young man, of about twenty-four years of age,” Shufeldt wrote, along to her last session with the doctor. Shufeldt also photographed transwoman Jennie June, who wrote “Autobiography of an Androgyne,” about her “sexual relationships with … mostly working-class white men who both accepted Jennie June as a transwoman and also frequently resorted to violence, extortion and blackmail against her.” In 1913, Elizabeth Trondle was arrested in a Brooklyn bar for “masquerading in male attire, smoking cigarettes, and drinking with men.” Trondle claimed to have spent “time working as a sailor on a ship named Dixie” and, when offered other clothes by the police, said, “They can’t make me wear it if I don’t want to, and I won’t wear it, so there.” “I’ve always been more boy than girl,” Trondle claimed.
On January 14, 1916, Antonio Bellavicini’s saloon at 32 Sands Street, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was raided when police officer Harry Saunders, disguised as a sailor, entrapped six men who propositioned him, arresting them for disorderly conduct and Bellavicini for keeping a disorderly house. Bellavicini and his lawyer fought back, but judges sentenced Bellavicini to three months in the workhouse for keeping “a place of public resort at which the decency, peace, and comfort of the neighborhood were disturbed.” Bonner’s Saloon, near 32 Sands Street, one of the rare enterprises with a black proprietor, was harassed repeatedly by the law, with one of the charges being “the presence of fairies … a very effeminate type of man.”
A happier chapter, considering the post-World War I period, introduces young black lesbian entertainer Mabel Hampton, who sang in Coney Island, the Village, and Harlem. She met a “tall, light-brown-skinned woman,” who brought her out and from whom she first heard the word lesbian. She was later interviewed extensively on tape by the Brooklyn-based Lesbian Herstory Archives. In lesbian life, “Hampton settled into the role of stud, a popular term among queer black women that was analogous to being the butch in a butch-femme couple.” In the 1920s and ’30s, “Hampton was tapped into a large lesbian network. ‘I had so many different girlfriends it wasn’t funny.’ … Her circle of friends was almost exclusively lesbian and bisexual women, though she occasionally befriended queer men at parties.” In 1985, Hampton was grand marshal of New York City’s Pride March.
Hart Crane’s inspiration for his six part epic poem “The Bridge” was Brooklyn Bridge.
“Like Walt Whitman before him, Crane had a fondness for sailors, laborers, and other working class men.” “Crane wrote, ‘I begin to feel myself very connected to Whitman.’” “Sections of ‘The Bridge’ are love poems … Crane was determined … to show that there was a space for queer love in the American mythos.” Danish sailor and journalist Emil Opffer, “with blond hair, blue eyes, and a ‘generous and gregarious disposition,’ … was … the love of Crane’s life and the muse that inspired some of his most beautiful poetry.” Crane described “the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge in the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another. But “despite [Crane’s] love for Opffer, they broke up a little more than a year after they got together” and Crane had affairs with a number of sailors, including “a wild Irish red-headed sailor of the Coast Guard, who introduced [him] to a lot of coffee dens … on Sands Street, and then took [him] to some kind of opium den.” When Crane committed suicide, his mother destroyed most letters from his lovers.
There’s a look at poet Marianne Moore, editor of the Dial literary magazine, which ceased publication in July 1929, after which Moore moved from the Village to 260 Cumberland Street in Fort Greene. She was always in a queer milieu, having been raised by her mother, Mary Moore, and the woman in her mother’s life, Mary Norcross, who wrote about Mary Moore in 1904, “Think of having each other at night and all through the day for a whole month, Darling! I have never been so starved.” “Norcross encouraged Marianne Moore to study at Bryn Mawr, starting in 1905 … The school was overseen by Dean Carey Thomas, who lived on campus with her partner, Mary Garrett. Marianne was close to two of her English professors, Lucy Marin Donnelly and Katherine Fullerton, who were also a couple … Moore first met queer modernist poet Hilda Doolittle (better known as H.D.) while both were Bryn Mawr students. At school, Moore expressed her most romantic feelings, in a series of ‘crushes’ on other students.”
“Moore had a supportive family of queer women, older role models for happy same-sex couples, and an environment that treated relationships with women as normal and healthy … At least three lesbian heiresses served as patrons to Moore: British author Bryher …; Boston socialite Katherine Jones …; and Louise Crane.” Moore “hosted a who’s who of queer culture out of her Brooklyn apartment, with frequent visitors including … photographer George Platt Lynes, the poets Hilda Doolittle and W.H. Auden, and … Bryher.” In 1934, “Moore began mentoring one of the most famous [lesbian] poets of the mid-twentieth century: Elizabeth Bishop.”
After exploring gay and lesbian environments that small group made for themselves in Brooklyn, Ryan writes, “for many visitors in the 1930s Brooklyn was a party destination. In particular, post-World I, the area near the Brooklyn Navy Yard became synonymous with nightlife. Slumming Manhattanites could find titillation and a sense of the exotic there, much as in Harlem. Sailors had a reputation for loose morals, rough excitements, and international experience. When New Yorkers wanted to find sailors, they headed across the East River to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, right where Antonio Bellavicini had been busted for serving gay men in his saloon 20 years earlier.”
In the 1930s, “The writers of [the publication] Broadway Brevities clearly had an intimate knowledge of New York City’s queer scene.” A subheadline of a November 1931 article, “Third Sex … Film Stars and Broadwayites Go Gay, reads “Brooklyn Navy Yard Center of Flagrant Camping for Gobs [enlisted sailors] & Society Slummers.” At Frank’s Place, a gay bar “just back of the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” “night after night, but especially on Saturdays and Sundays, … 50 to 75 sailors were there, and anywhere from 50 to 100 men and boys, with painted faces and dyed tresses, singing and dancing,” “the hostesses, a pair of drag queens named Violet and Blossom,” “with their own ‘special following’ thanks to their ‘elaborate drags.’” A Brooklyn contributor to the Kinsey Report noted “from Brooklyn to Harlem there were scores of bars catering exclusively to homosexuals and their prostitutes.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a headline “Sinful Sands Street Really Just a Sissy” and noted, “The Picturesque Brooklyn Thoroughfare” was “like Greenwich Village.”
Tony’s Square Bar “serviced sailors and their admirers throughout the 1930s and well into the ‘40s” and ’50s. Tony’s was just ‘a couple of hundred yards’ from the Sands Street entrance to the Navy Yard.” New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein and Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, found that Frank’s Place had been raided and “ended up at another speakeasy nearby, ‘a dive full of sailors and a few tarts.’”
In the 1930s, the odds against us were considerable. After Prohibition was repealed, in 1933, the State Liquor Authority (SLA) was “created in 1934 to regulate drinking establishments.” The “Mafia maintained a stranglehold on gay bars.” George Chauncey wrote, in “Gay New York,” “While the legislature did not specifically prohibit bars from serving homosexuals, the SLA made it clear … that the simple presence of lesbians or gay men, prostitutes, gamblers, or other ‘undesirables” … made an establishment disorderly.” The Hays Code/Production Code Administration assured that “the pansy craze [in films], which presented a vision of queer people as odd and unusual, but also harmless and exciting, was over. Even in vaudeville, where queer people had an established presence dating back to the mid-1800s, they were now persona non grata” and, thanks to New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, 14 burlesque theaters closed in 1937. Added to the government repression was the influence of Sigmund Freud, who visited the United States in 1909, in the wake of which American psychoanalytic organizations formed, and Americans came to see “the world … increasingly divided between homosexuals and heterosexuals,” and came “to understand that a deviant sexual nature could lurk within the mostly manly man or feminine woman.”
Ryan explores the pioneering work of Jan Gay, née Helen Reitman, “journalist, professional nudist, and children’s book author,” in probing lesbian sexuality. Jan Gay contacted German sex researcher and early proponent of gay rights Magnus Hirschfeld, of the Institute of Sex Research, and worked with obstetrician Robert Latou Dickinson, who had more than 5,000 case files of female patients, primarily from Brooklyn, to form the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants (CSSV). Her work was absorbed into the CSSV’s published study, “Sex Variants,” some of the work informed, though, by participants’ bent toward prevention and treatment of sexual maladjustment. Thomas Painter, contributor to Alfred Kinsey’s work, participated in the CSSV for a time, but had to fight to reclaim his manuscript on male prostitutes to give it to Kinsey. Kinsey once wrote that Gay could “very definitely help on this research,” but ultimately wrote to her, “I know nothing of your specific scientific training and have had no opportunity to observe you in scientific work.”
Ryan writes that Brooklyn College’s gay Beat poet alumnus Harold Norse happily limned naked Italian boys in the municipal showers, “bodies glistening in the sun … flicking wet towels on bare butts,” and pronounced himself “cured” of his virginity while at the college. Norse claimed his place in the Brooklyn queer brotherhood that included Whitman and Crane and had his “initiation” by his English professor David McKelvy White, who introduced Norse to “camp classics,” songs “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden” (Beatrice Lillie), “Mad About the Boy” (Noël Coward), and “Falling in Love Again” (Marlene Dietrich), and took him swimming and for dinners, in the mid-1930s, at “the St. George Hotel—perhaps the most elegant cruising ground in all of Brooklyn’s history.” Norse became involved with poet Chester Kallman. They went to a reading by Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden and, soon, Auden and Kallman became lovers.
This leads Ryan to an extensive look at “urban commune” 7 Middagh Street, in Brooklyn Heights, also known as February House, organized in 1940 by Harper’s Bazaar editor and author of the novel “The Opening of a Door” George Davis, who was given to “campy monologues about the joys of Brooklyn cruising.” The first residents were Davis, Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, and Gypsy Rose Lee, “the intellectual bawdy queen, the brainy beauty.” Later ones were set designer Oliver Smith, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Richard Wright and his family. Guests included Isherwood, Jerome Robbins, Janet Flanner and Solita Solano, Salvador and Gala Dali, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Lincoln Kirstein. McCullers got her inspiration for “Member of the Wedding” in Brooklyn Heights and for “Ballad of the Sad Café” on Sands Street. Smith’s breakthroughs were designing sets for Copland’s ballet “Rodeo” and for “On the Town,” with music by Bernstein and choreography by Robbins. The latter, “the story of three young sailors on shore leave in New York City during” World War II, though “nominally set in Manhattan, Smith said, “was inspired by the bars on Sands Street.” “West Side Story,” though set in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he told journalist Fran Schumer, for New York Alumni News Magazine, in 1990, was inspired by “the time he and a younger Jerome Robbins walked under the Brooklyn Bridge and down by the docks.” “The queer heyday of February House was mostly over by the fall of 1941, after just a little more than a year,” after sailor Jack Barker almost broke Auden and Kallman up.
In 1941, the United States entered World War II and Brooklyn and its Navy Yard played an important part in the war effort. “Homosexuality was considered a disqualifying condition” for the Selective Service, but according to Allan Bérubé, in his book “Coming Out Under Fire,” “At least 650,000 and as many as 1.6 million male soldiers were homosexual.” One who did make it into the service, Ryan found, and was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was William Christian Henry Miller, “inventor, model, Coast Guard sailor, and participant with Alfred Kinsey’s sex research.” Artist Paul Cadmus, once a Cherry Grove presence, called Miller “the most beautiful man I have ever met.” Tennessee Williams and photographer George Platt Lynes were others who knew Miller.
“For those with a taste for men in uniform, Brooklyn offered innumerable delights,” not just the bars of Sands Street, but “at least three … ‘peg houses’” (i.e. male whorehouses) in Brooklyn as well. On March 14, 1942, police raided the one at 329 Pacific Street and among those arrested were US Senator David Ignatius Walsh from Boston, Brooklyn merchant mariner and sex worker Charles Zuber, and composer Virgil Thompson.
With many men fighting overseas, women had the opportunity to join the work force at home, including “machinist and sailor Rusty Brown,” who “found the military full of queers … ‘There were millions of us, army, navy, marines, Coast Guard, air force,’ she told [historian Len] Evans.” “On August 14, 1945 … the Japanese surrendered, ending World War II ‘and our world started to collapse,” Brown said to Evans, as servicemen returned and took back the jobs that women had been doing. After the war, Brown managed to pass as a man while working as a machinist, became a professional Coney Island drag king, and had a 28-year relationship with woman named Terry, a Coney Island burlesque performer.
Ryan offers post-war accounts of dishonorable discharges and similar blue discharges for gay men, forced rehabilitation, and entrapment. He looks at the double life of Dr. Edward Sagarin, Brooklyn husband and father, aka “Donald Webster Cory,” author of “The Homosexual in America” and “the Lesbian in America” co-author of “The Homosexual and His Society,” and early member of the New York Mattachine Society. He “publicly propounded that homosexuals were disturbed and needed therapy … [and[ attacked the post-Stonewall Riots gay liberation movement during a panel at the American Sociological Society.” We meet Curtis Dewees, who noted that there were Mattachine discussion groups of Brooklyn Heights and Greater Brooklyn.
Enemies here are Senator Joseph McCarthy, foe of “Queers and Commies,” and Robert Moses, New York City Parks Department Commissioner and Triborough Bridge Authority Chair, among other posts, foe of Coney Island and Sands Street the way they were, who saw to it that his highways “completely cut off the waterfront from the rest of Brooklyn.”
As Ryan winds his story down, he points out that, while living in Brooklyn, Kenneth Anger made his biker film “Scorpio Rising” and Truman Capote wrote “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “In Cold Blood,” and “Holiday” magazine article “Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir.”
In 1963, police cracked down on the Supper Club, gay restaurant at 80 Montague Street, opened in 1950 and called by Ryan “the first gay bar in Brooklyn,” as opposed to the “queer-friendly trade bars … [of] Coney Island and on Sands Street.” But, “around the time [it] closed, the Starlite Lounge opened in Crown Heights and slowly became an underground institution in the city’s black queer community.”
Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Williamsburgh, Bushwick—Brooklyn is definitely queer again.