Hugh Ryan's Queer Histories of Brooklyn’s Working Waterfront

Wanna hear what I've been up to for the last year? Join me while I discuss my research as the NYPL's 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Scholar! Since the coining of the word “homosexual” in the late 1800s, up until the decline of the city’s light industry post-WWII, the Brooklyn waterfront has served as a complicated refuge for working class queer people, providing economic opportunity, inexpensive housing, social privacy, and sexual possibility – as well as police surveillance, racist exclusion, gendered fetishization, and the financial instability that haunts many low-income communities. In this talk, Hugh Ryan will examine the working-class queer waterfront spaces of Brooklyn—from the military factories that gave all women (but especially lesbians) economic freedom and social privacy, to the complicated transgender visibility on display at the freak shows of Coney Island, to the cooperative houses created by queer artists during times of economic hardship. The talk will be organized around five major thematic sections: Factory Life, Coney Island, Outlaw Sexuality, Queer Communes, and Sailors.