When Historian, Curator, and Author HUGH RYAN  wrote WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, he found a thousand great images that couldn’t fit in the book. On Jan 16th, thanks to Oscar Wilde Tours, he’ll be showing them off and discussing “Brooklyn and the Birth of America’s Queer Life!”  

Ryan will take you on a tour of the seedy, fabulous, and forgotten queer history of Brooklyn, from Walt Whitman to the butches of WWII.

WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER, won a 2020 New York City Book Award, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2019, and was a finalist for the Randy Shilts and Lambda Literary Awards. He was honored with the 2020 Allan Berube Prize from the American Historical Association, and residencies/fellowships from Yaddo, The Watermill Center, the NYPL, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2019-2021, he worked on the Hidden Voices: LGBTQ+ Stories in U.S. History curricular materials for the NYC Department of Education. 

You can watch his interview with QUEERGURU below

Ryan’s latest book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison was published recently. It is about a   landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher.

Sun, January 16, 2022
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM EST
Tickets via Eventbrite HERE

Can’t make the live event? No problem! You can watch the video recording at your convenience for 2 weeks.

https:// queerguru.com/hugh-ryan-when-brooklyn-was-queer/