Enter to win When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan!
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About When Brooklyn Was Queer:
When Brooklyn Was Queer (on sale March 5, 2019), is Hugh Ryan's fascinating survey of Brooklyn's LGBTQ history. In 2011 when Ryan launched The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History helping local communities around the world explore their own queer history, he was shocked to discover no such history of Brooklyn existed. Not a book or a documentary or article that explored the queer history of the borough so often in the shadows of Manhattan. Ryan started collecting stories on his own, and that passion project lead to the galley you hold in your hands.
"The stereotypical image of 'Brooklynites' has always been one of tough broads and street-smart greasers, working-class men and women whose heterosexuality was as pronounced as their broad New York accents," writes Ryan. "Scratch that straight surface, however, and Brooklyn's queer history comes pouring out, full of poets, sailors, undercover cops dressed as sailors, brothels, sideshows, communes, rough trade, Nazi spies, trans men, dancers, machinists, pathbreakers, mythmakers, and more. And with every archive I rifle through, that 'and more' becomes more, and more, and more."
Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn. He is the Founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and sits on the Boards of QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Buzzfeed, the LA Review of Books, Out, and many other venues. The author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, he is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, and a 2018 residency at The Watermill Center.
