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When Brooklyn Was Queer
Jun. 8th, 2020 06:36 pmThis is not so much a review of Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer as a couple of musings inspired by the book, which covers Brooklyn’s queer history roughly from Walt Whitman to Truman Capote. (The book is not solely about gay men, but it does tend to be more about gay men than about anyone else.)
The first thought is that public understanding of queer history suffers a lot because many people basically assume that the 1950s are representative of a sort of baseline historical attitude toward queerness, when in fact the 1950s were unusual in the virulence of their homophobia and in the intense police pressure on queer communities. They were near the apex of an arc of oppression which took its first wobbly steps in the 1890s, slowly rose after World War I, ramped up exponentially after World War II, and only began to fall after the Stonewall riots.
The other is this quote, in which Ryan is talking about early twentieth century attitudes towards same-sex relations between men: “Homosexuality wasn’t a permanent or fixed identity defined by the gender of your partner; instead it was an action almost any man might undertake if the circumstances were right.”
I’ve seen variations on this quote in a number of different sources, and I guess what gets me about it is that none of the authors ever seem to stop to consider that the people heading the committees that shaped the policies based on this thinking were themselves… men. Their belief that “almost any man might have sex with another man” may well arise from their own experience. Either they themselves had succumbed to the temptation for a same-sex encounter or two when they were young and giddy and also susceptible to the temptations of female hookers (also considered morally reprehensible! Also a very common form of sexual experience for young nineteenth century men!), or at any rate they knew enough guys who did that when someone was like “You know who is susceptible to the attractions of male hookers? ALL MEN,” they were like “Yeah, that checks out, manly men WILL fuck anything.”
It also occurs to me that, while this attitude is often presented in opposition to the idea that homosexuality is a permanent identity, these two ideas are not actually opposed. There can be people who are primarily interested in same-sex sexual activity AND ALSO people who will bang a person of the same sex occasionally if they’re in a single-sex environment or the price is right or they just happen to feel like it or Venus is in retrograde.
The first thought is that public understanding of queer history suffers a lot because many people basically assume that the 1950s are representative of a sort of baseline historical attitude toward queerness, when in fact the 1950s were unusual in the virulence of their homophobia and in the intense police pressure on queer communities. They were near the apex of an arc of oppression which took its first wobbly steps in the 1890s, slowly rose after World War I, ramped up exponentially after World War II, and only began to fall after the Stonewall riots.
The other is this quote, in which Ryan is talking about early twentieth century attitudes towards same-sex relations between men: “Homosexuality wasn’t a permanent or fixed identity defined by the gender of your partner; instead it was an action almost any man might undertake if the circumstances were right.”
I’ve seen variations on this quote in a number of different sources, and I guess what gets me about it is that none of the authors ever seem to stop to consider that the people heading the committees that shaped the policies based on this thinking were themselves… men. Their belief that “almost any man might have sex with another man” may well arise from their own experience. Either they themselves had succumbed to the temptation for a same-sex encounter or two when they were young and giddy and also susceptible to the temptations of female hookers (also considered morally reprehensible! Also a very common form of sexual experience for young nineteenth century men!), or at any rate they knew enough guys who did that when someone was like “You know who is susceptible to the attractions of male hookers? ALL MEN,” they were like “Yeah, that checks out, manly men WILL fuck anything.”
It also occurs to me that, while this attitude is often presented in opposition to the idea that homosexuality is a permanent identity, these two ideas are not actually opposed. There can be people who are primarily interested in same-sex sexual activity AND ALSO people who will bang a person of the same sex occasionally if they’re in a single-sex environment or the price is right or they just happen to feel like it or Venus is in retrograde.
