When Brooklyn Was Queer

[osprey_archer]

This 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.

Comments

[dray]

I'm assuming this is before the time when 'bi' was used, let alone 'pan'? Interesting to see how that plays backwards in time.

[osprey_archer]

I think at this point bisexual may still have been used as where we would use intersex today, but I'm not sure about the exact dates of the rise and fall of that usage.

[minoanmiss]

I remember reading about this when researching for a fanfic project of all things. *makes another note of this*

[osprey_archer]

If it had been published a few years earlier, I'm sure it would have been HUGE in Captain America fandom.

[minoanmiss]

Hahahah the fanfic project I refer to was for Captain America fandom. :)

[osprey_archer]

What would pre-war Stucky even BE without the Brooklyn Navy Yard? Or, as it tended to become in fics, The Docks??

[minoanmiss]

ahahaha I cannot stop giggling now. :)

[missroserose]

Your comment on the assumption of 1950s attitudes being the historical norm reminds me of another period I was reading about some time ago...I think it was late 18th century Britain? And the author commented that the reason we have so much information about molly-houses and the liked is that there was a huge wave of public censure (and thus legal crackdowns, with the associated documentation) towards the queer community. And, in fact, that one of the great ironies of LGBTQ+ history is that the periods where we know the most about it tend to be the ones where homosexuality being most actively persecuted, since during other times the general social rule was "don't ask, don't tell", and people seemed more or less fine with that.

I think that's a very good point about homosexuality as an identity not necessarily being at odds with homosexuality as a behavior. I've often had mixed feelings about the former; I completely understand its value in terms of raising group cohesion and achieving political aims, but sexual behavior in human beings is notoriously complicated and context-dependent, and making that part of your identity always seemed extremely limiting to me. I'm honestly curious as to how the queer community will continue to evolve as predator pressure (i.e. censorious attitudes/laws) eases; I'm hoping that exploration will become more the norm and there'll be less of a sense that you must strictly adhere to one side or the other.

[osprey_archer]

It strikes me that this fact about LGBTQ+ history is, in itself, an artifact of this assumption that All of History Is Like the Fifties: people go looking for evidence in old police records, and when they don't find it they often throw up their hands, instead of looking at evidence like Walt Whitman writing

"Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching
and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,"

I mean sure, says the straight historian, he says the youth loves him and he loves the youth, but does he mean LOVE love? Surely if he meant LOVE love Walt Whitman would never have been hailed as the first truly American poet and enshrined in the ranks of the cultural canon, so even though it sounds gay it can't be because all of history is as homophobic as the 1950s. It is Known.

But if they admitted Walt Whitman as evidence, that would tend to suggest that the 1850s were very different from the 1950s in this respect.

[missroserose]

Hah, itself an excellent point. :) I'm reminded of some of the Tumblr posts despairing over how they could write "I love girls" in their journal over and over and some future academic, having read it, would fall all over himself to explain that, well, in the context of the time, saying you "loved girls" was a common means of expressing sisterly affection and shouldn't be interpreted to necessarily refer to sexual or romantic love...

Although perhaps that's committing the same sin in reverse, assuming that future historians will be as unthinkinigly homophobic as mid-century historians were.

(Also, I imagine you've seen it before, but I link this piece from The Toast on how Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman Almost Certainly Did It because it's far too good to let gather dust in the annals of Internet History.)

[osprey_archer]

I've read that piece! A true classic.

[ancientreader]

These are really good insights.

I'm suspicious of the idea of fixed sexualities in general -- not that I think a particular person can't have a fixed sexuality, but I'm dubious about our ("our"?) default assumption that sexualities are fixed. It's my strong impression that young people of all genders and all (the multiple biological) sexes are more horndoggy than older persons, thus more likely to rub off against any conveniently located warm body. Then as people head into their late twenties and their thirties they may be single or may branch off into settled or semi-settled relationships, which might or might not be monogamous; but in any case, as a rule the high tide of horndogginess has ebbed somewhat, plus as people age they tire more easily, they're more likely to develop smaller or larger disabilities that make it harder to go out and find new partners, and all of that sort of funnels people into looking as if they have a fixed sexuality when it might be just circumstantial. (People who don't know me well assume I'm a lesbian because I'm in a long-term monogamous relationship with a woman, but "queer" would be a much better fit, and the degree to which I'm attracted to various genders has oscillated over time anyway.)

IDK, but given that a salient feature of how humans have evolved is flexibility and adaptability, and given that affectionate sexual bonding promotes sociality and familial relationships, it just seems to me like a looser sexuality fits in better with everything else that we know about H. sap.

Yeah, I guess the tl;dr here is that I have a feeling we don't actually know all that much about sexuality ...

[osprey_archer]

I think our current understanding of sexuality is so hampered by the fact that the data from the twentieth century comes from such an oppressive social milieu, where queerness was heavily penalized and any sexual contact with a member of the same sex (especially for men) could get you branded queer for life.

It's like trying to get a read on how many human beings enjoy peaches in a society where PEACH-EATER is the worst possible insult you can throw at a person. Under those circumstances, only people who REALLY love peaches will eat them, so how are you going to tell how many people are out there who kinda like peaches, or really like peaches but not enough to risk it?

[missroserose]

I love this simile and honestly I kinda want to write a story about the forbidden yearning for peaches now XD

[osprey_archer]

"When T. S. Eliot wrote 'Do I dare to eat a peach?', he was not of course talking about actual peaches. It would be unthinkable for a man in that time and place to actually eat peaches. He meant it as a metaphor for..."