When Brooklyn Was Queer

by Hugh Ryan

Boyce is voluble and sweet, making his tales of assaults, arrests, and constant, casual harassment all the harder to hear. For every block he recalls another beating, for every neighborhood another gang. He tells me how queers learned to survive, and how that hard-won knowledge, which was literally beaten into his bones, made the Stonewall Riots possible. “Anywhere you’d go, you’d have to be ready,” he recalls with a sigh. “I was attacked in the Bronx, attacked in Brooklyn. Go to the movies? You’d be attacked. But whatever happened, we’d manage to meet up again, right in the vicinity and safe. That made us excellent urban guerrillas, because we knew how to break and reform. That kept the Stonewall Riots going for hours.” Days, actually. From June 28 to July 1, 1969, some of the most marginalized people in the country—the homeless, poor, sex workers, drug addicts, people of color, homos, dykes, queers, and queens—became an irrepressible force, fighting back against the routine police harassment they experienced. In that moment, they realized the Village was theirs. “Nobody was against us, that’s for certain, even if they weren’t joining us.” Boyce talks with his hands, driving the point home. “You could see it in their eyes: ‘I can’t do this, but do it for me.’ And all the straight people that were trapped in it were guided out. Because it wasn’t against straight people. It was against the police.” For nights on end, Boyce and his friends led the cops on a merry chase, smas...