When Brooklyn Was Queer

by Hugh Ryan

The poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s.

I read in the Bible last night that a “meek and quiet spirit” is the only thing for a woman. But how can one ever do or be anything if meekness and quietness are the best things in life. I know plenty of women who have meekness but they have attained it only by giving up all hope or thought for themselves. I could not do that without giving up ambition too.

As Smith-Rosenberg points out, Victorian women inhabited a “world of intimacy, love, and erotic passion … in which men made only a shadowy appearance.”

this openness about their feelings has helped to make them invisible to modern historians, for whom queer love and shame are inseparable.

From her father, she may also have learned a tolerant attitude toward sexual diversity; in 1913, he was censored by Mormon church elders for “teaching young men that sodomy and kindred vices are not sins.

Digest this thought and all it implies for a moment: as early as 1906, in some areas of Brooklyn a trans woman could be out on the street, soliciting for sex, with an active clientele.

This was yet another way in which the early 1900s were a transitional period for queer people in America: after the public had begun to recognize and name our existence, but before the legal system had had a chance to devise methods of enforcement and prosecution targeted at us.

Although they may seem only slightly related, fears about “race mixing” and queer people were intimately connected, flip sides of the same eugenic coin. Both fears, ultimately, were about preserving the “white race.”

Over the twentieth century, “coming out” to an older, wiser queer person would become one of the defining experiences of being queer. The phrase coming out is derived from debutante culture, and it once referred exclusively to being brought out into gay society (as opposed to our modern usage, which is more about proclaiming your sexual identity to the straight world).

Additionally, in the 1920s, an androgynous look for women was popularized by flappers, who bobbed their hair and cultivated “masculine” habits such as smoking and driving.

Just as Thomas Painter recognized that going off to war put straight men into proximity with homosexuality—thus enabling them to understand and perhaps even experience it—the same was true for women working in the factories.

And Joe Marvel? Prior to the war, he was the assistant director of the Brooklyn Museum for eight years, where he organized the first show of Picasso in America, and the first performances of ballet ever at an American museum (no longer was ballet the province of rough workingmen’s saloons, as it was when Ella Wesner got her start on the stage). In his spare time, Marvel was on the board of the National Urban League, worked with fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli to create high-art anti-venereal-disease posters, and helped Margaret Sanger open her first birth control clinic, in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. As a conscientious objector during the war, Marvel was one of the only people allowed into Gestapo-controlled prisons in France, where he brought food and critical medical supplies to members of the Paris Underground.