When Brooklyn Was Queer

by Hugh Ryan

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.