The Queer Histories of Brooklyn’s Working Waterfront with Hugh Ryan

Please join us on Tuesday, January 31^st at 7pm as Hugh Ryan, the Library’s Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar for 2017, shares his current research. 

Since the coining of the word “homosexual” in the late 1800s, up until the decline of the city’s light industry post-WWII, the Brooklyn waterfront has served as a complicated refuge for working class queer people, providing economic opportunity, inexpensive housing, social privacy, and sexual possibility – as well as police surveillance, racist exclusion, gendered fetishization, and the financial instability that haunts many low-income communities.

In this talk, Hugh Ryan will examine the working-class queer waterfront spaces of Brooklyn—from the military factories that gave all women (but especially lesbians) economic freedom and social privacy, to the complicated transgender visibility on display at the freak shows of Coney Island, to the cooperative houses created by queer artists during times of economic hardship. The talk will be organized around five major thematic sections: Factory Life, Coney Island, Outlaw Sexuality, Queer Communes, and Sailors.

Hugh Ryan is a curator and journalist based in Brooklyn, whose work primarily explores queer culture and history. He is the Founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, and sits on the Board of QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking. As the Library’s Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar for 2017, he has been researching the queer history of Brooklyn's working waterfront, in preparation for an upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Historical Society. @Hugh_Ryan / hughryan.org

The Martin Duberman Visiting Scholars are funded by the generous support of Martin Duberman and Eli Zal.

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