It’s a satisfying retort to the idea that there was nothing queer there before.Ī hungry archivist, Hugh Ryan unearths vivid material to populate this story. The unique experience of queer communities in Brooklyn during this time, he argues, formed the prehistory to the modern gay liberation movement and its signal event, the Stonewall riots. His larger argument is that “the development of Brooklyn would track with the development of modern sexuality” for roughly a century from 1855 to 1965, when the borough’s postwar industrial decline and urban renewal would also bury these communities. But once he began to look for it, he discovered a rich past, from lesbian welders in the Navy Yard to queer culture in bathhouses and freak shows in Coney Island. In his epilogue, he recounts how he also once assumed that Brooklyn had no history of queer community to speak of before the new millennium, when people like he and I (that is, the children of suburbanization) began to move there. When Brooklyn Was Queer proceeds on the assumption that my mistake is widely shared. It is this error that Hugh Ryan’s new history attempts to correct. “Rather than simply being driven into concealment by a heteronormative and homophobic society, many men (myself included) entered the Vale of Cashmere after dark because we enjoyed it (even drew a sense of power and resistance to societal norms from it), not because we had no other options through which to engage with other men.WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER: A HISTORY by Hugh Ryan St. “Gathering at the fountains and along the benches in the Rose Garden above the Vale of Cashmere during the day is as much (or more) an act of fellowshipping and strengthening of community ties as it is one of cruising for sex,” G. An iPhone screen doesn’t offer the feeling of being in a “lush tropical jungle,” or the smell of “vegetation smoldering and seething with a life all its own,” as Buchanan writes in “Summer Chills.” And neither can any bar or nightclub offer an equivalent experience. “Apps can’t replace a place like this,” Roma says. It’s partly this sense of enchantment that makes the Vale of Cashmere persist as a meeting spot even as the search for intimacy in communities of all orientations migrates to the internet.
This means they’re free of voyeurism and objectification they artfully convey their subjects’ humanity and emotion. Some men pictured look full of loneliness and longing others lounge blissed out against tree trunks. “These are collaborative portraits,” Roma says. He’d spend a minimum of 20 minutes talking to people he met about his project, and then, if they were interested, he’d photograph them in long 6-second exposures.
Men would often approach Roma as he was setting up his unwieldy camera. Over the course of three years, Roma got to know the men in the Vale of Cashmere, which got its fairytale name from an 1817 Thomas Moore poem. They don’t convey any particular attitude about the men or their proclivities or their minority status.
While some photo series focusing on marginalized populations feel deliberately political, these images are journalistic in their detachment and artistry. His images transcend topicality they’re about more than the changing politics of sexuality. Roma says “it’s a coincidence” that he wrapped up the series just as gay marriage was legalized federally.