Fantastic overview of the queer history of Brooklyn from 1860 to 1960, including over all trends in queer culture, how society treated queer people, and as many examples of lives as the author could reasonably pack in. I appreciated so much about this book. First of all, the author was very careful not to try to jam people from history into modern day labels as we would see them. He was careful to explain the context of the time and how it would have been seen then; he did his best to use pronouns that the people seemed to prefer, and stated why he choose what and what his information was based on. Over the whole book, Ryan was careful to list where he was getting information from and outline what biases he felt it had. He made sure to highlight that he was privileging white guys because that had a better paper trail, and worked to include women and queer people of colour when he could.

Aside from being technically solid, this book was fun. It was much less of an academic feel than Gay New York, and included a lot more anecdotes and bits of biography to give a feel of the time. I enjoyed hearing about how lesbian actresses managed their images, and how that changed over the years, and how they connected with other lesbian actresses, generations of gay men cruising for sailors, excerpts from campy speeches, Hart Crane's ten million torrid affairs and poetry inspired by said, male beauty contests in bathhouses on Coney Island, and lesbian Rosie the Riveters.

A more serious side of the book is how wider society, the judiciary and medical professions attempted to spy on and police queer lives, and how the increasing medicalisation of homosexuality (once that was even a word) allowed crack downs and round ups. There's a side to that about early sexology research and how queer people tried to manage that, but it's largely pretty grim reading.

I'm glad the author put all the research into creating first a museum and now a book about his area's history, and I hope many more such projects follow. Fascinating stuff.