Hugh Ryan
“It is often assumed that the history of American sexuality is one of linear progress, moving from a time of benighted homophobia to our present-day enlightenment. However, the further back one looks, the more it seems to be a story of incoherence before intolerance, of ‘not knowing’ before ‘not accepting.’”
“Hugh Ryan is one of the most important historians of American life working today. The Women’s House of Detention resets so many assumptions about American history, reminding us that the home of the free has always been predicated on the imprisonment of the vulnerable. Of vital importance to those interested in criminal justice reform; prison abolition; gender history; the history of sexuality and the history of poverty, as well as anyone who declares themselves knowledgeable about New York City history, this account does what history is supposed to be—looking to the past to understand our broken present and possibly help us plan for a better future.”
“In this essential, abolitionist work, historian and author of When Brooklyn Was Queer Hugh Ryan uncovers the stories of this bewildering place and of the people who populated it.”
“With meticulous research and fierce compassion, Hugh Ryan brings stories and communities almost lost to history to vivid life. Ryan’s brilliant work is a thrilling portrait of the endurance, resourcefulness, and indefatigable joy queer people brought to bear upon the challenge of their own survival. This is an essential book, and I’m more grateful to it than I can say.”
“A delicious, fun, and moving study, cohered and popularized from generations of queer historians and deepened with new and exciting primary research. Hugh Ryan’s love for queer Brooklyn is page-turning, intersectional and an engrossing read.”
“A boisterous, motley new history… an entertaining and insightful chronicle.”
Hugh Ryan is the author of The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison (Bold Type Books, 2022), winner of a 2023 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association. His first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), was a New York Times Editor’s Pick. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Buzzfeed, the LA Review of Books, Out, and many others.
He is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a 2017 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, the 2019-2020 Allan Berube Prize for outstanding work in public LGBT History from the Committee on LGBT History at the American Historical Association, a 2018 residency at The Watermill Center, and in 2021, he was an artist in residence at Yaddo. In 2019, he was honored by the Brooklyn Historical Society and the Brooklyn Borough President for his work on the queer history of Brooklyn. He is the Founder of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping local communities create engaging exhibitions rooted in their own experience. He sits on the Boards of QED: A Journal in LGBTQ Worldmaking, and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art.
In an interview Ryan was asked about his evolution as a community historian. He responded,”I felt like there was an element that most queer adults had never gotten to do which was to take something they care about and think about it in a deep way that would cause them to really rigorously get engaged with it and then have to present it to someone else. Straight people get that experience all through school. Right? But queer people if you want to talk about queer history, you’re never given a moment to do that kind of work and I think that that work is incredibly important. It enables us to talk about our lives and about our history.”
Ryan is an alumni teaching fellow at the Bennington Writing Seminars, and regularly teaches Creative Nonfiction in the MFA Program at SUNY Stonybrook. He is currently on the Board of Advisors for the Archives at the LGBT Center in Manhattan and The Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Ft. Lauderdale. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
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(c) M. Sharkey
Book Jacket
Book Jacket
