I recently read When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan (St. Martin's Press, 2019) for a book club, and have mixed feelings about it. It's a well-done, readable history that draws on some familiar sources and delving into the archives, and on the whole I recommend it. I learned about the history of Brooklyn, which usually is lost in the shadows of Manhattan, and got some insight into the rise and fall of cities.
What bothered me was Ryan's frequent invocation of "the modern idea of sexuality", with the implication that people used to have old-fashioned, inadequate concepts of queerness that we have, fortunately, moved beyond. I think he knows better, as I'll try to show, but he keeps returning to that formula. For example:
However, we can see that Roebling understood his love for his friend to be of the same cloth as his friend’s love for him; it is at most a difference of quantity, not quality. The idea of “homosexuality” had not yet emerged as a separate kind of male-male intimacy. What stands out from this story, aside from Roebling’s lack of shock or disgust, is the absence of any specific words for this type of desire (or the men who profess it) [40].
Or:
The idea that people had a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent and could be used to classify humanity into groups was only just emerging among theorists in Europe. There was little agreed-upon language to even discuss those feelings. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out in his essay, the job of the poet is that of language-maker, the person who documents and names the new experiences of the times [24].
I could quote many more examples. There are a lot of problems in this theme. For one, are the experiences Ryan is writing about "new"? He's referring partly to the idea of community, of people classifying themselves into groups based on erotic interests and practice. It's open to question whether this tendency is new, even in the US: the little communities of "mollies" in eighteenth-century England fascinated gay historians a couple of decades ago, for instance, and social networks and cruising areas are documented around the world, throughout history. There's a substantial literature on this. I can't tell whether Ryan ignores it because it's not immediately relevant to the topic of queer Brooklyn, or whether he's unaware of it. One can question how much mollies, sodomites, sapphists and other theorized their communities, but that's not very important unless one is determined to limit "community" to late twentieth-century commercial gay men's culture. Unfortunately, many do. But theorizing beyond an ad hoc minimum mostly interests only a small minority of queers, and even those few tend not to do it very well.
For another, as Ryan shows abundantly, "a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent" doesn't accurately describe more than a minority of the men and women he's writing about. This is most obvious in the milieu of sexually-receptive men ("fairies" et al.) and the men ("trade") who penetrate them, whether for money or convenience or both. Ryan devotes a lot of space to this pattern, at least partly because it's so well-documented in old criminal records, newspapers, and medical literature. He steps gingerly around the question of the actual sexual orientation of the insertive trade, who according to the lore were younger and would age out of the market as they married and found steady employment. (This is debatable in many cases, but it's the lore.)
This idea is complicated further by talk of "sexual fluidity," that "We're all a little bit gay," that "most people are bi except for a few at each end of the bell curve." Despite lip service to such slogans, bisexuality is regarded with skepticism and hostility by many gay men and lesbians. Among gay men at least, there's a common belief that at heart, trade really only want to be penetrated, and the same gay men who believe themselves doomed by biology to be bottoms turn out to be tops with regard to the very tops they value so much. (As I've argued before, this is reminiscent of sexist males' belief that all women are really whores at heart.) There's an analogous uneasiness about femme women among lesbians. Both concepts -- fixity and plasticity -- coexist in the supposedly modern concept of sexuality. Ryan's evidence shows this, but he resists it; at least, he never seems to notice the contradiction. I think it's significant that belief in a fixed homosexual nature arose and became dominant at the same time that evidence against it multiplied not only in accounts like Ryan's but in "common sense" talk about sex. It's also ironic that "queer," Ryan's label of choice, was rehabilitated in the 1990s against the supposed rigidity of gay and lesbian identities, only to be folded back into supposedly scientific theories of biologically fixed sexual orientation.
To his credit, Ryan is aware of the historical connection of biological determinism and the "modern conception of homosexuality", which I've addressed here before. Ryan writes:
Early twentieth-century medical science was dominated by the eugenics movement, which believed social problems were rooted in deviant bodies and inheritable traits. This movement reached its apogee with the sadistic, anti-Semitic science of the Holocaust, which has allowed us to conveniently forget the power and prevalence of the eugenics movement in America. Just as people of color, women, and queer people were gaining social power and becoming visible, eugenic science would be trotted out to prove that black people were less human, women were less intelligent, and queer people were a biological dead end that threatened to contaminate good (white) Americans [76].
But he also writes that "Sigmund Freud’s system of psychoanalysis, and his ideas about sexuality residing in the human mind, only reached American shores in 1909. It would take long decades before they would supplant eugenic ideas about the body as our dominant way of understanding sexuality (and personality in general)" [77] Is he really unaware that Freud became a whipping boy for feminism and post-Stonewall gay activists, who rightly attacked the psychiatric profession for its role in pathologizing women and homosexuals? That was before we assimilated ourselves into the profession, and accepted biological determinism while forgetting its ties to eugenics.
He writes:
The same doctors who would define “the homosexual” as a biological class unto itself would also define “the pickpocket” that way, and “the woman who is erotically stimulated by hat pins” as well. Today, it seems natural to view homosexuality this way, and ridiculous to think that being a pickpocket might be a hereditary, biologically defined class. But this is the biased, thoroughly unscientific swamp from which our modern ideas about sexuality arose [77].
I agree, so I don't understand why he writes uncritically about "our modern ideas about sexuality" elsewhere in the book. Ryan also seems to think that the modern concepts of "transgender" and "intersex" are somehow more valid than their predecessors, that nineteenth- and twentieth-century "fairies" and bulldaggers were really "intersex" or "transgender"? These concepts, which might sometimes be useful, are just newer social constructions, with the same contradictions and inadequacies as older ideas. That's because "sex" and "gender" are still incoherent and poorly thought out -- possibly more than ever.
So, for example:
According to Ward Hall, a gay man who got his start in the circus in the early 1940s, these [sideshow] acts were sometimes performed by people who were actually intersex, but they were also done by effeminate men and masculine women whose gender presentations were already so at odds with what the audience expected that they believed them to be physically intersex as well [116].
Or again, of a self-identified "fairy" who
told Shufeldt that she was, in our modern terms, intersex (meaning
her body had a mixture of typically male and female characteristics),
and that she had previously been pregnant. Shufeldt disputed this with
his medical examinations, which were so thorough they bordered on being a
cavity search. It’s impossible to know what to make of Loop’s
assertions. Did she truly believe herself to be intersex? Was this an
elaborate camp put on by a fairy out to have some fun with a serious
doctor? [79]
Was she "really" intersex? Apparently not, but Ryan doesn't tell what term she used. That term was intended to replace the older "hermaphrodite," which referred to individuals with "both" sets of reproductive organs. Such individuals are vanishingly rare, so "intersex" might be a slight improvement. But it seems to have been stretched to include a wide variety of traits, including smaller-than-average penises or larger-than-average clitorises, with the associated assumption of determined gender behavior such as dress or career preferences. And from what I see in online discussion, many people confuse "transgender" with "intersex," and many transgender individuals are trying to base their identities in biology. It isn't only scientists who love eugenics and biological determinism.
When Brooklyn Was Queer includes a lot of interesting information, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in LGBTQ history. Just pay attention to the man behind the curtain. As so often happens, his theory is at odds with his data, but that's useful to know too. I've never thought that I needed different words for my feelings for other men: it was our enemies who insisted that what I felt wasn't love. "Same-sex desire" is just desire. Despite many years of determined efforts to prove otherwise, men who love men and women who love women are biologically speaking just men and women. Of course "men" and "women" are not obvious (or pre-cultural) categories either, but traditionalists again are the source of the confusion, because of their wish to police other people's gender and erotic lives - a wish that unfortunately is shared by many non-traditionalists.
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Page references are to the Kindle edition.