Learn about the seedy, fabulous, and forgotten queer history of Brooklyn, from Walt Whitman to the butches of WWII. Buy your ticket here.

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Can't make the live event? No problem! You can watch the video recording at your convenience for 2 weeks.

Give me now libidinous joys only!

Give me the drench of my passions! Give me life

coarse and rank!

To-day, I go consort with nature's darlings—to-night too;

I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share

the midnight orgies of young men...

-Walt Whitman

For nearly a century, the “libidinous joys,” “loose delights,” and “midnight orgies” of LGBTQ Brooklyn have been cloaked by the shadows of Manhattan.

But it was Brooklyn where Walt Whitman wrote the first poem about cruising to enter the American canon; Brooklyn, where Victorian drag artists took center stage at the close of the 19th Century; Brooklyn, where Black lesbian dancer Mabel Hampton first learned what it meant to be queer in the Roaring Twenties; Brooklyn, where Nazi spies pumped service men for state secrets in one of the biggest scandals of World War II; and Brooklyn, where Gypsy Rose Lee, W.H. Auden, and Carson McCullers nightly trolled sailor bars for dirty entertainments.

In fact, Brooklyn was a queer mecca for decades, from the moment the Erie Canal opened and reorganized all of American life. On its unique and fascinating streets, the story of what it meant to be homosexual or lesbian or transgender was written. The history of Brooklyn and the history of what it means to be queer in the Western world twine around each other like flowering vines. In this vividly illustrated presentation, author Hugh Ryan unpacks queer Brooklyn – and through Brooklyn, the queer world.