WHEN BROOKLYN WAS QUEER

Ryan narrates his work of LGBTQ history as it played out in Brooklyn over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those featured include drag kings, a brothel owner, a black lesbian dancer, a transgender man, and others. Ryan's delivery is engaging and, at times, intimate. Exploring the rich but often unrecognized, or even erased, events of Brooklyn's past, he shows how prominent Brooklyn was in terms of queer history and how much of that dissolved, particularly after WWII. The historical events come across as clear in his prose and accessible in his conversational delivery. When he is tracing the intimate details of people's lives through diaries, letters, other writings, and even interviews, he conveys a bit more emotion and meaning, which will pull listeners in even more. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2019]