Hugh Ryan: Will Change How You Think About Queer History

LGBTQ&A

Jeffrey Masters

Society & Culture

4.7 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2022

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With his crucial new book, historian Hugh Ryan restores The Women's House of Detention to its rightful place in LGBTQ+ history. "It was one of the Village’s most famous landmarks: a meeting place for locals and a must-see site for adventurous tourists. And for tens of thousands of arrested women and transmasculine people from every corner of the city, the House of D was a nexus, drawing the threads of their lives together in its dark and fearsome cells."

Hugh Ryan, author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison joins us on the podcast to talk about how years before the Stonewall Uprising, the House of Detention changed queer history.

In the interview, we play a clip of Jay Toole talking about her time in prison. Click here to listen to the full interview with Jay.

And click here to check out a picture of The Women's House of Detention on our Instagram.

LGBTQ&A is hosted by Jeffrey Masters and produced by The Advocate magazine, in partnership with GLAAD. A condensed transcript of each week's interview is posted on The Advocate's website. Follow us on Twitter: @lgbtqpod

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'm Jeffrey Masters, and when you think about the defining moments of queer history,
0:08.0	you probably think about something like Stonewall.
0:11.0	By now we know the rough outline of what happened that night.
0:14.0	There was a police raid at a bar, we fought back, we high-fived, had a kiki, all good stuff.
0:19.0	But the Stonewall Uprising was a one-time event with a clear beginning and ending.
0:25.6	The story and storytelling is already there in that one fiery moment.
0:29.6	That's unfortunately just not the case for other history-defining events and places,
0:34.6	like, for example, the Women's House of Detention, which has
0:38.7	a scope and scale that doesn't fit into a tight, easily digestible narrative.
0:43.9	The Women's House of Detention was a prison in Greenwich Village that both housed queer
0:48.2	people and also attracted queer people to the neighborhood.
0:52.1	It was a landmark, an unavoidable fixture of queer
0:55.2	life from 1931 when it opened to 1974 when it was torn down. It is hard to explain just
1:03.9	how much it impacted queer in trans lives then and now. And today, the historian Hugh Ryan is here
1:10.7	to break it all down. Hugh has a new book
1:13.1	out, aptly titled The Women's House of Attention, and it refocuses our history in a way that I think will surprise you.
1:20.4	So without further ado, let's hear it from The Advocate Magazine in Partnership with Glad. This is LGBTQ and A.
1:34.3	So before I read the book, I thought this is going to be a book about queer people who lived in a prison.
1:40.3	That's it. And that is only like the tiniest part of why this place mattered. So just to get everyone listening caught up and on the same page, can you give the broad overview, like the brief explanation of why it mattered and why we're even talking about this prison to begin with?
1:56.9	I think the reason that I came to write about the women's house of detention initially was because it was a prison that dominated Greenwich Village in the mid-20th century, the period where we really start to think about modern categories of what it means to be gay or lesbian or trans, and also where we date a lot of our queer history to and from, right?
2:15.9	Greenwich Village in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s,
2:19.9	Stonewall, all of that is swirling around this prison that no one ever seemed to talk about
	...

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