Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

My guest today is Hugh Ryan. He is a historian. He is also the curator of the pop-up

Museum of Queer History and is the author of the books The Women's House of Detention,

Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, and When Brooklyn was Queer. Hugh, thank you so much

for joining us here on Currard Affairs today. Thank you,

I'm a big fan of the magazine, so I'm happy to be joining the podcast. Well, I had not read your

work until one of our mutual acquaintances, yes, Ben Nyer, our editor at large, said you have to

have to speak to Hugh Ryan, you've got to read his books, and why haven't you had Hugh on yet? So let's start with a kind of overview of your project as

it runs through both of these books and through the pop-up museum that you run. You excavate queer history. And one of the things that's

sort of fascinating is, as I started reading your work, it made me realize that I, having

gone to an American public school, the queer history that I was taught probably began in 1969, and it began with the Stonewall

uprising, and then probably progressed from there. And what's so interesting about your

work is that's sort of where you, at least in these two books, that's almost where the history

ends. And you go back to all of

these stories, all of these worlds that existed in the centuries leading up until the point

where queer people became more visible in America in the 1960s.

So perhaps you could give an overview of what you're trying to do through these books.

Absolutely. I mean, I think the biggest thing I'm trying to do is pay for my expensive archive habit by justifying it, by writing books.

I just love being in the sort of paper stuff of history. But in terms of what my actual intellectual project is, honestly, the fact that you even learned about the Stonewall Rebellion is a big step up from my public school education in America, where if we learned anything about gay history, it was AIDS because it was the 80s.

And it was not history per se.

What we were told was sort of there was nothing and what it was awful.

There was a blank canvas behind us.

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