Hugh Ryan is a writer, curator, and historian in New York City whose work focuses on queer history. 

His award-winning 2022 book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, tells the story of a building in Greenwich Village that held tens of thousands of incarcerated women, transgender men, and gender nonconforming people over its nearly half-century of existence–but has been largely forgotten in the modern imagination of Greenwich Village.

Ryan’s first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, chronicles the lives of LGBTQ+ people in Brooklyn from the 1850s to 1969. It features case studies of individuals’ lives, charts a path along the waterfront–where many queer people found community–and uncovers how labels have shifted and morphed throughout the late nineteenth century up until the Stonewall riots. 

On a very hot afternoon in June, over cookies in the Writer’s Foundry’s beloved Carriage House, Ryan and I discussed his entrée into researching and writing queer history books, the detective work inherent in finding a story in decades- or centuries-old archives, his advice for early-career writers, what he’s been reading, and what he’s working on next. 

HAYLEY BARNES: I’ve read your books, loved your books. Your work does a lot with archival material, looking at queer history in New York City. Your books take a really granular look at the lives of our queer ancestors. I’m interested in, broadly, how you found this beat, and why it’s important to tell these stories. 

HUGH RYAN: There’s two answers to the first part. The very short answer, the immediate answer, is that I–in 2010, there was this exhibit at The Smithsonian called “Hide/Seek: Difference in Desire in American Portraiture,” and it was their first ever queer-specific exhibit. A few months after it opened, there was this nasty little hit piece written about it, and they pulled some of my favorite works. Art by this guy named David Wojnarowicz, who I had always loved. 

And there were all these protests in New York City about it, and I joined the protests. And a month into the protests about it, I had this weird moment where I was like, “Wait–yes, it’s awful that this piece was pulled, but I can’t go to any museum in New York and see any queer history or queer art. And I’m not gonna make it down to D.C. to see this show, so why am I putting all this energy into something that’s bad, but also is part of a much-worse ecosystem?”

So I started an organization called The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History. It started off, honestly, as kind of a joke. It was a one-night party as part of a week of events that were happening. I lived in this big, communal queer warehouse, and the people organizing this week of events asked, “Can we host the kickoff party at your house?” Because our house had previously hosted a lot of events, before I lived there. My roommates were all old and cranky; we were all in our mid-thirties, and they were like, “No. We no longer want to be the party house just because we have so much space.” And I said I would host it if I could throw a museum instead of a party.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I’d like to play with it, get into it. Thirty people made exhibits, and 300 people showed up that night–which was way more than even our large apartment could hold–including 13 plainclothes cops, who shut us down at midnight for fire code violations.

And as we shut down, there were all these artists who had yet to show off their pieces, all these people saying, “When is the next one? I wanna make an exhibit.” And I said, “Oh, this wasn’t a ‘thing,’ it was a joke–not a joke, but a provocation, maybe?” But in that moment I was like, “Well, wait–other people really want this.” And Buzz Slutsky, who at the time was studying arts, offered to help curate, and so we came up with this organization. And Graham Bridgeman was like, “I work in development, I want to know more queer history, I can be a development officer and help you make this thing real.” And so we started to do it.

We started in Brooklyn, but we didn’t know what we were doing in Brooklyn, we just did a show. When we did shows other places, we started to realize what we do is work with local communities to develop installations that respond to the local community, bring out local artists, bring out local history, and then we use our web of connections to bring money and other things from the outside, that the community wants but doesn’t have inside the community.

So we do that a bunch of other places; it works really well. We go back to Brooklyn to do it in Brooklyn and discover that nobody knew anything about Brooklyn history. It was this shocking moment. And then in that moment, we all realized that we didn’t know anything about Brooklyn history. 

My parents are from the Bronx and upper Manhattan. I had been living in Brooklyn ten years at that point. I was a women’s studies major in college; I had been doing all these shows, and I didn’t know anything about Brooklyn.

So I went to go get the book, because I assumed there would be one. It was probably printed in, like, 1973 by Alison Press and no one had checked it out of the library since. But I thought it would be there. 

There wasn’t one, and there wasn’t a documentary and there wasn’t a YouTube channel and there wasn’t a blog. And I was like, “What the fuck?”

So the New York Public Library had this grant called the Duberman Fellowship Grant, from Martin Duberman, the historian. It was a grant to do queer research at the library. So I proposed doing research on the queer history of Brooklyn, with this idea that what I would do was put together–we were calling it a précis at the time–like a timeline of Brooklyn queer history that we could then give to artists so we could make this exhibition. I didn’t know or think about writing a book at all–it was only when I got the grant, my first day there, that they said to me, “By the time you’re done with this grant period, you should have your book proposal finished.” And I was gobsmacked. Like, “Oh my god, yes! Yes!” 

Because I had gone to grad school for non-fiction, and immediately stopped writing it. I did not like writing about myself, I thought I wanted to write memoir, which at the time, I ended up not wanting to write. I ghostwrote kids’ books for a couple of years afterwards, but writing had become a kind of–I wrote a little travel journalism, and this here, and that there. But I thought, maybe I’ve made a little bit of a mistake, maybe that’s not my path. But then when they said that, I thought, “Oh that’s absolutely what I’m doing. I’m writing this book.” 

And then writing that book immediately took me into writing about The House of D, because so many of the people that I followed ended up in The House of D. And I thought, “How can there be a twelve-story maximum security prison in the middle of Greenwich Village for fifty years, and I’ve never heard about it?”

I was shocked–I was absolutely shocked when I read about it. I thought, “Surely this is a different Greenwich Village than the one I’m thinking of.” But no, it’s just there and nobody knows it’s there.

And it had all these important ramifications. It was part of Stonewall, the one thing we all know about. And I was like, “Wait. This is inconceivable.” That’s the short answer. I’m not very good at short answers. The longer answer, which connects to that, is that I have–ever since I was young–when I was in the seventh grade… I’m writing a memoir now, and this is part of it. When I was in the seventh grade, we had a Spanish class, and I loved my Spanish teacher. She did really fun lessons about slang and Nintendo and Beverly Hills 90210, and one day, she overheard a bunch of the kids calling me a faggot, but she didn’t realize they were calling me a faggot, she thought they were just using the word. And so she decided she’d do this really fun lesson on how you say faggot in every Spanish-speaking country around the world–which was devastating, on one level.

But on another level, it was this weird moment of “Oh my god. There are gay people everywhere.” And it really opened this up for me. And I started going to the library specifically to research gay people, because that was the moment where I realized they existed. And I started to get a sense–that I think has propelled my work ever since–that by looking for these moments where what I am told on the surface, and what seems to be there don’t match up. I can feel there is something not right, and that propelled my research into queer history, before I even knew what I was doing.

That’s the same thing that propels all my books. When I find this place where I’m like “Wait–how does no one know the queer history of Brooklyn? Wait–how do I not know this prison was there?” Right? These things that feel like they should be obvious. And yet, somehow are not. And that’s been what has guided my work into queer ancestry, always. I’ll find a document and think “Wait. I should know this document, but why don’t I know about this? Why don’t I know about this person? Why has this story been kept from me, when it feels so important?” So I think I’ve always been drawn to these very specific, granular moments of discontinuity. 

[Writing the book] took a long time. Part of that was because I was trying to look at something that I quickly realized was two lenses that weren’t really common. Not only did people not really look at queer history, they didn’t really look at Brooklyn history. I grew up at a time when Brooklyn was a place you came from, not a place you went to. I had to go to a lot of different places, a lot of different archives to assemble that book. There is some original research in it, but a lot of it was really more about collecting all of the research that was out there and putting it into a map and a timeline, and saying what changes over time and what changes in different neighborhoods, and what causes those changes to happen.

[In your research] is everything digitized these days? Are you looking at microfiche machines, are you looking at old paper?

Paper. Most of it’s paper. Almost all. Little things–once I knew enough about something; for example, once I knew I was looking at Hart Crane–there are lots of digitized photos of Hart Crane, there are some letters that are digitized, there was a book written, so in those ways I was able to find a lot of materials. But sometimes the digitizations were actually not helpful.

I looked at the diaries of Lincoln Kirstein, which are at the New York Public Library. And they had created a document that was like a PDF that they would show you, like “We’ve typed them all up; we’ve transcribed them.” And my research assistant noticed that there were all these ellipses in the transcripts, and he was like, “Are these ellipses in the text? Is that how he writes his diaries? Or are there things that are being left out?” And he went and looked at the original diaries and found all of this gay stuff that was left out of the transcripts.

The transcripts were made in the seventies. But if you didn’t know to look, you were going to miss all this stuff. So it was a lot of paperwork. I looked at archives in New York, in San Francisco, in Pennsylvania, in Boston, in New Jersey. I contacted archives where they had print things that hadn’t been digitized. There were some letters that I really wanted to look at in the Wyoming Historical Society, so they digitized them for me and sent them to me. But it really was a lot of paper. In both cases–almost all paper.

Do you feel–and this might be a little woo-woo–but do you feel more connected to these people from a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, when you’re looking at paper?

I do, yes. And it’s woo-woo in a sense, but it’s also not, because what I quickly came to learn is that you can learn a lot about something by looking at the thing itself. How it was produced, what condition it’s in, how it’s been maintained. Was it hidden? Was it openly available? When I wrote The House of D, for instance, I worked from this giant group of records called the Women’s Prison Association Files. They had been in the New York Public Library for forty years. No one had ever looked at them, which I was told by the Women’s Prison Association when they gave me permission to look at them. 

Already, that tells us something really interesting. These files have been available for forty years and no one’s looked at them. Because they’re not labeled “gay” in any specific way. And even the WPA said they didn’t think they were discussing gay topics in the 1930s. 

And so it’s this story about Greenwich Village: the place we should know the most about in gay history–that connects to Stonewall: the event we should know the most about [in gay history]–publicly available in a public space in the center of Manhattan, and we don’t know the story. When I started to look at the files, something about them was a little off. I kept trying to google the names of people in them, run them through Ancestry.com and other searches to find out more, and I had a really hard time finding anything. And at first I thought, “Ok, well, these people just don’t have large public historical lives.” 

Eventually, through looking at them enough, I started to notice something else. The way that the files were written–there was a social worker, who’s clearly the person taking the notes. The notes were written in paragraphs–those paragraphs then had someone else’s initials near them and checkmarks. And I was like, “This is weird. There is something off. Why all these levels…?” Then I got to a point in one file, maybe four months into looking at them, where they talk about gay slang. And the social worker is being told by a lesbian that her girlfriend had let her “fringe” her the first time. And I thought, “Oh, it’s this lesbian slang I didn’t know about.” So I try to search for it, I can’t find anything, no one’s ever heard of it. It does not exist. And all of the sudden, I have this moment where I think, “Fringe… fringe… French. French her!” And suddenly I realized what I was looking at. The social workers were recording their notes via dictaphone, and someone else was typing them up. And the social worker was checking to make sure they were ok, which meant that any word could possibly be a homophone of itself. Every name, I had to start thinking, “How is this name spelled, potentially, phonetically?” And that opened up everything. Suddenly I started to find all these people because the spellings were all just a little bit off. But it took really sitting with the document itself, and looking at it and feeling it and getting a sense that–if it had been in black-and-white, I might not have noticed that this pen and that pen were different from one another.

So in all these ways, having the actual physical material helped me to understand the history better. 

I’m really interested in the idea of a writer living and working and making a living as a writer in 2024. How much does teaching have to be a part of that? Can you be a literary citizen without being a teacher? Is teaching something you always wanted to do, or was it more like “this is the option that I have”? 

I always wanted to teach. I love teaching writing. Working at Bennington, working with my students, even though they’re not reading my work, it sharpens my mind. It keeps me thinking about the fundamentals of what makes an essay an essay, why is something successful, why is good writing good writing? And because I’m constantly thinking about that and having to verbalize it and look at essays and say “This isn’t working because you say this but you show that,” or “this introduction isn’t embodied enough, so where are we?” So then as soon as I sit down with my own work, I say, “My introduction is not embodied either.” So there’s this kind of constant dialogue that’s happening between me and the work of my students. Not exactly [with] students, though–I am thinking about their work, and in thinking about their work, I inevitably end up making my work better.

Do you have advice for young writers? 

The big thing for me was to not get sidetracked by things I thought would make money but I actually look down on. I spent five years trying to write kids’ books because I thought kids’ books were easy to write. And I was shocked that I was continually bad at it. Somehow, it didn’t quite come together. And because I got on that track, my first agent was like–when I came to her with a book proposal for a history, she was like, “Well, look–you already have a name writing kids’ books. Can you make that into a kids’ book?” And I said “No, I don’t think I can.” But she’s right, so … I just got really sidetracked for a long time. And I hated it and I didn’t want to do it, and I didn’t like writing and the writing was bad. 

It’s one thing to do something you don’t particularly like purely for the money. You have to have a job waiting tables, but when you leave it your mind is free. I kept letting my writing get entangled with moneymaking ideas in the hopes it would be so easy that it would then free me up to write things I care about later. But the end result was that I wrote things I didn’t care about and they weren’t very good, and nobody wanted them, and I felt like I was wasting all this time. So that was a real lesson to me. That even if the stuff I do doesn’t pay me particularly well, when I care about it, I do my best. And when I put my best foot forward–make money or not, fail or not, at least I know I did my best, and that’s reassuring and I think it’s maybe one of the only things you can hold onto in this world where we don’t have a lot of control. Your book might be a huge success tomorrow because the right random person tweets about it. But it might also not. Your book might come out the same week as, you know, January 6–this happened to a friend. She’s like “My book just disappeared.” Nobody wanted to talk about books for months.

At least do–if writing is the thing you love, at least in that thing, do the thing you love. Don’t let it get in your way and pursue something that isn’t something you love in your writing. That’s the big thing for me.

That may be the answer to my next question. We had a lecturer this past semester who introduced this concept of the “blank check” book. If you had a blank check, what book would you write? Are you writing in a way that’s holding you back from what you actually want to write–because you’re trying to write something commercial, or something that’s of the moment? Does that bring something to mind for you?

Yeah. I have one right now that I’ve tried–I spent four months last year. I put down working on the book and just applied for funding and got none of it. I have this history of the avant-garde of the Lower East Side in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that is like, my next dream project, but it’s another one that’s gonna require years of research. More than either of [my other books], because the people are still alive. I’ve been researching it since 2020, 2019. But I haven’t had time to focus on it because it’s so big. So I’ve been doing these life interviews with folks; I’ve done about 80 of them. And the memoir that I’m writing actually came up because I said to my agent, “Ok, I think it’s gonna take me six years to write this book, can I sell it now?” And he said, “No. Nobody wants to hear that it’s going to take six years to write a book.” And I said, “I need something to live on while I do the research.” And he said, “Well, you’re trained in memoir, and you’ve never written one, and you have an interesting story. And people pay a lot more for memoirs than they do for histories.”

It’s not something I’m against writing. I love essays. I love writing the memoir. I don’t particularly like writing about myself. That was something I realized in grad school. In an ideal world, would I be writing this memoir? I don’t know. It probably wouldn’t be the thing–I think I would’ve kept doing history. I like [memoir], I like writing it, I’m not against it, it just isn’t the “blank check” book. I’m writing this book in part so I can get to that Lower East Side book.

For me, outlining this [memoir]–again, going back to teaching my students. I was saying to them over and over again, “This is how you figure out what your essay is. You have to look at the moments in your life that led you to a certain kind of change or to a new idea. So either you have moments you keep returning to and you need to figure out ‘what’s the meaning, how did that change you,’ and that’s why you keep thinking about them–or you have a change that you want to tell people about and you need to go find those moments.”

So that’s what–the outline that I made has nothing to do with the form of each essay. Interestingly enough, it never even occurred to me when I was writing it to think about the form, I just sort of thought–it’ll be like what’s on the page. But what happens is I sit down and I know all my pieces are there. I know the important moments and the thoughts they led me to. And I know the overall arc of the piece. And then when I sit down to write, it comes out completely differently. One of them came out as a letter. That wasn’t anything in the text, but it’s how I put the pieces together. But having this very thought-out ‘what are my pieces,’ and ‘what are my meanings,’ really made it possible for me to do a lot of work very quickly once the book had sold. They want a full draft by the end of the year. Preferably by October, since they gave me a one-year contract. 

I’m really excited. I’m nine essays–I’m working on the tenth now, out of 14.

Have you read anything exciting recently?

I’m in the middle of a book that I’m loving. Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland. And I love a history that is really voice-y. That isn’t afraid to be really specific and sound like a person. And so this history–not only does he have this incredible voice to it, but it’s told through his own life. Every year of his life is a chapter. And he mixes–moves in and out of the personal and the much more global. And a lot of times the personal is a synecdoche for the global. Sometimes it’s not–sometimes we just get the personal and sometimes we just get the global. It’s so smart, so smartly done, and so beautiful, and so obviously the work of someone who has been thinking about these things for 60 years. It feels kind of like a capstone on his work. 

Another book that I just finished and really love is Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s The Tree Doctor, which is spare and beautiful and really intensely emotional and sexual. It’s the first book I’ve read that really captured the pandemic for me in an interesting way. It’s not my experience with the pandemic. The narrator of this book is a woman who is in California because–she lives in Hong Kong with her family. Right before the pandemic, she flies to San Francisco because her mother needs to go into a nursing home. So she’s there when the lockdown happens, and she gets stuck, separated from her family, and ends up having an affair with this tree doctor who she hires to take care of the plants in her mother’s garden. And it really gets at so many parts of the isolation, the fear, but also the… it’s so hard to talk about the pandemic still. The things that it made possible because of the things that it made impossible… it gets all of that. It’s such a nuanced fictional look at something that I experienced directly recently, and I feel like I haven’t seen anything else that’s grappling with the pandemic in a way that’s nuanced and thoughtful and real and yet fictional.

I know you talked about going to archives in New Jersey and San Francisco and all kinds of places. Your first two books are obviously very focused on New York City. Is there another city that you have done some research on in the course of this that you’re like, “Maybe I’ll write a book about that one day?”

One I was tempted by briefly. I lived in New Orleans for six months. I loved it. I love New Orleans.

Walt Whitman spends this time in New Orleans, and later says–much later in his life, after he’s sort of been really gay and starts to be a little less gay. He says there was a woman in New Orleans, he says “I fathered six children,” all these things where you’re like “That’s not true.” It did make me wanna go and learn about his time in New Orleans. In Leaves of Grass, in the section that is called “Calamus Poems,” he talks–there’s this whole part about “Live Oak With Moss,” and it’s this whole… He wrote those poems in New Orleans, and there’s this early draft of one in pencil where you can see him erase the “he” of the lover and replace it with “she” and so I thought–New Orleans is important to Walt Whitman. And there was a moment where I thought maybe that’s … when I didn’t know what that book was yet. Maybe I need to go to New Orleans; maybe that’s where this all began. And then I was like, “No, that’s not it.” I did love New Orleans. So maybe I need to just go and write a book about the history of New Orleans. And then I was like, “I’m not the person to write that history.” I would be the literal definition of a carpetbagger. 

I want to say: I don’t think you need to have a direct 1:1 identity match with the subject you’re writing about. But you do need to understand why you’re the right person to write that book. I’m not the right person to write every book about women’s prisons, but the House of D was directly connected to the work I was already doing. I went on a tour at one point with an older queer person, Jay Toole, who’s at the start of the book, who literally looked me in the face and said “I’m doing this because the young people are forgetting. People do not know. Someone needs to do this.” It sort of felt like all of my work had led me to this place, and then a queer elder in my community was looking me in the face and saying, “Someone has to do this.” And I asked around and no one was doing it. And I realized that almost everyone who I spoke to for that book, who had direct experience in the prison is dead now. Carol Crooks died during the pandemic. If I hadn’t interviewed her when I did, there would be no interview anywhere recorded about her experiences with Afeni Shakur and in the Women’s House of Detention. 

I love all my work and I have a big ego, so with all of that in mind, I think that’s the most important thing I will ever do. There’s nothing I can do that will rival that. That story is so essential. It was so close to slipping away entirely from living memory. And I don’t think I did the best job with it. I look at that book and think of all the things I could make better about it. But in terms of my actual intercession into history, When Brooklyn Was Queer is fun and it’s a lot of great stuff. But it doesn’t… I don’t know how to put it. It doesn’t start a new story. It doesn’t–it collects and there’s a thread in it about the development of queer identity over time, which I only slightly understood while I was writing it. I actually have another book I’m working on, a very small book. A 60-page monograph that’s my conceptualization of 200 years of queer history and the changes in identity in America. Which really is me attempting to do what I think would’ve made that book really critical. What I learned from that book, what it served, I hadn’t worked out all the ideas. It’s only there in underlying forms. 

But with The House of D, I feel like I really nailed it. I see why this matters and I can tell you right now it does matter and it made Greenwich Village the queer neighborhood it is today. Stonewall happened the way it did because of that prison, and so much else in this country happened because of the way we conceptualize women specifically as criminals through the body and through ideas of not being properly white feminine. That has reorganized our entire world after the Civil War. For me, I don’t think I’ll ever do anything that matches that again. I’d love it if I did. That was just luck. I happened on the right story at the right time and I was able to tell it right.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.