PositiveThe New RepublicIt’s a satisfying retort to the idea that there was nothing queer there before ... A hungry archivist, Hugh Ryan unearths vivid material to populate this story ... Ryan takes care to note that \'racist and misogynist structural realities meant that even at its outset, American queer life developed in splintered pockets\' ... At times this drives him to too modest conclusions ... The archival discoveries that Ryan has made, however, evoke a world of affection and pleasure that is at odds with the prevailing story that sexual liberation only began in the 1960s ... Ryan’s history posits that the urban world of prewar Brooklyn produced a certain kind of queer, and that postwar suburbia enforced a kind of forgetting. The prodigal return of the suburban queer to the city is often underwritten by the promise of redeeming a sense of unclaimed belonging, and Ryan’s archaeology successfully seems to notarize it ... I felt a warmth reading about these forgotten lives, which left an infinity of traces on the same streets I walk, though the frame Ryan operates with presumes that everyone else had forgotten, too.
