Join us for a conversation with Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, and Benjamin Shepard, author of Illuminations on Market Street and Brooklyn Tides: The Fall and Rise of a Global Borough (with Mark Noonan).

Hugh Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history―a great forgetting. That Ryan unearths. Shepard’s work explores similar themes of cultural erasure as spaces of difference are forced to contend with seas of identical details encroaching. What will become of Brooklyn?  Tracing the emergence of Brooklyn from village outpost to global borough, Brooklyn Tides investigates the nature and consequences of global forces that have crossed the East River and identifies alternative models for urban development, providing an ethnographic reading of the literature, social activism, and ever ebbing tides impacting this transforming space. The formation of the Brooklyn we know today is inextricably linked to the stories of the incredible people who created its diverse neighborhoods and cultures. Ryan and Shepard will discuss a few of these narratives, comparing Brooklyn with historically queer spaces such as Manhattan and San Francisco, unpacking the cross currents and cultural tides from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village, East Coast to West, Fulton to Market Street.

Copies of Ryan’s When Brooklyn Was Queer and Shepard’s Illuminations on Market Street are available for purchase at the Bureau. To reserve copies please write to us at contact@bgsqd.com. Please support the Bureau by buying books from us. Thank you!