Review: Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

Reviewed by Rachel Corbman

The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
By Hugh Ryan
Bold Type Books, 2022
368 pages

Fifty years ago, an art deco prison towered over Greenwich Village. Between the years of 1929 and 1971, tens of thousands of women and trans masculine people passed through the Women’s House of Detention, waiting for a trial or serving sentences. In The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan convincingly demonstrates why this largely forgotten prison matters to queer history. Despite Ryan’s central focus on the so-called House of D, The Women’s House of Detention does not read like an institutional history. Rather, Ryan weaves together the life histories of dozens of women and transmasculine people, following them before and after their time at the House of D. The institution, he reminds us, “only matters because of the people who passed through it.” In Ryan’s hands, historical actors never lose their singularity. Collectively, however, their stories revise commonly held assumptions about how and why Greenwich Village became “a global byword for queerness.”

Before The Women’s House of Detention, Ryan already established himself as a key figure in queer public history. A decade ago, he accidentally founded the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History when 300 people showed up to his Bushwick loft for the first pop-up. For the next few years, the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History organized a series of temporary exhibits around the country, including a delightfully weird exhibit at the Jefferson Market Library — ironically the former location of a courthouse adjacent to the House of D — that featured dioramas of queer books created by queer artists from the United States, Canada, and South Africa. 

Ryan’s profile grew in 2019, with the publication of his first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, alongside the opening of a companion exhibit “On the (Queer) Waterfront” at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Readers of When Brooklyn Was Queer will notice thematic parallels and an overlapping cast of historical actors — Mabel Hampton and Big Cliff Trondle — in Ryan’s new book. Thematically, both books excavate a queer history of an often-overlooked place in New York City. Most people, as Ryan explained in the introduction of When Brooklyn Was Queer, do not “consider queer, Brooklyn, and history in the same sentence without a bit of prodding.” Somewhat similarly, The Women’s House of Detention focuses on an untold story of Greenwich Village, “perhaps the most studied place in all of queer history.” Both books also share a similar periodization. When Brooklyn Was Queer ends in 1966 with the shuttering of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, while The Women’s House of Detention ends in 1974 with the destruction of the House of D. Not coincidentally, Ryan ends each book at a historical juncture that is more often remembered as a beginning in queer historiography marked by the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the emergence of a gay liberation movement. Both projects, thus, offer pre-histories of contemporary queer activism and culture in which the “derelict” remains of the Navy Yard and the razed prison function as metaphors for what is left behind in the stories we tell.

In other ways, though, The Women’s House of Detention feels like a departure from When Brooklyn Was Queer. Though generally well-received, some reviewers questioned Ryan’s investment in Brooklyn’s literati — Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Carson McCullers, Harold Norse — or raised concerns about the whiteness of Brooklyn’s queer history, seeing this as the book’s “most significant weakness” or even “fatal flaw.” For his part, Ryan seemed to anticipate this critique. He began his search for archival traces of Brooklyn’s queer history out of his love for the borough’s vibrant queer present. His search for queer ancestors, however, also yielded a “long story of racism.” Throughout When Brooklyn Was Queer, Ryan attends to the larger structural issues that produced Brooklyn as “very white” during the timeframe of his study, leaving an archival record with only “spotty” evidence of the few people of color who lived in Brooklyn at the time. But even as When Brooklyn Was Queer acknowledges the “asymmetrical record” of queer history, Ryan tends to be most interested in stories that can be pieced together from the archive rather than speculating too much about the “gaps in our knowledge.”

Perhaps counterintuitively, the House of D is well-matched for Ryan’s skill as a researcher and writerly penchant for a good story. In researching the House of D, Ryan drew from a range of oral histories and published sources, including autobiographical writing penned by some of the prison’s most famous occupants, such as the political prisoners Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur, and Angela Davis. However, Ryan relies most heavily on a deep dive into the records of the Women Prison Association (WPA), an organization founded in 1848 to provide services to a hand selected group of women before and after their release. Not surprisingly, WPA clients tended to be “younger, straighter, and whiter than the prison population as a whole” but not monolithically so. From WPA case files, Ryan meticulously reconstructs the lives of approximately two dozen women or transmasculine people. We, for example, are introduced to Louise B, a precocious Black teenager from Prospect Park who was arrested in 1941 for stealing a three-volume set of the Naval Chronology of Great Britain from a rare bookstore with her girlfriend Ann C. Fluent in French, Italian, and German, Louise eventually left New York for Paris in the 1950s. We also follow Big Cliff Trondle — a familiar figure from When Brooklyn Was Queer — to his sad end. We first meet Big Cliff in 1917, as a brazen teenager on trial in Brooklyn for wearing “a blue serge suit, silk hose, tan oxford shoes, and a newsboy cap” — a case that generated a small media spectacle. By the 1930s, Big Cliff was hooked on newly criminalized heroin and “in and out” of the House of D until his death in 1942. 

In following the lives of women and transmasculine people like Louise and Big Cliff, The Women’s House of Detention carves a new path through the familiar terrain of 20th century queer history, making two related arguments along the way. Ryan, first, demonstrates how the informal networks forged by women and transmasculine people in the House of D formed the “backbone of early dyke culture that made organizing imaginable,” even as queer history too often “sidelines people like them.” After tracing how informal networks functioned as a necessary precursor for queer organizing, Ryan draws direct lines between the House of D and Greenwich Village’s storied history of organized queer resistance. Though these links become most clear in the late 1960s, Ryan tracks down evidence of at least one WPA client with ties to the homophile movement in the 1950s. On August 19, 1958, Honora D., a Black femme from Queens, ducked out of a WPA dinner to attend Leo Strauss’ lecture on “Homosexuality and the Law” organized by the Mattachine Society. Likewise, in the last chapter, Ryan tells the story of queer Black Panthers Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird to tease out the entanglement between gay and Black radical social movements. Shakur and Bird, Ryan explains, were detained in the House of D the night that the Stonewall Inn exploded in spontaneous queer resistance to a routine police raid of the bar. Five hundred feet from Stonewall, women and transmasculine people in the House of D “held a riot of their own, setting fire to their belongings and tossing them out the windows while screaming ‘gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!’”

With The Women’s House of Detention, Ryan has solidified his place as my favorite queer guide to New York City. After a brutal description of the death of Big Cliff Trondle, who was presumably murdered by a john, Ryan addresses the reader directly to tell us the exact location of Big Cliff’s unmarked grave, “should you care to visit him”: Lot 49A, Section E, Grave 14Tem in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens. For historians and general audiences alike, Ryan’s ability to connect readers to the past is the ultimate strength of his writing. After reading Ryan, I experience the same city block differently, looking for the palimpsestic traces of who or what used to be there. “There, there! We were there,” I can almost hear in response.

Rachel Corbman earned a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stony Brook University in 2019 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in community data at the University of Toronto.