When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan

Author:Hugh Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

As the piece continues, it becomes clear that the author is very familiar with the bar. He describes the hostesses, a pair of drag queens named Violet and Blossom, as having their own “special following” thanks to their “elaborate drags.” Interestingly, from this point on, male and female impersonators almost exclusively used professional names of the gender they performed under. This was a sea change from the time of the Great Ricardo and Florence Hines and perhaps indicates that the impersonators were less concerned with, or capable of, projecting a traditionally gendered image offstage.

At Frank’s Place, the Brevities author picked up rumors from sailors from California, who talked about the “star who likes them ‘salty and sea-going,’” and the one who owned an antique store to conceal his faggy interest in period décor. Later in the article, the author discusses a variety of gay men and their lives in Brooklyn, from “Frank M—,” who has “an elaborate abode in Brooklyn” and “occasionally cultivates the society of some pretty actresses” to throw off suspicion about his homosexuality, to “another and much younger actor, one who still earns good money,” but also “makes frequent trips to the vicinity of the Navy Yard Y.M.C.A., in Sands Street.”

Overall, the piece makes it clear that a high-end gay scene in Brooklyn was directly connected to a network of gay nightlife around the city and country. According to a gay New York City resident named Thomas Painter (who provided Alfred Kinsey with a wealth of anecdotal information about gay New York during the 1940s and ’50s), “from Brooklyn to Harlem there were a score of bars catering exclusively to homosexuals and their prostitutes.”27

By the mid-1930s, thanks to the decreased size of the military between the two world wars and the end of Prohibition in 1933, the neighborhood around the Navy Yard lost some of its rough edges—but it retained its gay clientele. In 1935, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle devoted an entire article to not-so-subtly suggesting that something about Sands Street was queer. “Sinful Sands Street Really Just a Sissy,” ran the headline. If that wasn’t clear enough, the subhead explained that the “Picturesque Brooklyn Thoroughfare” was “like Greenwich Village,” which had been the epicenter of the pansy craze. The neighborhood was “cosmopolitan,” filled with “brightly-lighted bars” and “strolling sailors.” On the weekends, “crowds of expensively-clad men and women from the five boroughs and from out-of-town roll down Sands Street in luxurious automobiles, and seek the excitement and glamour they’ve heard about, in the bars, the one cabaret, and in the passing characters on the street.”28

That one cabaret was Tony’s Square Bar, which serviced sailors and their admirers throughout the 1930s and well into the ’40s and ’50s. Tony’s was just “a couple of hundred yards” from the Sands Street entrance to the Navy Yard and had a sign on the door that read NO MINORS UNDER 20 ALLOWED (in response to which one journalist wryly noted, “Minors age rapidly in Sands Street”).29 Inside, the bar was

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