This Book Tells the Forgotten Queer History of a Women’s Prison

Them, May 9, 2022: This Book Tells the Forgotten Queer History of a Women’s Prison

“Hugh Ryan’s award-winning nonfiction debut, When Brooklyn Was Queer, made waves on the literary scene by combining engrossing storytelling with meticulous research into queer history. With engaging prose, Ryan told the story of a New York City borough that has become emblematic of the simultaneous ubiquity, visibility, and erasure of modern queer history writ large.

“Ryan brings that same balancing of the universal and the particular to his new book, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, out May 10, which chronicles the history of Greenwich Village’s Women’s House of Detention, or the “House of D,” as it was called. This building, which stood from 1929 to 1974, was and is a pillar of queer history. It held tens of thousands of women, transmasculine people, trans men, gender nonconforming people, queer people, poor people, sex workers, and people of color — in sum, people whose identities and presentations made them targets for incarceration but whose lives were nonetheless important.

“Prison abolitionism has always been a central axis of many activist movements in the U.S, as Ryan traces in The Women's House of Detention. Many of the people who passed through the House of D were radical in a myriad of ways, forming an integral part of liberation movements that continue today, including Angela Davis and Afeni Shakur. ‘Researching the House of D has shown me the consistency of this truth, over decades, through liberal movements and conservative ones: the prison system is irredeemable,’ Ryan writes.”

Additional reading:

The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan on bookshop.org

Jezebel, May 9, 2022: 'The Women's House of Detention' Illuminates a Horrific Prison That 'Helped Define Queerness for America'

Village Preservation, January 29, 2018: The Women’s House of Detention

Village Preservation, August 28, 2020: The House of D: A Panel on the Women’s House of Detention