When reading Hugh Ryan's When Brooklyn Was Queer, the reader may feel certain (as I did) that Ryan is perched next to you on a stool at a gay bar, whispering stories of queer trysts, losses, and triumphs in your ear as you ironically down Manhattans. Ryan captivatingly weaves together a vibrant history of queer waterfronts, “peg houses,” communes, and scandals, which is a history also erased by highways, violence, pathologization, and morality committees. While some may be chagrined that there is yet another book on queer New York City, there are actually few extant scholarly volumes on the city's queer history, and fewer still that deemphasize a Carrie Bradshaw view of the world, i.e., queer history beyond Manhattan. Inserting new history into academic discourse, while also rereading and amplifying long adored queer people, places, and experiences for a public audience, When Brooklyn Was Queer is a profound mix of rigorous historical scholarship and delicious readability that will be of use and interest to queer scholars and queer youth alike.The text is split into seven chronological chapters. After a prologue and introduction, the book opens in 1855 with Walt Whitman walking near the waterfront to pick up the first published copies of Leaves of Grass; the next chapter begins with the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, binding Brooklyn to Manhattan forevermore. Ryan then structures chapters by decades (1910s, 1920s, 1930s) as he traces shifting gender and sexual mores to articulate changing notions of queerness. He splits the last two chapters between 1940 and 1945, to focus on the WWII era, and the increasingly restrictive and menacing 1945–1969 period of “great erasure,” concluding with the Stonewall Riot. Ryan's chapters detail the rise of when, where, and how queer people could find one another and themselves across Brooklyn, and how they shaped the city and world we know now.Many of the queers and queer places Ryan discusses are artists and art venues such as theaters or poets’ and novelists’ communal homes. These queers’ art and lives were often fodder for tabloids, a vast source of archival records. Some subjects appear in multiple chapters—gay diarist and Kinsey informant Thomas Painter, lesbian activist and archivist Mabel Hampton, transgender voluntary medical subject and sex worker Loop-the-Loop, and (sexuality undefined) poet and essayist Marianne Moore—thereby affecting a sense of how queer lives seep beyond any formal periodization. Ryan's notion of queer, too, is admirably leaky and inclusive. His 114-year history situates the modern reader in shifting identities and frameworks, ranging from inverts to homosexuals, drag queens to drag kings, bisexuals to asexuals, transgender people to cross-dressers, and everyone in between and beyond, whether for one-night hookups or lifelong partnerships.The contributions of When Brooklyn Was Queer are manifold. First, Ryan's political economic reading of the city is grounded in everyday lives of queer Brooklynites, whose queerness shapes and is shaped by expanding materialist locales of transportation infrastructures, working-class neighborhoods, and waterfront redevelopment. Reading urban planning through the lens of gender and sexuality renders further insights into how development worked alongside and against “deviance.” Second, the text includes close readings of eugenic-saturated policing, laws, policies, and morality campaigns, along with medical developments, that shaped the notion of what homosexuals are in Brooklyn and, in so doing, how queerness works differently across city geographies and time. Some buildings, streets, and neighborhoods were mentioned so often that they become saucy characters unto themselves: the now obliterated cruising lane of Sands Street (damn you again, Robert Moses), the now knocked down, queer communal home “February House” at 7 Middagh Street (residence to Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, and W. H. Auden, among others), and that space at the end of the Brooklyn world where everyone was welcome to play, Coney Island. There is even a record of what may be one of the first Brooklyn gayborhoods, which emerged as gay men bought and coordinated the decoration of their homes on State Street in the early 1960s (238). Finally, Ryan has written a smart, witty, and easy-to-read queer history that upsets notions of queer history as a “march of incremental progress” (223), thereby furthering the access and range of queer history for public, classroom, and academic audiences.The most significant weaknesses of the book have to do with race foremost and gender second. Ryan cautiously explains that while he begins When Brooklyn was Queer with Whitman, it is the power of white gay men to retain records primarily about themselves. Some would argue it's best not to reassert the limits of the archive; yet, there are always moments in each chapter that erupt with possibilities for further intersectional insight that never come. Calling out archival absences and limits per chapter would have served the reader well. Ryan sometimes attends to but does not resound the fact that white privilege shapes most of his subjects’ ability to create and, sometimes, sustain queer spaces and lives. Most potently, Ryan ends his third chapter, “Criminal Perverts, 1910–20,” by noting that “fears about ‘race mixing’ and queer people were intimately connected, flip sides of the same eugenic coin” (98). If this sentence had framed the chapter rather than come at its conclusion, the deep and total ties among gender, sexuality, and race would have saturated the chapter as they saturate queer worlds.Still, Ryan's Brooklyn allows the reader to take in this forever edge and “edgy” borough/county to recall its unique and important past: “If we imagine each of the queer lives this book will discuss as a single thread, Brooklyn is the place where they all momentarily knot together before shooting out again in every direction” (37). When Brooklyn Was Queer can be added to the thankfully ever-growing list of queer public histories that take us in hundreds of new directions we never knew existed but have craved all along.