Gay cruising brooklyn

The (Almost) Lost Gay History of Brooklyn

Illustration: Remie Geoffroi

In 2010, the writer Hugh Ryan, incensed by the Smithsonian’s decision to delete David Wojnarowicz’s A Conflagration in My Belly from display, created the Pop Up Museum of Homosexual History in his Bushwick loft. The experiment was enough of a triumph (and a fire hazard — the police secure it down on opening night when 300 people showed up) that Ryan was inspired to scoop deeper into his adopted borough’s own gay history. His research became the new book When Brooklyn Was Queer. The story starts with Walt Whitman’s depictions of gay cruising in Leaves of Grass, likely the first in American letters, and continues through to the queering of Sands Street between the World Wars and the demolition of landmarks of gay life during Robert Moses’s construction of the BQE in the early ’60s. (Though with the companion creation of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the master builder unintentionally fathered a whole unused cruising ground.) While the lives of white same-sex attracted men in Brooklyn are the most historically documented, Ryan makes a particular effort to include women and gender-nonconforming people. He ends the book right before St

‘Untitled’ (from the series ‘In the Vale of Cashmere’), 2010. All photographs by Thomas Roma.

Despite having had exhibitions at both the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography and being the founding Director of Columbia University’s photography program, Thomas Roma has never had a solo exhibition in a gallery in New York. That will alter tonight, with the opening of Steven Kasher Gallery’s In the Vale of Cashmere, a entertainment of black-and-white pictures taken in an area of Prospect Park called the Vale of Cashmere between 2008 and 2011. The area of the park is secluded, most easily accessible through a hole in a fence, and it’s known in Brooklyn as a cruising ground for gay men.

Related: Thomas Roma: ‘The Waters of Our Time’

Built as a playground for world children in the late 19th century, the Vale has been neglected, and is overgrown with foliage and the kind of huge, mutant weeds that can only flourish from urban soil. Although a team is raising wealth to renovate the Vale, it has survived much of the constant cycle of renewal in New York unscathed, so much so that wandering into it might g

Now a popular intimate site for marriage proposals both same-sex attracted and straight, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade was once one of New York City’s most trendy and well-known male lover male cruising areas, beginning in the 1950s and long-lasting well into the 1980s. During the 1960s in particular, it became contested ground when complaints from residential neighbors about the "goings on" there tardy at night led to a police crackdown as good as a curfew.

The Brooklyn Heights Promenade, also called the Esplanade, is a a 1,826-foot lengthy platform and pedestrian walkway which cantilevers out from Columbia Heights over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights. It is particularly recognizable for its breathtaking views of NY Harbor and the Lower Manhattan skyline, and runs from the west close of Remsen Road to the west end of Orange Street and can additionally be accessed from Montague Avenue and Pierrepont Place and the west ends of Pierrepont Street, Clark Lane and Pineapple Avenue. The promenade first opened in mutliple stages between 1948 to 1951. As early as 1952, it had already become a documented location for lgbtq+ male cruising.

As reported by Hugh Ryan in When Brookly

Brooklyn Heights Promenade

History

The Promenade, a pedestrian walk that cantilevers out from Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, is recognizable for its views of Modern York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline. Opened in stages between 1948 and 1951, it had become a documented location for gay male cruising by 1952.

In the early 1960s as the Promenade’s reputation grew, gay men from other parts of the city flocked to Brooklyn Heights. In the words of Armand Whitehead, who moved to Brooklyn Heights in 1963, “It was absolutely wild. People did everything there.” In September 1962, the police responded to complaints from straight residents and the Brooklyn Heights Association with a crackdown, which included stationing plainclothes officers on the Promenade. In 1966, the Parks Department imposed a curfew from midnight to 6 AM at the request of the police, who told the Brooklyn Heights Press that they were responding to the many neighborhood residents who “objected to the ‘goings on’ there late at night.”

Eventually the police became more accepting, and according to Whitehead, “if they knew you from the n