Before Stonewall: The Women's House of Detention Changed Queer History
Stonewall Uprising, The Women's House of Detention was an unavoidable fixture of queer life. "It was one of the Village’s most famous landmarks: a meeting place for locals and a must-see site for adventurous tourists," Ryan writes. "And for tens of thousands of arrested women and transmasculine people from every corner of the city, the House of D was a nexus, drawing the threads of their lives together in its dark and fearsome cells."From 1929 to 1974, the House of Detention permeated life in New York City so thoroughly that it even began appearing in songs and pop culture.
In 1960, Jerry Herman, the famed Broadway composer of Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles, wrote a song for his Off-Broadway musical revue, Parade!
called "Save The Village", originally entitled “Don’t Tear Down the House of Detention". In 1972, Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death, the Broadway musical by Melvin Van Peebles, known as the godfather of modern Black cinema, featured the song, "10th and Greenwich" (the well-known address of the prison).
The song is considered the first lesbian love song in Broadway history. Ryan's new book, aptly titled, The Women's House of Detention, is the most thorough collection of pre-Stonewall queer lives I've ever read.
