The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

From 1929 to 1974, in New York’s Greenwich Village, there stood a prison, a detention center housing women and transmasculine people that was “dangerous, vile, violent, dirty, and cruel”—but also a place that became a locus of the local queer community (among those incarcerated were Angela Davis and Andrea Dworkin). In this essential, abolitionist work, historian and author of When Brooklyn Was Queer Hugh Ryan uncovers the stories of this bewildering place and of the people who populated it.