Whitney Strub, editor. Queer Newark: Stories of Resistance, Love, and Community. Rutgers University Press, 2024.
I don’t remember exactly how my Georgia-born Nanna recalled the 1967 uprising in Newark. But her daughters—my mother and my auntie—always tell a story of sleeping in the bathtub, out of sight of windows for fear of stray bullets, and gawking at the troop-filled Humvees rolling down the streets. Meanwhile, as this quasi-military occupation was unfolding at home, the man who would become my father was already stationed in Vietnam, working in the martial courts. He returned to find a city still reeling from racial strife and beginning its decades-long decline. He went on to serve in the government of the city’s first Black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, in the planning department.
Gibson’s election as the first Black leader of a big East Coast city was a historic victory, representing the hopes attached to Black electoral success in the post-civil rights era. My father even reportedly attended the 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, that brought together Black political leaders and activists, from Democratic officials like Gary’s own first Black mayor, Richard Hatcher, to Black nationalists to left-wing barnstormers like the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Yet conflicts over convention agenda items like Zionism exposed the rift between the Black left and centrists eager to head up urban patronage networks and work within Democratic officialdom: the big tent was already falling apart. Meanwhile, many cities newly governed by Black officials were declining sharply in the face of deindustrialization: closing factories, rising rates of murders and burglaries, and the flight of white taxpayers to the subsidized and segregated suburbs—what became known as the urban crisis.
I was born at Beth Israel Hospital in the Weequahic section of Newark, in 1993. Sometime when I was a toddler, a shooting landed a bullet in the porch (or, in some versions, the door) of the building across the street from us. We lived in an apartment above a tía of mine in Irvington, a town next to Newark with similar demographics and troubles, part of a constellation of North Jersey rust-belt ghettoes—East Orange, Paterson, Jersey City. Soon after the shooting, we moved a thirty-minute drive away to one of Newark’s leafier, safer, whiter suburbs, in Union County, about an hour from midtown Manhattan on a good day (distances in New Jersey, the nation’s most densely populated state, contract and expand with traffic). My parents were Newark-born working-class strivers, who pushed my older half-brother to the top of his class at Saint Benedict’s Prep in downtown Newark before sending him off to Brown. I got a BA from Rutgers and later an MA from NYU, and spent my post-college years in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, scraping and hustling in odd jobs before eventually landing in a PhD program at Duke, hundreds of miles from my lifelong tri-state bubble.
These days, uprooted and disoriented, in penniless pursuit of a dubiously useful degree in the sparse expanses of Dixie, I’ve come to understand where I’m from. Or at least try to. To heal, or maybe to feed my homesickness, I take breaks from studying to go find stumps and fallen trees by various forested nooks and creeks around town, where I sit and devour books about places that I have more convincingly called home in the past. Mushrooming on my dresser are three piles of New York history books (Brooklyn: The Once and Future City by Thomas Campanella and The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Osman Suleiman, to name two), some “borrowed” from friends or flames past. (Tim from Inwood? I don’t know where you are, but I still have Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran, on 1970s gay New York.) Now added to this stack is Queer Newark, edited by Rutgers historian Whitney Strub, a recent anthology of academic and oral histories of the gay, lesbian, and transgender communities of my birthplace—and a welcome if at first irritating reminder that I am, after all, bridge-and-tunnel in my origins, not a “native New Yorker” for whom, as the song goes, nobody opens the door.
I suppose that such wistful identification with New York is, like moving out of Newark as a child, or pursuing a doctorate at the “Harvard of the South,” an attempt to claw one’s way out of the stigmas and imprisonments of being born into the wrong class, color, and zip code. By contrast, in the stories and testimonies of Queer Newark, I catch glimpses of a life I might have led if my family and I had stayed behind, and the rich legacies of queer people of color that I could have been enmeshed in. Between a white kid in my elementary school who said he wouldn’t sit next to me because I was Black, and the homophobic sermons I heard in church—the one Black space I had growing up—I could have used such a chosen family.
In media and popular culture, Newark has long appeared as irredeemably unsexy, violent, destitute. “Queer Newark reclaims Newark,” Strub declares defiantly, “as a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.” The book snuffs out the dominant view of the city, one ethnography and endnote at a time, centering squarely on the city’s poor and working-class Blacks and Latinos, especially Puerto Ricans and Brazilian immigrants. Queer Newark “highlights the intersectional ties between not only queerness and race and gender, but also queerness and class,” Strub writes, “for, like straightness in Newark, queerness here is markedly poor and working-class.”
The collection opens and closes with the heartbreaking story of Sakia Gunn, who was murdered on May 11, 2003, on the corner of Market and Broad Streets in the heart of downtown. Lovingly described as “young, gifted, Black, and queer,” Gunn “became an ancestor” for the crime of rejecting a man’s advances as she and her friends were returning from a night out in Greenwich Village. In the book’s epilogue, Zenkele Isoke, who studied Gunn in her dissertation, analyzes how a homegrown, Black lesbian–led movement in Newark organized actions and memorials, saving Gunn’s name from a silencing obscurity. Emblazoned on a mural along the McCarter Highway, “the longest mural on the East Coast,” is Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s Sakia, Sakia, Sakia, Sakia, painted in Gunn’s honor. If not for this collective campaign of remembrance, Gunn’s story would have been neglected or forgotten, never receiving the attention given to, say, white, gay, and cisgender men such as Matthew Shepard or Tyler Clementi.1
Interspersed with these historical accounts are excerpts from the book’s namesake archive, the Queer Newark Oral History Project. Begun in 2011 at Rutgers-Newark, the project aims “to relocate both history and the power of narrating it away from the Ivory Tower and into the community as much as possible,” drawn from “listening sessions” with Newark queers of various ages and backgrounds. Valuable in itself, such an approach is also a practical necessity. Oral and extratextual methodologies are crucial in scholarship on multiply marginalized groups like queer and transgender people of color, historically excluded or erased from institutions that would produce and preserve documents like wills, contracts, letters, or diaries. (Even where such records have existed, they are often suppressed: love letters between gay GIs would be thrown in the trash; family members would deny or destroy evidence of the sexuality of gay male kin who died of AIDS in the 1980s.)
These are acute cases of the evidentiary challenges of queer history as a whole. The editors of Bodies of Evidence, an earlier landmark volume of queer oral history, note that the field, like queer life itself, is undermined by “heavy social stigmatization of queer desires, the active state policing of queer behaviors and public expressions, the medicalization and psychiatric classification of bodies feeling and expressing queer meanings, and the religious intolerance of queer and non-nuclear family units and forms of spiritual kinship.” None of this is to say that historians can or should rely solely on oral methods, of course; rather, healthy marriages of archival and ethnographic methods can produce the generative interdisciplinary connections that Queer Newark exemplifies.
At its height of prosperity and population in the early twentieth century, Peter Savastano and Timothy Stewart-Winter write in the book’s opening chapter, Newark was no “mere waystation” for queer New Yorkers, but a destination—so much so that during one vice crackdown in New York, a Newark police official worried that “undesirable classes of society” might take refuge and metastasize across the Hudson. In 1928, a nineteen-year-old “slim blond” ephebe from East Flatbush, Brooklyn decided to put on their sister’s clothes and make their way to Newark. “Arthur Houston” slept at the YWCA for a night before checking into a hotel as “Miss Dorothy Dix of Hollywood, California.” After staff called the police department’s missing persons bureau, Houston was arrested on charges of impersonating a woman. Savastano and Stewart-Winter hesitate to categorically gender Houston, or to pigeonhole their story in the annals of either “gay” or “trans” history. Where “the first generation of scholars in gay and lesbian history might have seen Houston as a gay man who cross-dressed,” they write, “more recently scholars of trans history have pointed out that there is little basis for emphasizing the desire for sex with men on the part of a figure such as Houston rather than the decision to wear feminine clothing, or to assume that the latter was done merely as a tactical means to pursue the former.” The queer in Queer Newark captures this more fluid, adaptable approach to archival subjects like Dix, accessible to us only in news clippings and snapshots, and not easily assimilable to any of our familiar identity categories.
The whole book is a marvel of such methodological resourcefulness. Anna Lvovsky uses the nigh-ethnographic records of Newark’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) to uncover the city’s midcentury network of gay watering holes, which both thrived and suffered under the weight of state repression. Lvovsky follows the model of George Chauncey and other historians of queer life, who have squeezed studies from the copious records of cops, courts, and buzzkill booze-control authorities. As Chauncey has written, “the most significant step in the campaign to exclude the gay world from the public sphere was a counterintuitive one: the repeal of Prohibition.” Liquor licenses could be revoked if police, often working undercover, observed “disorderly” conduct, thus effectively deputizing nightlife proprietors in anti-gay crackdowns. The ABC’s “evidentiary reports often read like catalogues of gender-nonconforming behaviors,” Lvovsky writes, of “women who wore pants, spoke in gruff tones, or ‘drank their beer roughly,’ men who ‘swayed as they moved,’ raised their pinkies, or simply acted in an overly ‘friendly’ manner.”
The 1960s are remembered as the moment that Newark would begin to unravel, yet Lvovsky argues convincingly that “the steady ebb of white, middle-class families left space not just for growing Black neighborhoods but also for a commercial culture that flouted traditional sexual norms.” As in other cities, these were “semi-private spaces that nurtured boundary-pushing behaviors that might have drawn more hostility on the streets,” from prostitution to cross-dressing to interracial coupling. Here too Newark parallels but doesn’t duplicate New York, showing the liberatory possibilities opened by the urban crisis. Post-uprising Newark’s story, Kristyn Scorsone writes in another chapter, “is not a simple declension narrative of the fall of another postindustrial northern city.” Queer community-building in this period, generally a Black phenomenon, “laid the groundwork for the city’s queer and transgender community to engage in later kinds of queer institution-building, such as entrepreneurial businesses,” as well as political organizing and the ballroom scene of the 1980s and ’90s.
The older bars documented by Lvovsky were joined by new clubs clustered around Halsey Street in Newark’s Central Ward. Le Joc opened in 1974 as the “first Black and queer owned and operated underground club in Newark”; its owner, Albert Murphy, “was initially known for throwing extravagant Mother’s Day fashion shows that featured high fashion models like Beverly Johnson, the first Black model to make the cover of . . . Vogue, in 1974.” Guests at Le Joc included celebrities like the legendary supermodel Iman and others. The theatrical Doll House, “a unique club space that infused elements of the Black Arts Movement with high fashion, camp, and ballroom culture,” opened two years later. Owned by two “beautiful gay men who could pass for women,” including one cross-dresser, the Doll House was particularly friendly to Black trans women; one early employee was ballroom performer Pucci Revlon, who would later appear in 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, alongside other Newarkers. “The influence Newark’s club and ballroom scene had on New York City’s scene has yet to be fully studied and appreciated,” Scorsone writes.
The influence of course also ran the other way. After Le Joc closed, Murphy managed a new club called Zanzibar, which opened on Broad Street in 1979. “Our crowd was much straighter and we weren’t as sophisticated as Manhattan,” recalls Miles Berger, Zanzibar’s owner, “but basically we were the New Jersey version of the Paradise Garage”—the legendary, scrappy downtown Manhattan disco club that drew a mostly Black and Latino clientele. Through Berger and Murphy, who were immersed in Manhattan’s disco scene, the Zanzibar was part of a tri-state party network that included legendary DJs like Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan. My mother and her sister, a lesbian, visited the Zanzibar and other clubs in and around Newark, as the soundscape shifted from disco to house in the 1980s. My mother remembers standing right in front of the speakers at the Zanzibar, blissfully zoning out. If Newark undeniably declined by many measures in these years, by others it blossomed. As in New York, with swathes of downtown abandoned or neglected, rents were cheap and space was plentiful, clearing the way for a ferment of musical, social, and sexual experimentation.
Growing up in Scotch Plains, we would regularly hop in the family van to go to Newark, and my father, by then working as a cop in neighboring East Orange, would drive me and my little brother through the city. It was a kind of homecoming—though technically our old apartment was in neighboring Irvington. New Jersey in general is a mess of mini-municipalities, and the borders between towns are so porous as to be imperceptible. Yet this density masks a deep degree of segregation. Scotch Plains is a majority-white town with a significantly higher median income than Plainfield, right next door and almost entirely Black and Latino; the two are sneakily separated by a single road. My family would always venture into Plainfield to go shopping, to get fades at the barbershop, enjoy pupusas downtown, or get Jamaican oxtails from Elma’s Kitchen. On the bus to Elizabeth to attend community college, I would pass the stately mansions of Westfield or Cranford, quickly followed by the shabbier duplexes and triplexes of Elizabeth, home to the East Coast’s busiest port.
The planet’s most polyglot corner, the tri-state region is a concentric patchwork of inequality and division. Closely connected by transit and commerce, fortunes and demographics vary mile by mile, even block by block. Tony, lily-white Scarsdale sits just north of the Bronx, home to the country’s poorest congressional district; Short Hills in New Jersey, one of the ten wealthiest zip codes in the country, lies a stone’s throw from the decrepit projects of Newark. Residents might take the same trains in and out of “the city”—midtown and downtown Manhattan—but they live worlds apart.
This inequality also manifests in the region’s historiography. Scholarly literature on the five boroughs is too vast to summarize, yet where is New Jersey’s version of The Power Broker? Work on largely Black and poor Newark is scanter still. Reviewing the existing scholarship in a 2010 issue of the Journal of Urban History, the local historian and activist Stanley B. Winters wrote that “few scholarly studies examine the history of modern Newark”; even academics at Rutgers and other local universities rarely produce dissertations or monographs on Brick City. Books on queer life outside the largest US cities remain rare, and for Newark and New Jersey they are almost nonexistent: my own research yields only scattered articles on, say, Atlantic City’s gay bars. Queer Newark is the first but, one hopes, not the last of its kind.
Newark itself still suffers as a stubborn symbol of postwar urban dysfunction, and later, of shallow neoliberal revival. By the turn of the millennium, as historian Kevin Mumford observes in Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America, the city “consistently led the nation in the indices of social distress,” from unemployment to reported venereal diseases. In the twenty-first century, Brick City boosters peddled its media image as the “next Brooklyn” to speculators and gentrifiers-in-waiting. Its pitch as a postindustrial comeback kid was facilitated by then-mayor, now Senator Cory Booker. With a thousand-watt smile and a “kumbaya” vacuousness evoking Obama and other “post-racial” Black politicos, Booker courted billionaires and corporations to set up shop just a hop across the Hudson and Passaic from New York. “Booker’s frequent media appearances made him seem opportunistic to many locals,” Mumford writes, and “his wooing of such corporations as Audible and Panasonic” rang hollow to Newarkers beyond downtown. Perhaps most notorious was a $100 million dollar gift from Mark Zuckerberg to uplift the city’s chronically underperforming schools, money that “evaporated into a nexus of high-priced consultants,” leaving residents and youth out to dry. After two decades’ efforts to claw out of inherited blight and disinvestment, Newark still has an estimated two thousand vacant lots across just twenty-four square miles; ranked sixty-sixth by population, Newark is the nineteenth-“neediest” city in the nation as of 2023, according to one study assessing hunger, poverty, and other factors. But at least now there’s a Whole Foods downtown—just six blocks from the corner where Sakia Gunn was killed.
Here the uncomfortable intersection of queer community and urban inequality also comes into view. Toward the new millennium, with crime rates falling and tech, finance, and real estate money flowing, America’s largest cities traded the old urban crisis for the new one of gentrification. “Gay ghettos” like the Castro in San Francisco, Boystown in Chicago, or Manhattan’s Greenwich Village are far from actual ghettos, but instead enclaves of well-heeled whites with enough of every kind of capital to fund mainstream queer organizations. Walk from New York’s sleek, well-resourced LGBT Center on West 10th Street to the legendary gay bar Julius’, and you’re far more likely to bump into a Human Rights Campaign donor with a six-figure FIRE-sector job than one of the nightwalking pier queens of yesteryear. The dual devastations of the AIDS epidemic and Giuliani-era anti-vice campaigns saw to that.
Meanwhile, a city like Newark, still relatively locked in the long post-’60s urban crisis, is not usually seen as a tourist-friendly haven for gay, lesbian, or transgender travelers. As a teen I would take a bus into the city and crash on my half-brother’s couch in Harlem, joining Pride parades or going to the Center—and bypassing Newark without a thought of what I might find there. Such disparities, Strub reminds us in his introduction, have cemented and “reinforced widespread perceptual links between queer urban space and whiteness.” In fact, Newark and other hollowed-out, majority-black cities—like Flint, Detroit, or Gary—are “rarely thought of as sexual or erotic spaces at all.” As well as preserving queer stories and scenes that might have gone undocumented, Queer Newark seeks to re-eroticize the hood. While academic queer theory too often neglects the classed dimensions of sexuality, most of the book’s chapters explicitly center working-class and queer people of color struggling with the material effects of ghettoization.
Of course, the “ghetto” itself is an invention, defined by over-policing and carceralization. It is also, as Leilani Dowell writes in her chapter “At Home in the Hood,” “a metonym for a mindset of laziness, violence, and backwardness, conjuring images of the ‘welfare queen’ and the hyperviolent Black man.” In places like Newark, she writes, the ghetto serves as what David Harvey calls a “spatio-temporal fix,” “solving” the morbid symptoms of capital overaccumulation by spatially displacing, containing, and disciplining “surplus” populations. When ghettoized groups cross these raced, gendered, and sexualized boundaries, this containment is aggressively reinforced, as in the case of the Jersey Seven and the queer Newark community that was their home base. In 2006, seven Black queer women were assaulted in Greenwich Village by a man enraged that they had rebuffed his advances. In the “sensationalization of the attack and the trial that ensued,” Dowell writes, “local media outlets . . . would remind their readers that all but one of the seven were bridge-and-tunnel invaders” from Newark, not the gentrified Village. The press caricatured the women as a “she-wolf pack”; Bill O’Reilly aired a segment spooking his geriatric Caucasian viewership with the specter of underground lesbian gangs.
Strub’s own chapter takes Newark as a microcosm of both hidden histories of queer activism and the sometimes intolerant treatment of homosexuality by the left—from white Students for a Democratic Society activists to Black nationalists—through the biographies of little-known locals such as Raymond Proctor. Like my grandmother, who escaped from Jim Crow Georgia to the Bronx before settling in Newark, Proctor arrived in Newark via the Bronx from his native New Orleans. Proctor earned a degree from Seton Hall and got a job as a caseworker for the Essex County Welfare Board in 1960. The following spring, a Newark-Essex branch of the Congress of Racial Equality launched, and Ray and his fellow-traveling brother returned south as Freedom Riders. Proctor’s personality and creative troublemaking, such as a 1963 “sing-in” at a White Castle in Newark, got him elected to chair the CORE branch the following year. “As quickly as he took charge,” however, he left the position, reportedly to travel to Sweden for graduate study in social work. Though his sexuality at the time was not publicly known, Proctor “deviated from normative hetero-masculinity in ways that caused some implicit discomfort, and,” Strub judges, “possibly experienced more overt pressure left out of the historical record.” Proctor’s time in Sweden transformed him, and he returned to Newark “wearing flared pants and carr[ying] himself with a new self-confidence.” He started coming out to more and more people, including family, even taking his nieces and nephews on a vacation to Fire Island. Tragically, after a lifetime of service to his community, and like thousands of other gay men, Proctor died of AIDS, in 1988.
Then there is the infamous though often caricatured homophobia of Amiri Baraka, both the city’s most famous political figure and, with Philip Roth, its best-known writer. Shockingly for those who only know his most incendiary Black nationalist phase, Strub argues that “Baraka also served as the foremost midcentury literary scribe of queer Newark through his poems, plays, and novels.” Born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark in 1934, he was booted out of the military as a young man as an alleged Red, and landed in the libertine bohemia of the Village, quickly gaining fame as a playwright and poet. Though Jones was then married to a white woman, “the assassination of Malcolm X brought him to a racial reckoning,” prompting him to abandon his wife and children for Harlem just as the Black Arts movement was taking off, and ultimately to return to Newark for good, in 1965. In the following years Baraka denounced NAACP kingpin Roy Wilkins as an “eternal faggot,” and sent a threatening 1971 letter to Bayard Rustin, cruelly denouncing Rustin’s supposed sexual “sickness” for alienating blacks and warning, “you will even be eliminated.”
Yet this bigoted middle period has overshadowed the earlier, less uptight Village years, when Baraka was far more ambivalent toward gayness. Strub notes that a scene in one of Jones’s early plays, The Eighth Ditch Is Drama, “erupted in . . . gay sex” so “graphic” that it got him arrested on obscenity charges after its 1961 debut. Baraka went on to produce other works with overt queer themes, including moving scenes of love and intimacy under adversity, as well as dandyish gay heroes and suspiciously accurate name-drops of Newark cruising spots. (In The Slave, from 1964, a character recounts chasing “that kind of frail little sissy-punk down Raymond Boulevard”—a place, Strub points out, that locals sometimes “call[ed] . . . ‘Miss Raymond’ and ‘the Road to Ruin’ for its centrality to Newark cruising.”) “The overtly autobiographical nature of Jones’s work,” Strub writes, with scholarly understatement, “raises questions about his actual sexual practices.” Strub even uncovers a letter from the Newark-born gay poet Peter Orlovsky to his longtime lover Allen Ginsberg, about their mutual friend: “I hope Leroy is happey [sic] and alright. Sorrey [sic] I dident [sic] make love with him when he wanted me to.” Make of that what you will.
The coarse homophobia and misogyny of Baraka and some other Black Power militants may in part reflect Black Newarkers’ bitter disappointments in the aftermath of the 1967 riots. Black residents were finally able to take control of their city, from the mayoralty on down—just as Brick City was collapsing under the weight of redlining, depopulation, and deindustrialization. (My mother remembers, before the uprising, living among many Jewish and Italian shopkeepers, neighbors, and others, all of whom slowly disappeared after 1967. My dad campaigned against the city’s last white mayor, Hugh Addonizio, who oversaw the police crackdown on rioters, and was later convicted on corruption charges.) By 1970, the civil rights revolution had transformed the country, especially the racial makeup of the big-city Democratic machines. “Americans . . . elected Black mayors in sixty-seven cities with populations of more than 50,000 from the 1960s to the early 1990s,” Mumford writes in Newark, “and by 1972 the state of New Jersey alone had four Black mayors.” Even the politically moderate, Alabama-born Gibson, like other big-city Black mayors, partly owed his success to the shock troops and symbolism of Black Power politics.
By the time of Gibson’s re-election, it was increasingly apparent that the election of Black mayors led to the staffing of municipal bureaucracies with more Black people, thus more accurately representing newly mobilized constituencies—but little else. Even as Gibson had to resort to begging Trenton and Washington for funds, Newark police ballooned to “an all-time peak in 1974 of 1,640 cops, or 4.7 officers for every thousand residents—one of the nation’s highest ratios for large cities,” yet “crime rates decreased only marginally.”
Meanwhile, Prudential and other big local firms took an axe to their workforces, and manufacturers followed white residents out of the city. My own grandmother went from working in a toy factory in Newark to a job at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories complex in suburban Summit, a dozen miles away. As employers fled the city, tens of thousands of jobs left with them, bleeding the city of both economic opportunities and tax revenue. As Brad R. Tuttle writes in How Newark Became Newark, “the population dropped by fifty thousand between . . . 1970 and 1980”; in a similar timespan, the city’s poverty rate rose from a little over a fifth of the population to about a third. Though Essex County and New Jersey gained jobs overall, Newark’s downward slide continued. Postwar Newark had “attracted more federal money per capita, and used the funds to flatten entire neighborhoods and build more public-housing units per capita than any city in the country,” Tuttle writes, yet a 1973 study found that it had “the poorest housing conditions of all large US cities.” Even grocery store chains pulled out, leaving food deserts. Though Gibson somehow lumbered into a third term, “by the fall of 1981, the widespread perception was that [he] had lost his energy and sense of mission.” Newark’s residents—Black and Puerto Rican, and whatever white folks were left—wanted, understandably, to leave.
While my own immediate family left Newark, others close to us stayed in the city. When I was a kid, a godbrother of mine, the son of my mother’s childhood friend, would travel from Newark to the suburbs to stay with us on weekends. After a few years, without warning, he just stopped coming. Years later I learned that he had been incarcerated, and once he got out, fell on hard times. Growing up in the impoverished former Cotton Belt in Albany, Georgia, my maternal cousins—all of them, like my godbrother, Black cisgender men—were also thrown behind bars for gangbanging. Their stories certainly gave me perspective on my more advantaged and mobile circumstances. But with our shared blood and color, an undercurrent of would that have been me? still haunts. These were boys with whom I would play-fight as a child, fending off accusations of “softness,” my incipient queerness.
But for all my ambivalence about leaving or staying, I know that no matter where we lived, growing up with a Vietnam veteran father, who had also been a cop during the crack wave, was not going to be easy. My mother’s own father vanished when she was a child—an era of her life she rarely talks about, not helped by a house fire decades ago that consumed every photo from her youth. My mom and dad had seen some shit and gone through some shit. Much of that shit fell onto me. Once, when I was a kid, the cops came to our door; my parents already knew I was gay, and I had been banished from the house. We had to go to court. I faintly remember a child services agent, a Black woman in a dark pantsuit, showing up at our Cape May-style house in those picture-perfect suburbs. In the blur of memory, I don’t recall what she or anyone said.
The last time I spoke to my dad was on Super Bowl Sunday two years ago, which also happened to be my little brother’s birthday. I had just achieved what I thought was my dream, pouring my parents’ years of sacrifices and “tough love” into a fully paid ticket to earn a doctorate. My dad shook my hand and said, in his gruff, stony way, that he was proud of me. A few days later, while sitting on a couch in Williamsburg, watching TV with a friend, I got the call. He was found dead in his bed.
Despite everything, many did stay in Newark, and others arrived. Reflecting the city’s shifting demographics, Queer Newark’s later chapters focus almost entirely on Newark’s black and, later, Latino communities. The Portuguese-speaking community in the Ironbound neighborhood is put under an ethnographic microscope in a chapter by Yamil Avivi. In college I met my friend Jon, a philosophy student originally from Curitiba, in southern Brazil; a few times a year we would go to the Ironbound, a stone’s throw from Newark Penn Station, in search of feijoada and guaraná. Our favorite spot was a churrasqueira and buffet called Delícias de Minas, where I first encountered things like pão de queijo (cheese buns), and where the waiters would keep slicing off and serving oven-fresh pieces of linguiça sausage and piranha from skewers the length of one’s arm, until you signaled them to stop.
Little did I know at the time that the staff of this and other Ironbound Brazilian restaurants are overwhelmingly queer. Reinterviewing interlocutors from her previous ethnographic work in the neighborhood, Avivi documents the growing acceptance of queerness in the community since the 2000s. Interviewees report the predominance of queer service workers at places like Delícias de Minas, as well as the sight of steadily more gay couples openly holding hands, even at local ethnic festivals. Yet the surrounding culture has remained heteronormative, and in the city’s halfhearted neoliberal revitalization, the Ironbound was marketed as a tourist-friendly enclave of entrepreneurial and well-behaved “ethnics,” in contrast to the criminality and disorder of neighboring US-born Blacks and Puerto Ricans. One queer Brazilian immigrant, pseudonym Carlos, reports that he associated “becoming American” with white suburbia; after slaving away in construction and domestic cleaning in New York, he met a “masculine-acting and introverted Italian American” in a North Jersey gay bar, with whom we went on to buy homes in New Jersey, earn U.S. citizenship through newly legal same-sex matrimony, and eventually move into a “newly built massive five-bedroom, four-bathroom home” in Florida. Carlos laments the loss of his gay Brazilian circle in the Ironbound, even as complains “that his friends were . . . envious of his mobility.” Anxious and isolated, Carlos tries to content himself with homonormative aspirations, an American dream with rainbow characteristics.
My paternal abuelo and abuela were from Santurce and Ponce, respectively; my father’s family like to claim, with only slight exaggeration, that they were the first Puerto Ricans in Newark. Starting with my namesake Tío José, they began arriving sometime between the Jones Act of 1917, which guaranteed US citizenship, and the start of World War II. As in New York, before the later arrivals of Brazilians, Mexicans, Dominicans, and others, Puerto Ricans were virtually the only Latin Americans in Newark, representing about a tenth of its population in 1970. Against popular portrayals of Newark as simply a “Black city,” Mumford describes Puerto Rican discontent with Black cultural nationalists’ campaigns for various Afrocentric makeovers (mandatory dashikis here, Bantu place-names there). On Labor Day weekend in 1974, when county cops tried to stop a dice game at a local Puerto Rican festival, the ensuing protest escalated into two days of rioting that resulted in two deaths and “more than two dozen buildings burned down.” Complexly positioned in the black-white racial binary that has shaped Newark in popular memory, these and other stories of Puerto Rican community and militancy have received comparatively little scholarly attention.
Strub’s chapter does tell the story of Hilda Hidalgo, a “pioneering Puerto Rican lesbian feminist” who, despite her decades-long relationship with a woman, “tended to emphasize her lesbian identity in national women’s studies and social work scholarly communities, while in Newark her public image hewed closer to a Puerto Rican ethnic identity, with her sexual identity left somewhat suspended.” Born in Río Piedras in 1928, as a young adult Hidalgo moved between the US and Puerto Rico, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees before settling in Newark in 1960 and becoming a stalwart left organizer. Her coalition-building between Puerto Ricans and African Americans was crucial to Kenneth Gibson’s 1970 election. “Apparently in response to her outspoken work,” Strub writes, “her car was firebombed outside her home in North Newark in October 1969”—one episode in the city’s longer history of political violence. Hidalgo was also a scholar, producing cutting-edge research on Puerto Ricans in Newark; after coming out in the 1970s, she penned pathbreaking work on Puerto Ricans and sexuality, including a 1976 article in the Journal of Sexuality on “The Puerto Rican Lesbian and the Puerto Rican Community.” One hopes that Strub’s account will help draw further overdue recognition to other local figures. Save for Strub’s section on Hidalgo, for example, the documentary riches of the Newark Public Library’s Puerto Rican Community Archives (where I once worked for college credit) are left largely untapped.
My longest visit to Newark in recent years was to the Whigham Funeral Home, just west of downtown and a block away from St. Benedict’s, my brother’s old prep school. I’ve been to Whigham’s twice: after my abuelo’s death, when I was in middle school, and then again in 2022, after my father died. It’s also where the bodies of greats like Sarah Vaughan and Whitney Houston were prepared for burial. My dad was a loyal donor to the local public jazz radio station, and he spun records like Vaughan’s when I was a kid. I remember riding in his van, listening to Babatunde Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, hearing stories of Celia Cruz or Ray Barretto in concert.
At the funeral, my relatives told old stories of blocks and wards and schools. Soldiers played “Taps.” The East Orange police chief spoke at the podium, praising my father’s service. To my surprise, she said that when in uniform, my dad kept a photo of my brothers and me underneath his visored hat. I did not recognize the father she and others spoke so glowingly about—and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had taunted her fellow cops in the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan two years earlier, during another uprising. Afterward, no one at the ceremony asked what I was up to, or if I was seeing anyone, or how I was doing in grad school. I felt like a ghost.
As I write, I am scrambling to find a subletter to take over my room in Durham for the summer, maybe even beyond. If home is where the heart is, then central Brooklyn, still predominantly Black, is it, landlords and rats and all. But so, in a strange way, is Newark. Stranded in the South, I’m surprised to say: I miss New Jersey. I miss my dad. At least on his better days. I hope to see him again one day—even if just for an apology. And I can’t wait to go back home.
A Rutgers undergrad, Clementi was filmed by his roommates kissing and embracing another man. Days later, after opprobrium and gossip had spread on social media, he jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge, into the Hudson. ↩
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