The Women's House of Detention Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Hugh Ryan

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover image illustration by Eiana Ejait

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  First Edition: May 2022

  Published by Bold Type Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Bold Type Books is a co-publishing venture of the Type Media Center and Perseus Books.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ryan, Hugh, 1978– author.

  Title: The women’s house of detention : a queer history of a forgotten prison / Hugh Ryan.

  Description: New York : Bold Type Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021040521 | ISBN 9781645036661 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781645036647 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women’s House of Detention. | Reformatories for women—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Women prisoners—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions—20th century. | Transgender prisoners—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions—20th century. | Poor women—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions—20th century. | Prison abolition movement—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. | Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)

  Classification: LCC HV9481.N62 W6679 2022 | DDC 365/.430974741—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040521

  ISBNs: 9781645036661 (hardcover), 9781645036647 (ebook)

  E3-20220317-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Few Notes on Language

  INTRODUCTION Jay Toole Marks the Land

  CHAPTER 1 The Prehistory of the Women’s House of Detention (1796–1928)

  CHAPTER 2 Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Social Workers—the Prison’s Eyes, Ears, and Record Keepers

  CHAPTER 3 Where the Girls Are: Greenwich Village and Lesbian Life

  CHAPTER 4 Rosie the Riveter Gets Fired

  CHAPTER 5 The Long Tail of the Drug War

  CHAPTER 6 Flickers of Pride

  CHAPTER 7 Conformity and Resistance

  CHAPTER 8 The Gay Crowds

  CHAPTER 9 Queer Women Get Organized

  CHAPTER 10 The City’s Search for the Perfect Victim

  CHAPTER 11 Gay Lib and Black Power

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  About the Author

  Praise for The Women’s House of Detention

  This book is dedicated to the memory of the forgotten.

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  A Few Notes on Language

  THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK I USE THE WORD QUEER IN A MATERIALIST, rather than identity-based, way to refer to the broad collection of people whose sexual and gender expressions were not normative in their time. Use of the word queer to refer to sexually nonnormative people goes back to the early nineteenth century, but most of the people I discuss in this book would not have used that word, in that way, for themselves. In that sense, it is an ahistoric term that is useful in this context.

  Often, I use the phrase “women and transmasculine people.” Many of the folks in this book were presumed to be women and lived lives that were masculine of center, but I have no access to how they identified. I do not want to make them invisible, presume facts I do not know about them, or project my assumptions onto them. Some clearly identified as men, and I follow their lead. Overwhelmingly, however, the people I am writing about understood themselves as women, and I do not want to obscure that fact either.

  For people whose stories I’ve drawn primarily or exclusively from private social work files, I use only their first name and last initial, as they never chose to make their stories public. For people who told their own stories, or whose stories I found largely through published documents, I introduce them using their full name, then default to just their last name. In both cases, this is a choice made out of respect.

  I capitalize Black in the same way that I would capitalize an ethnicity such as Irish or Puerto Rican (although these categories can overlap), because part of the legacy of slavery in America has been an erasure and flattening of the vast ethnic diversity of the people we today call Black—a flattening that continues to this day. Black connotes a specific experience and history, and even those Black people who do not share that experience—for instance, recent Black migrants from other countries—have the presumptions of those experiences placed on them by virtue of living Black in America, and must deal with the material realities that accompany those presumptions. As this is not true in the same way for white or brown people, I do not capitalize those terms.

  Finally, I primarily refer to the Women’s House of Detention as a prison, which is technically only a place where people are caged after they have been found guilty in our criminal legal system. Pretrial detention takes place in a jail. The House of D held both kinds of detained people.

  INTRODUCTION

  Jay Toole Marks the Land

  The success or failure of a revolution can almost always be gauged by the degree to which the status of women is altered in a radical, progressive direction.

  —ANGELA DAVIS, If They Come in the Morning…

  THE JEFFERSON MARKET GARDEN IN GREENWICH VILLAGE IS ONE OF the loveliest places I can’t stand. Flowering season seems to last longer there than the rest of the city. The low-rise nature of the surrounding buildings allows precious sun to warm the ground for Lenten roses in the first weeks of March, and keeps the garden inviting until the last camellias drop their petals in November. The only potential reminder of the spot’s one-hundred-fifty-year history as a prison is the high steel fence, which these days keeps the unwanted riffraff out rather than in.

  I used to love this garden. I’d sit by the koi pond, do interviews on my cell phone, and think what a beautiful oasis it was—what a gift the Village had given the city. Now, I can’t look at it without hearing Jay Toole’s voice describing the brutal physicals that doctors had inflicted upon her there, when the garden was a prison called the Women’s House of Detention.

  When I go into the garden, I’m always brought back to the one time—happened many, many times but this one stands out. He’s telling me to get on the table, and put my feet in the stirrups and this and that, and it felt like his whole arm went in there, you know, and they checked everywhere, every hole you have that’s where they went. Then he was like “All right, get off the table. Hurry up, we got to bring the next one in.”

  “Hurry up?” And I couldn’t move, the pain was so bad and I don’t know what he did up in there but it was so, so bad. When I looked down I was covered in blood.

  And they didn’t do nothing.1

  Today, it’s hard to imagine that a prison once graced the rarified streets of Greenwich Village, one of New York City’s most picturesque (and unaffordable) neighborhoods. But for almost as long as there has been a Greenwich Village—which is to say, almost as long as there has been a United States—detention centers have been an integral part of Village life. The last of them, the Women’s House of Detention, stood from 1929 to 1974. It was one of the Village’s most famous landmarks: a meeting place for locals and a must-see site for adventurous tourists. 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.

  Some were imprisoned there once, for as little as a day; others returned often and were held for years at a time. For decades, upon their release these women navigated the streets of Greenwich Village: ate in its automats and diners; caroused in the bars that would let them in; lived in nearby tenements; slept rough in the parks; visited friends and loved ones who were on trial or in detention; worked what jobs would hire them; attended court-mandated health screenings and probation meetings; and in a million and one other ways, made the Village their own. Now, aside from a small plaque on the garden’s fence, they have been almost entirely forgotten.

  Almost.

  The slim few who have fought to preserve the memory of the House of D are mostly working-class lesbian/bisexual women and transmasculine folks—the people most likely to fall into its clutches, and least likely to have other landmarks to call their own.

  Jay Toole first ended up in
the orbit of the House of D when she was thirteen, in 1960. Some friends had given her the haircut every cool boy wanted: a tight-fade flattop, just like Steve McQueen and Mickey Mantle. That was the final straw for her father—a violent, sexually abusive man who ruled their Bronx home with his fists. That night, he threw her out, and Jay lived among the queer kids on the streets of the Village for the next twenty-five years. At the age when most of her peers started high school, Jay started heroin. In 1964, she stole a taxi to drive her girlfriend to California, but they only made it as far as Texas before they were caught, and Jay was sentenced to her first bid in the House of D.

  “A lot of us called it the playground. A lot of us called it a prison. I called it both,” Jay told historians in 2016, “depend[ing] on what I was arrested for and how much I got.”2

  For Jay, the prison was complicated: dangerous, vile, violent, dirty, cruel—but also a place where she met other queer people, and one of the centers of her queer community. She and other butches would hang out in the shadow of the prison, at Whalen’s drugstore on Sixth Avenue, where they could watch the tide of arrested women flow in and out of the prison’s high stone walls. Most of the people she met in prison are gone now, dead or disappeared. But Jay keeps their memories alive. Since the early 2000s, she’s organized tours of the West Village, to share the queer history of the House of D, because “young people don’t know about it.”3 The landmark is gone, but she marks the land, exposing the grim roots beneath the garden’s manicured paths.

  And make no mistake: the House of D was a queer landmark. In truth, all prisons are, especially ones intended for women.

  Today, approximately 40 percent of people incarcerated in women’s detention facilities are part of the broad LBTQ spectrum4 (compared to about 3.5 percent of the general population).5 That percentage is based on in-person interviews with over a hundred thousand currently detained people, and researchers only identified someone as a “sexual minority” if they themselves identified that way or if they had sexual relationships with people of the same sex before being incarcerated. We can only speculate how high the percentage would have been had the study counted those who could not talk openly about their sexual identities, or if it had included those who had same-sex sexual relationships while incarcerated.

  We live in the age of mass incarceration. If we extrapolate these findings to the nearly 250,000 women currently incarcerated in America, at least 100,000 are queer.6 And that’s after decades of LGBTQ, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-prison activism, which have supposedly made our criminal legal system more fair. During the years the House of D was active, which spanned the single most homophobic period in American history, the percentage of queer people it encaged was almost certainly higher. How much higher, we’ll never know for sure. But records show that queer women and transmasculine people were sentenced to the House of D for such crimes as smoking, forgery, petit larceny, being homeless, attempting suicide, murder, wearing pants, sending the definition of the word lesbian through the mail, “associating with idle or vicious persons,” staying out late, accepting a ride from a man, vagrancy, alcoholism, prostitution, possession of narcotics, “waywardism,” disobedience, stealing rare books, being alone on the street, rape, drug addiction, and lesbianism itself. Yet the impacts of queer people on prison history, and the impacts of prisons on queer history, are rarely examined. Even when they are, the focus is mostly on men.

  However, thanks to its age, size, and unique history as an early adopter of penal innovations, New York City “offers a unique perspective on how the rehabilitation of female criminal behavior developed as a distinct reform enterprise,” according to Cheryl Hicks, author of Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890–1935.7 Furthermore, over the course of the twentieth century, New York City went from having a 98 percent white population to a 44 percent white population. Major demographic shifts like the Great Migration, the immigration of Black people from the Caribbean, post–World War II anti-urban white flight, and the influx of Puerto Rican people due to the economic devastation of American colonial capitalism have had formative effects on our city—and our prisons, and the way we treat the people incarcerated in them. Thus, New York’s penal institutions for women offer unique insights into how racism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia intertwined with misogyny to create public policy, and ruin human lives.

  And the House of D, more than perhaps any other prison, had an outsized role in queer life. It sat at the end of Christopher Street, the block whose very name is a global byword for queerness. You could see the Stonewall Inn from the prison’s high, small windows, and during the Stonewall Uprising, those on the inside held a riot all their own, setting fire to their belongings and tossing them out the windows while screaming “gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!”8 Yet still in 2016, the New York Times would refer to the protest as being all gay men, and only grudgingly issue a correction stating there was “at least one lesbian involved.”9 Jay Toole, a Stonewall veteran herself, could have told them that—if only they had bothered to ask.

  The House of D helped make Greenwich Village queer, and the Village, in return, helped define queerness for America. No other prison has played such a significant role in our history, particularly for working-class women and transmasculine people. For them, as pioneering historian Joan Nestle (founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives) once wrote, the House of D was a constant “presence in our lives—a warning, a beacon, a reminder and a moment of community.”10

  Many—perhaps most—formerly incarcerated people talk rarely about their experiences, and many—perhaps most—non-incarcerated people refuse to listen when they do. At most, we get data about people in prison: aggregated statistics that reduce them down to fungible numbers, not human beings with specific thoughts and experiences. As Nicole Hahn Rafter wrote in the preface to Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control, “Like others who have attempted to study prisoners of the past, I was constantly frustrated by lack of information on individual inmates.”11

  In the thirty years since Rafter wrote her book, little has changed. In the introduction to a 2015 study of prisons in early America, Jen Manion wrote that “without diaries or letters written by the women themselves, I accepted that I would never really know what they thought, felt, or strived for,” and bemoaned “how incomplete our understanding of state authority has been without attention to the actions, thoughts, and experiences of those subjected to its reach.”12

  The bulk of the work of this book has been to undo this silence, to find and follow the lives of imprisoned women and transmasculine people, and to allow revelations about the Women’s House of Detention, Greenwich Village, queer history, and prisons generally to arise from their lives, their ideas, their stories. This is the biography of a unique building, but the building only matters because of the people who passed through it. By reconstructing the experiences of hundreds of incarcerated New Yorkers, I’ve identified a representative few whose lives were particularly well-documented. They have acted as the Beatrices for my descent into what one prison social worker called the “hellhole” that was the House of D.13

  When I began sketching out the idea for this book five years ago, I had a naive understanding that prisons were bad, and should be made better. I might even have described them as “broken.” But to look at prisons historically is to see a monstrously efficient system, doing exactly what it was designed to do: hide every social problem we refuse to deal with.

  Prisons have very little to do with “justice” or “rehabilitation.” If they did, we would care about the 83 percent recidivism rate for people currently incarcerated in state prisons.14 Or we would be up in arms about the fact that two hundred thousand people are sexually assaulted while incarcerated every single year—and that’s not even counting those who are violated by the routine procedures of “health care” in prisons and jails, or those who never report being assaulted, out of fear or shame or simple recognition that the system does not care.15

  If one in twelve people sentenced to prison were also sentenced to be raped for their “crimes,” we would call that barbaric. But when one in twelve people is sexually violated as collateral damage to their imprisonment, we call that justice.