Join us at @jefferson_market_library @nypl on Tuesday, July 12th, for THE WOMEN'S HOUSE OF DETENTION: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, a book talk with author Hugh Ryan @hughoryan in conversation with Project manager Amanda Davis. Free; register via link in bio.⁠ ⁠ Ryan's latest book presents the history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, as a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. The Women’s House of Detention (demolished 1974) was a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment. Though now largely forgotten, it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974 and was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates—Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur—were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher. #nyclgbtsites⁠ ⁠ Photos: (1) Women's House of Detention, c. 1945, via @museumofcityny; (2) Interior view of the Women's House of Detention, c. 1941. Credit: Irving Haberman via @nbcnews.