NYC Queer History Landmarks Hiding in Plain Sight: The Women's House of Detention
Also known as the House of D.
Sappho
submerges
at the Sea Colony
knowing nothing of the Women’s
House of
Detention
This was part of a poem submitted to the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter the month after the Stonewall Riots in 1969. It invokes Sappho—the ancient Greek philosopher from Lesbos who inspired the word “sapphic”—to present a harsh contradiction between Sea Colony of lesbian liberation and the Women’s House of Detention, or (as it was known colloquially) the “House of D.”
It’s no wonder why the anonymous author saw fit to illustrate this contradiction, because the House of D was a towering presence looming over the vivacity of Greenwich Village.
Over the course of its 42 years of existence, the House of D’s inmates ranged from actors like Mae West to legendary activists like Angela Davis. The austere building clouded the Village with the reminder of what happened if a woman or anyone assigned female at birth went too far in opposing the State.
In a 1974 report on conditions in the prison, Davis wrote of a “family system” that inmates had developed in order to survive. Inmates with longer sentences and more familiarity with the prison’s workings sheltered their greener counterparts in a relationship that Davis described as parental.
She wrote:
What struck me most about this family system was the homosexuality at its core. … Since the majority of the prisoners seemed to be at least casually involved in the family structure, there had to be a great number of lesbians throughout the jail.
Davis emphasizes in her essay that it came as no surprise to her the prevalence of lesbian relationships within sexually segregated spaces, and it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone else either.
A full 16 years before Davis published her report, in 1958, Virginia McManus—who was imprisoned for being a call girl—wrote a salacious article about the ubiquity of lesbian inmates for Confidential magazine—an article the magazine advertised as “More candid than Kinsey.”
McManus wrote:
The prison was a breeding ground of homosexuality for the uninitiated; a Utopia for lesbians. Of the more than 600 inmates I saw crammed into 12 floors of cells originally designed for 300 inmates, about 50 per cent were lesbians, and 40 to 45 per cent of the rest accepted homosexuality at least during their imprisonment.
But while McManus was more preoccupied with the sexual habits of the prison, the convergence of the Black Power movement and the Gay Liberation movement reverberated within the prison walls and throughout Greenwich Village.
A defining feature of the prison was that its windows only had bars. There was no glass to muffle the sound, allowing some inmates to correspond with others outside by shouting.
On the nights of the Stonewall Riots—which occurred a mere block and a half from the House of D—inmates lit pieces of toilet paper which they threw out the windows as a show of solidarity with the Queer rioters.
Jeremiah Newton—who was at the riots and is now the executor of Candy Darling’s estate—described the scene to Charles Kaiser for The Gay Metropolis:
They fell down very delicately, very gracefully, extinguishing before they hit the bottom.
In the months after Stonewall, when younger, more militant Queer activists began leveraging their power to pressure more moderate but longer-established gay rights groups, there was increased pressure to show solidarity with the Black Power Movement.
These activists suggested a protest outside the Women’s House of Detention, which had imprisoned Black Panther activist (and mother to Tupac) Afeni Shakur.
The moderates balked and said the protest was a nonstarter, so the activists established the Gay Liberation Front and held the protest anyway.
By 1974, allegations of rampant racism and abuse finally forced the prison to close.
In this series about the Queer history landmarks, I often lament the way these spaces have developed. Ballrooms turned to parking lots, brothels turned to restaurants, et cetera.
This is not one of those times.
The Women’s House of Detention was demolished, and today, it’s a public garden. Where once stood a grim warning to residents over the revelry of the Village now blossoms a lush and living embodiment of its spirit.