CAMP Rehoboth Book Club

• Monday, March 30 @ 5:30 pm
• Lewes Public Library, Lewes, DE

Now in partnership with Lewes Public Library!

The CAMP Rehoboth Book Club is an LGBTQ+ facilitated discussion group dedicated to reading novels about LGBTQ+ topics and/or books by queer authors that tackle a variety of interest and subject matters. We alternate between fiction, non-fiction, YA. This group typically meets on the last Monday of every month starting at 5:30 p.m. and is hybrid at Lewes Public Library and on Zoom. Use the link at the bottom of this page to register for the zoom.

Our book club aims to bring all members of our community together in a safe, supportive and inclusive space to enjoy literature, conversation and most of all engage with each other. This group is open to all regardless of sexuality and gender.

The Book Club Selection for March is The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan.

About The Women’s House of Detention

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century.

The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it 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.

Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition—and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women’s House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.

Presented by CAMP Rehoboth.

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