Inside the House of D
Listen to the work here!
Inside the House of D is a solo work for a percussionist, playing a combined keyboard setup including a 3-octave vibraphone, a glockenspiel (low G), two octaves of crotales, and a set of chimes (C-G’). This work is inspired by the Women’s House of Detention, which was, for half of the 20th century, the sole prison for incarcerated women in New York City. However, because of the systemic discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community that infested the 20th century criminal legal system, the “House of D” was populated overwhelmingly by lesbians and transmasculine people. Thus, the prison and the surrounding Greenwich Village became a center for queer life in midcentury New York, and despite discrimination and awful living conditions for queer women, inside and outside the prison, the communities these people built and the riots and uprisings that they partook in helped to define queerness and queer liberation the entire nation over.
The work is in five movements, each movement drawing on a different piece of historian Hugh Ryan’s 2023 book The Women’s House of Detention to tell different parts of the story of the House of D. The movements, with illuminating quotes from the book, are as follows:
I. “A promise unke(m)pt…”: “Public outcry sweeps in like the ocean, upends everything, and rushes out, leaving the correctional system jumbled, but no less dysfunctional. In fact, reform almost always comes with increased funding or more square footage for human cages, meaning that when the system relapses to cruelty, it’s usually bigger than it was before.”
II. “Life only makes sense seven times…”: “In the spring of 1931, a sixteen-year-old Elaine B. published a short lyric essay in her Sacramento High School yearbook. ‘Oh, what is Life?’ she cried at the beginning, before enumerating the joys that made up hers: ‘Tiny happinesses that help to make life for me are many – and various… The wind that stirs strange unmanageable longings within me… the road that leads ahead – when a friend walks by my side.’”
III. “Caged lavender… (This is no garden)”: “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 [activist] 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.”
IV. “Painted as/by monsters…”: “In 1956, the Department of Corrections finally codified in writing the process for segregating queer women and transmasculine people. … Technically, this policy remained in effect at least until 1964, when a researcher reported that queer women in the prison were not only segregated, they were forced to wear a ‘D’ on their clothing, for deviant.”
V. “No one is free until we all are.”: “Again and again and again, the Women’s House of Detention was the place where Black liberation, women’s liberation, and gay liberation came together to battle the carceral state. This support was not one way. When Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, was freed from jail in the spring of 1970, he announced that one of his goals for the party was to make common cause with feminist and gay liberation.”
At the end of his book, Hugh Ryan pleads that “every day, something slips into history that we will never recover: a memory, a document, the sound of a dead woman’s voice. Save what you can.” This piece is my way of amplifying and creating conversation with this history, of acknowledging that my freedom to live openly as a transgender person and queer woman would not be possible if it were not for the liberation movement that was born in the House of D, and ultimately, of saving what I can.
Inside the House of D was commissioned by Philadelphia-based percussionist Vladimir Puskovitch for a 2026 graduate percussion recital, and I am endlessly grateful for him for giving me a space to retell the story of the House of D through percussion music.