Synopses & Reviews
A seminal intellectual work, Queer Street is a vivid, anecdotal history of gay life in twentieth-century New York. Beginning with the Influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York in the golden age before McCarthyism. Qurr Street tells the explosive story of gay culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Comign out himself in the "buttoned-up/button-down" 1950s, McCourt positions his own homosexual experience against the whirlwind history of the ear, summoning a pageant of characters that includes Harry Hay, Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote, among many others. In a learned but lively voice, mixing theories of Nietzsche and Sontag with the history of Greenwich Village, McCourt highlights the major events of the period: the landmark eruption at the Stonewall In, the AIDS crisis that brought an end to a century of bathhouse culture, the ascendancy of the Christian right, and finally the social acceptance of gays that paradoxically marked the demise of queer culture. Queer Street is one of the most original, passionate, and astonishing gay works of nonfiction in years.
Review
"A fierce critical intelligence animates every page....The postwar generation of queer New York has found a sophisticated bard singing 'the elders' history'." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[McCourt's] wit is superb....The staggering scale, the lighthearted valor...make this book, in every sense of the word, monumental." Publishers Weekly
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"An extravagant edifice....The gifts of this magnificent writer are everywhere apparent." Harold Bloom
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"By turns entertaining, erudite and genuinely moving, this book leaves no doubt that, however fabulously furnished some closets were in those more oppressive times, freedom's better." Washington Post
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"Part autobiography, part cultural history, this book combines the self-conscious sensibilities of the poet with the dispassionate eye of the social commentator." Library Journal
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"A brilliant account of the evolution of modern gay culture in post-WWII New York." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
James McCourt is the author of three novels and two short story collections. He has contributed to the Yale Review, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He lives in Washington, DC.