Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 - Hardcover

McCourt, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393050513 ISBN 13: 9780393050516

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2003

Synopsis

Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York in the golden age before McCarthyism, Queer Street tells the explosive story of gay culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Coming out himself in the "buttoned-up/button-down" 1950s, McCourt positions his own experience against the whirlwind history of the era, summoning a pageant of characters that includes Harry Hay, Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote. In a learned but lively voice, McCourt highlights the major events of the period: the landmark eruption at the Stonewall Inn, 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. "Not since Truman Capote's Black and White Ball has there been such a gala collection of sacred monsters, feathered masks, icy pearls, chiseled remarks and bitchy mots all in one glamorous setting....An astonishing book, at once hilarious and touching."J. D. McClatchy

About this title

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.

Reviews

McCourt is the author of perhaps the best novel about opera (Mawrdew Czgowchwz, 1975, his first book recently reissued by NYRB Classics) as well as the best novel about AIDS (Time Remaining, 1992). Queer Street marks his debut in nonfiction, if such it can be called. His fans formerly waited eight or nine years for the master of camp glamour perfection to issue a new novel, yet the years since the century's turn have brought three books in rapid succession. Is this new productivity linked to a newfound confidence born out of Harold Bloom's elevation of McCourt in his appendix to The Western Canon (1994)? In McCourt's historical collage, an autobiographical thread prevails: young Brooklyn boy discovers Manhattan, grows up instinctively drawn to the artistic and pleasure centers its title evokes. Yet the book swells to bursting with other elements essays on film, lists of essential gay bars, invented characters bursting into Compton-Burnett chitchat. His wit is superb. "One cannot help noticing that a remake of Vertigo set in San Francisco today would be untenable: there is almost no one in California who does not believe in channeling and retrieved memory from former lives." McCourt can sometimes strike a needlessly provocative note (he implies a devotion to the Log Cabin Republicans just, it seems, to annoy) but readers straight and gay will be dazzled by the erudition he displays in listing every important event that happened in gay Manhattan over a 40-year period. They're all here Cardinal Spellman pinching altar boys; Douglas Sirk's shrewd casting of Rock Hudson as U.S. everyman; The Golden Apple as quintessential A-Gay musical. The staggering scale, the lighthearted valor and, most strikingly, a heavy reliance on Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 film All About Eve make this book, in every sense of the word, monumental: a Mount Rushmore with the familiar presidents' faces chipped away, replaced with those of Leonie Rysanek, Luchino Visconti, James Schuyler and Bette Davis.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393050513
• ISBN 13: 9780393050516
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 608