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

First Edition, 1st printing. Pristine, clean & tight copy, unread in AS NEW condition. "A seminal work that may prove unrivaled in its ability to capture the voices of a mad, bygone era, QUEER STREET is a voluptuous, anecdotal history of New York's gay life in the 20th century---a literary ode, a swan song---that barrels through four decades of crisis and triumph up to the era of the floodtide of AIDS."[]"James McCourt has written an astonishing book, at once hilarious and touching. Part screenplay, part scrapbook, part breviary, QUEER STREET is a diorama of the crucial decades of gay culture. McCourt is a divine ventriloquist of the era's voices, whether lowbrow, midtown, or high camp. Demigods in the recesses of opera house or bathhouse, screen idols and street life, barflies and brainiacs, gnomes and generalissimos---he's captured the whole ragged and voluptuous, vulnerable and exultant spectacle. Here is the gay soul's encyclopedia."---J.D. McClatchy. "QUEER STREET is an extravagant edifice altogether worthy of McCourt. Admirers of his published fictions will find a wealth here, almost cosmological, to supplement their previous impressions of him. But this should bring him a new readership, for this is a mode of self-revelation almost universally available. The gifts of this remarkably original writer are everywhere apparent."---Harold Bloom. Bright AS NEW copy w/sharp corners, crisp edges, square & tight binding; quite presentable & collectible. See my listings RUB436, 913 & 914 for other McCourt fiction.…