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

James McCourt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2003

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 20th century. Coming out himself in the "buttoned-up/button-down" 1950s, McCourt positions his own homosexual 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 amongst many others. Mixing the theories of Nietzsche and Sontag with the history of the Greenwich Village, McCourt highlights the major events fo the period: the landmark eruption at the Stonewall Inn; the AIDS crisis that brought an end to the bathhouse culture; the ascendancy of the Christian right; and finally the social acceptance of gays that paradoxically marked the demise of queer culture.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

Review

A brilliant account of the evolution of modern gay culture in post-WWII New York. -- Kirkus Reviews starred review, 1 October 2003

An astonishing book, at once hilarious and touching. -- J. D. McClatchy

An extravagant edifice....The gifts of this magnificent writer are everywhere apparent. -- Harold Bloom

Brilliantly captures queer New York life just before mainstream pop culture came nipping at its heels to swallow it up. -- Library Journal

Readers straight and gay will be dazzled by the erudition. -- Publishers Weekly, 22 September 2003

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (November 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393050513
• ISBN-13: 978-0393050516
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,417,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pass This By!, February 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 (Hardcover)

Queer Street advertises itself as an anecdotal history of New York's gay life in the 20th century. This is blatant misrepresentation. There are precious few anecdotes of any kind. The names went by, hundreds of them, people I've never heard of, places that have long since ceased to exist, and of which and of whom he told me nothing. If you don't already know, you're not worth his time to tell you. One thing I have gleaned about Mr. McCourt as a young man: he must have been insufferable.

An astonishing proportion of the book is endless gush over one female walking cliché after another-Bette Davis, Maria Callas, Judy Garland, and a nauseating infinitude of others (whom he refers to familiarly by their first names, though he never knew them personally). He's one of those fag hag fags. He worships women and despises them. "I don't trust any kind of woman. I say, anything that bleeds for three days and doesn't die can't be trusted." (p. 225) Okay, it's funny, albeit hateful. It's also a bit pathetic. I get this image of some aged dance queen decades from now citing Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera as the apotheosis of gay culture in our time, and spending 600 pages to do it.

I kept reading it anyway because, to be fair, the prose really is lovely, despite some inherent problems. Apparently, McCourt's editor gave up early. There are dozens of petty typos, and sentence upon sentence that makes no syntactic sense, as if McCourt changed his mind about (or simply forgot) where it was going halfway through writing it, and never went back to look at it again.

As I read this thing, I started out bewildered; then I was infuriated; finally, I'm prepared to look at it as just another brick in the foundation wall of the Human Comedy Theatre. Lots of people have the urge to embarrass themselves in public, though few go to this extreme length to do it. It reads like forty years' worth of journal entries, blatantly self-indulgent stuff written for the author's own pleasure. That's fine. Beats watching TV. But writing such stuff is one thing, publishing it another.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The McCourt Strikes Again, January 18, 2004

By 

Phelps Gates (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 (Hardcover)

This book bills itself as a history of 20th-century gay culture, but it's nothing of the sort, which may account for some of the infuriated reviewers here. Hmmm... a gay history where Victoria de los Angeles gets referenced 6 times in the index, and Samuel Delany doesn't make it at all (but Marilyn Hacker does!)?

What the book really is is a collection of opinionated comments on life and culture (some of it gay) by Harold Bloom's favorite author (I should have been warned in advance by Bloom's effusive jacket blurb about "the McCourt"). Only about half the book makes sense (and I suspect it will be a different half, depending on the reader), but since it's over 500 pages, you can read the half that makes sense to you and skip the rest and still get your money's worth.

There are some oddities in the book, perhaps reflecting a lack of editing. What are we to make of the reference to Rock Hudson's wife Phyllis Yates (106)? Is this a typo (but the indexer doesn't catch it)? A trick of memory (there but for my surname go I)? Or another of the imaginary characters which people the book, like Diana Devors (220-221)?

Is McCourt's discussion of alcoholism (378-9) just wrongheaded? Or is it a deliberate parody of pomo jargonism? Which of the many "interviews" in the book actually took place (in "real life" rather than the author's head)? Beats me! I confess to finding the book infuriating at first, but eventually charming.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Obtuse and infuriating, but ....., January 3, 2004

By 

fml66 "fml66" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 (Hardcover)

The book is infuriating because it is willfully solipsistic. The author is clearly writing to an intended audience, but it's unclear who that audience is; the publisher would like you to think that the book is a "seminal" record of a "mad, bygone era," but it is more accurately described as an obtuse memoir of a particular high-culture gay man's adventures, and as an elegy to a period of time in that culture that is gone and is never to return.

McCourt has said that this is a treatment of how gay culture moved from being marginalized and yet somehow pure, to commodified and therefore lacking. But that is not really what this book is about, either; it "ends" in 1985 (if not much earlier than that), with the death of Rock Hudson, and that can't be really described as the point in time at which it became okay for gay people to be treated as a mainstream target market by advertisers. Nor is it ever really clear what loss McCourt is bemoaning. The jacket copy says that he's bemoaning the "death of queer culture," but that's not true; he's lamenting the transformation of that culture from one thing to another.

More than anything else, this book is a catalogue of reference points and lists from the late forties, the fifties, and the early sixties, with a lot of impenetrable language, a lot of name-dropping, a lot of tangential versification, dialoguing, and other stream-of-consciousness gibberish, a lot of metaphors from old camp-classic movies ("All about Eve" being the most prominent), and a hilarious "interview" with Bette Davis (it is hard to ascertain whether this interview really occurred or is a figment of McCourt's imagination).

It's an occasionally compelling book if you have some connection to these reference points, either because you lived with them and through them or because you know people who did, or because you were "schooled" by people who did (and who forced you to watch "All about Eve" as many times as it took for you to "get" it).

But if all of that is meaningless to you, this book will probably be meaningless as well, and McCourt sure doesn't go out of his way to make it less meaningless to you. McCourt makes Edmund White look like a minimalist.