Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Before you buy this wordy, strange tome, check it out at the local bookstore. If you're a gay history buff, this isn't what you're looking for--the title is very misleading. It's a digest of confused essays, the unorganized puffery and random (and very uninteresting) thoughts of the author. I think the desired result was to portray "hip," it succeeded in being boring and tedious. I perused it at the bookstore and passed on it.

Gosh, I wish I'd read the Amazon customer reviews before buying this. After 50 pages I wondered if something were wrong with me. Could this book really be so bad? And then I read the Amazon customer reviews and felt vindicated. I had expected an at least somewhat straightforward history of gay culture along the lines of The Gay Metropolis, Gay New York, and Prepare for Saints. This book is really just a long-winded stream-of-consciousness list of stuff the author remembers from having lived in Manhattan in the 50s. Not only does he not care about including and educating the reader, he delights in lording his first-hand experience and knowledge over those of us who happened to be born later. Example: Early on he taunts the reader who did not have the chance to witness ballerina Tanaquil LeClercq's dancing (although he doesn't bother even to refer to her as a dancer; he just writes "...those who didn't see her...."). Well, let's face it: that's just about everyone. I consider myself a conscientious student of culture, esp. queer culture, and I've seen and read just about everything I can on LeClercq. I wanted to learn more, not to be taunted for having been born in 1961. (Just realized this: Mccourt was born in 1941; LeClercq contracted polio and stopped dancing in 1956. Hm...so he saw her as a child or early teen...possibly. I could almost accept his superiority if he were someone much older than I, some HUGE intellect like Virgil Thomson, but he's not either.) I urge you not to buy this ego trip--I mean--"book."

If you are someone who is interested in learning the actual history of gay culture from 1947-1985, then move on. This was the longest book I ever wasted my time reading. I'm sure the author is a very talented writer, but the title and cover were misleading as to the contents of this book. For someone wanting to do actual historical research, this book is a pointless collection of trivia centered around what would be considered extremely stereotypical gay 'interests'-most notably a continuing thread running through the book that rehashes the movie "All About Eve." Several times. A culturally elitist book about a whole lot of nothing.

Expecting a readable history of gay culture, or at least an entertaining romp through Manhattan, I was disappointed on both counts. Reading became a chore rather than a pleasure. I got the distinct impression that the author was writing more to himself than to an audience, a journal of discovery that only the writer can fully understand and appreciate.

Imagine if James Joyce were queer and writing about the "Gay scene" of the pre-AIDS era. Now take away a little talent, add a little ego, season with post-modern perspective. At times I gave up. At times I wanted to throw it against the wall. At times I wanted to burn it. At times I wanted to have written it.

An amazing book, a lark, a voyage. Truly incredible. Oh, just buy it. Give yourself permission to dip in and out, and then just enjoy.

Well in this-this-here "tome," a true Opera Queen of the Olde Schoole (as it were) reminisces about Gay Life 1945-85 from the pied-a-terre of Manhattan. Downtown becomes the standpoint from which the giddy whirl whirls... How best to describe this kaleidoscope of glimpses into the Camp sensibility? This potpourri-salmagundi-lagniappe (I just had to get into the spirit of his style...) Well, let's try some analogies.

First, what is the author's genealogical "pedigree"? The author's style is perhaps Ronald Firbank out of Oscar Wilde with fertilizing whiffs of Jean Genet and William Burroughs, not to mention Andrew Holleran's denizen dancers and dance, dedicated dourly to delight or anyhow distraction. Yes McCourt's style is "rough" as in ruggedly-baroque & rocococo. Product Disclaimer: As other reviewers here prove, you do need a Certificate in Deeper Reading to enjoy this melting pot, er ah, crazy salad. "Abandon Literalism All Ye Who Enter Here." But the style is also "rich" organic in a rather full-organ florescence...

Then, is the book itself, like "a nostalgic memorabilia trip"? As if the queer-temperament author climbs up to his memory-attic. And then unpacks for us his Hope Chest (or Drawers of Despair?) of recollections. Of his early life, and entering into The Life by night of gay New York, of his sojourn in England. Of historical events, personages. Above all of media: books, the theatre, and always opera, opera... With a satchel of sachets always, and oh the ambiance, Mary...

Or, is reading the book like "doing an archaeological dig," uncovering layers? Not just the dualism of straight daytime vs. queer night time. But also, we spot levels upon levels of historical allusion, shards of references to subcultures past. Hour of the wolf. The Everard baths and fire. The Homintern. Polari slang. Friends of Dorothy dancing the Madison. Cakes and ail. And too much more to mention. But always, it seems, "the standing-room line at the Metropolitan Opera..."

Or perhaps reading the book is like "walking through terrain"? It's varied within the hothouse botany of artifice. The forest of autobiography. Then a clearing where a duenna duet-duologue dishes diversely. Then a meadow, whereupon stage, screen, and books are played out. Then back into the orchid-greenhouse of the author's sensibility.

That sensibility-okay, more than not, it's non-"serious." Oh, he does can masculine Score Points butch-assertive fashion, like when he nails the problems with Joe Ackerly's biographer-he incisively takes a stand, using psychoanalysis and other insights well. (And his occasional Alter Ego can slap his silly self upside the sensibility, a gyroscope...) But the majority is camping on the old camp ground tonight and always. Always at one remove; and yet scoring some Truth-points even at the distance he must maintain. But, Tooo Much? Ultimately is more, less? Does it all become styrofoam filigree upon a tinfoil plakk? [{"Behind the surface, not more surface, but..."}] Could it get depressingly tiresome, this Peter Pan who never grew up? This Peter the pumpkin eater who turned into a carriage at 1 A.M., "the party's over," but this polyglot curliqueue Johnnie was so long at the fair...

Oh sure the moralists could condemn this embroidery. But, We Need This Too. Set it precious preserved on the culture shelf as a resource after all, yes... McCourt's intertextual but also "sort of unique" vision becomes valid-enough. Not at all beloved nor permitted by authoritarian regimes such as the Taliban and others nearer to home. Therefore it's "sublimation in the service of subversiveness..." If America is the melting pot, well say tossed crazy salad, well then let this crazyquilt patch belong too. Let a hundred pansies bloom, eh...

This book bills itself as a historical trip through gay culture from post WWII til the mid-1980's. What a bunch of hooey! The writing is so obtuse and convoluted it took me several readings of the same line to figure out what the author was trying to say (and I have a Masters degree too!). Thoughts begin and go nowhere or change in mid-sentence. Some sentences never end, just continue on and on until they have become fulblown paragraphs without end. And there is far too much camp exploration that has nothing to do with anything.

I feel bad that a tree was cut down to make the paper so that tripe like this could be printed. The author and the publisher should be ashamed.