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Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of the Life [Bargain Price] (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In which times, places, weather conditions, and descriptions of what people were (so to speak) wearing come of necessity into figurative play..." (more)
Key Phrases: flit side, queer fuck, tarnished angels, New York, Mae West, Bette Davis (more...)
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  • This item: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of the Life by James McCourt

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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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 608 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (December 2003)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393050513
  • ASIN: B001714ZFC
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.6 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #241,145 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

James McCourt
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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In which times, places, weather conditions, and descriptions of what people were (so to speak) wearing come of necessity into figurative play. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
flit side, queer fuck, tarnished angels, opera line, queer life, queer street, slow curtain, queer culture, camp name
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
New York, Mae West, Bette Davis, Fire Island, Margo Channing, Metropolitan Opera, Cherry Grove, Jackson Heights, Jeanne Eagels, Rock Hudson, All About Eve, Gore Vidal, San Francisco, James Merrill, World War, Douglas Sirk, Eighth Street, James Dean, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, James Schuyler, Queer Temperament, Santa Monica, Central Park, Kim Novak
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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
2.6 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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18 of 22 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.

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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
(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.

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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Not What It Appears, January 4, 2004
By rffklaus (West Coast) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 (Hardcover)
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.
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 		 Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, self-indulgent, amazing, impossible, required
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. Read more
Published on February 7, 2005 by Jesse Liberty

1.0 out of 5 stars WHAT A RIP OFF!!!
This book bills itself as a historical trip through gay culture from post WWII til the mid-1980's. What a bunch of hooey! Read more
Published on February 3, 2005 by Richard C. Park Jr.

4.0 out of 5 stars Styrofoam Filigree on Tinfoil Masque? Yeah, but We Need It
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. Read more
Published on February 27, 2004 by Brian Kevin Beck

1.0 out of 5 stars This book is not worth your money!
I am not sure why the author bothered to write this book. I guess he needed some money but how he found a publisher is a mystery to me. Read more
Published on February 12, 2004 by Joseph A. Massaro

1.0 out of 5 stars False Advertising
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. Read more
Published on January 17, 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting read
Ignore the naysayers - this book deserves every bit of the massive attention it is getting. James McCourt is a literary god. But my favorite book is still 'Delancey's Way'.
Published on January 12, 2004 by vistaboy

1.0 out of 5 stars big mistake
Expecting a readable history of gay culture, or at least an entertaining romp through Manhattan, I was disappointed on both counts. Read more
Published on January 9, 2004 by Randall F. Nielsen

3.0 out of 5 stars Obtuse and infuriating, but .....
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... Read more
Published on January 3, 2004 by fml66

5.0 out of 5 stars Emotional and factual information
I had read reviews of this book in several newspapers which were attracting, and I'm so glad I got it. It was more than I expected. Read more
Published on December 31, 2003 by Marian Fuller

2.0 out of 5 stars A tough, difficult read!
This book is the most difficult challenge to read I have ever undertaken. Suffice to say, the occasional nugget of gay history is buried in a sea of thick, cryptic writing that... Read more
Published on November 24, 2003 by Pop-Up Fan

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