Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.83 (756 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0393050513 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 608 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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 en
James McCourt is the author of three novels and two collections of short stories. He has contributed to the Yale Review the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Yet the book swells to bursting with other elements essays on film, lists of essential gay bars, invented characters bursting into Compton-Burnett chitchat. 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. The staggering scale, the lighthearted valor and, most strikingly, a heavy reliance on Joseph L. His wit is superb. 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
Joseph A. Massaro said 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. This book is unintelligible, boring, stupid, pointless, confusing, obscure, convuluted and frustrating. It's rare, thankfully, that other authors don't have such utter contempt and disregard for their readers as this one does.. A tough, difficult read! Pop-Up Fan 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 will have your eyes crossed in no time. Watch for many copies of this book to be featured on the "used, for sale" lists VERY soon after purchase.. Use a dictionary and the whole book isn't supposed to be in the first person. It's worth it for the following sentence on page 257 on why Diana Vreeland is low camp: "Mrs. Vreeland says all Swedes are marching towards a strange destiny". That sounds exactly like her and it made me laugh out loud. I don't think this book is supposed to be a sociological treatise or an exact historical document. I think people are disappointed because they have a preconception of something different.