Queer Street by James McCourt
Every page of Queer Street is infused with a ferocious critical intelligence. It uses jarring divagations in its words. A clever bard singing “the elders’ history” has been discovered by the LGBT New York generation of the postwar period. The capacity of James McCourt’s groundbreaking novel Queer Street to capture the voices of a crazy, bygone era has proven to be unmatched. McCourt sets his own ecstatic experience against the frenetic history of the time, starting with the rush of emancipated soldiers into downtown New York and continuing through four decades of crisis and success up to the moment of the flood tide of AIDS. As a result, a compelling and commanding interweaving of personal, intellectual, and societal history has been produced. For decades to come, it will be read, analyzed, and revered as a masterpiece.
Queer Street by James McCourt
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This book describes a sensibility that is no longer present. You can observe what the homosexual community’s status symbols throughout this time were. How much you knew, how intelligent you were, and how cultured you were served as status indicators. Money was not involved because status was not about money. In this civilization, there used to be conflicting values.
The end of this book coincides with the height of the Aids epidemic. Because these people passed away within a short period of time, it caused cultural reversals in the city. People who created the culture and took part in it suddenly vanished in the distance. The novel is vehemently solipsistic, which irritates me. The publisher would like you to believe 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 time in that culture that is gone and is never to return. The author is writing to an intended audience, but it’s unclear who that audience is.
