Queer Street
Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985
McCourt's dense, allusive history of gay New York from the postwar years to AIDS — his only work of non-fiction.
McCourt’s account of gay New York from the 1940s to the age of AIDS, written as cultural history and personal memory at once: the bars, the opera queues, the language, the deaths. Baroque in style and unapologetically so, it records a world that had almost no other chronicler of its own.
Recommended by 1 Person
Fran Lebowitz
James McCourt is a writer I adore. There is not a note of an opera, a frame of a movie, a page of a book that he hasn’t heard, seen or read in 50 languages. This is the only non-fiction he ever wrote. It’s a book you have to read to understand. I’ll do my best, but it’s hard to describe. When this book came out, it was badly, albeit favourably, reviewed in The New York Times. It was totally misunderstood.
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