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