
a book
Queer Street
James McCourt · 2003 · 608 pages
Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York in the golden age before McCarthyism, Queer Street tells the explosive story of gay culture in the latter half of the 20th century. 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. Village, McCourt highlights the major events fo the period: the landmark eruption at the Stonewall Inn; the AIDS crisis that brought an end to the bathhouse culture; the ascendancy of the Christian right; and finally the social acceptance of gays that paradoxically marked the demise of queer culture.
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Fran Lebowitz
“I beg people to read this book. He tells you about a sensibility that has ceased to exist. In this book you see what the status markers were within the homosexual community in this era. And the status markers were how much you knew, how smart you were, how cultivated you were. It had nothing to do with money – that’s not what status was about. There used to be competing values in this culture.”↗