A fierce critical intelligence animates every page of Queer Street. Its sentences are dizzying divagations. The postwar generation of queer New York has found a sophisticated bard singing 'the elders' history' (The New York Times). James McCourt's seminal Queer Street has proven unrivaled in its ability to capture the voices of a mad, bygone era. Beginning with the influx of liberated veterans into downtown New York and barreling through four decades of crisis and triumph up to the era of the floodtide of AIDS, McCourt positions his own exhilarating experience against the whirlwind history of...

The blood-red of Manhattan, the brilliant green of an Irish-American wake, the blue-rinsed divas of the opera and the bathhouse alike (Michael Gorra) are hypnotically rendered in this astoundingly smart book (John Waters). With some of the most lyrical cadences in recent literature, the legendary James McCourt animates twentieth-century New York through a kaleidoscope of sharp-edged, brilliantly colored memories (J. D. McClatchy) and with dynamic prose and high-brow erudition that has gone the way of the dodo (Publishers Weekly). Braiding a nostalgic portrait of the eternal city with a boy s...