James McCourt, _Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of the Life_, part the first

THIS SEEMS LIKE a classic to me, but the question "a classic what?" would be hard to answer.

The first of its two subtitles suggest it is a cultural history, but that would not be an adequate answer.

The book does not so much describe as conjure up, recreate, gay male culture between the end of World War II and the worst days of AIDS. But the geographical focus is much more specific than the phrase "an American culture" evokes, since apart from a section on England and a section on Hollywood, the whole book is about New York City--or just Lower Manhattan, really.

So, 1947-85, lower Manhattan, Stonewall and Gay Liberation loom large, no? No. McCourt was at the Stonewall Inn on that famous night, but went home early, and the handful of times he mentions Gay Liberation he sounds skeptical.  For instance, McCourt admired and admires Mart Cowley's Boys in the Band, which drew a lot of criticism from more movement-oriented critics:

This opus he [i.e., McCourt] had found it necessary to defend passionately against virulent accusations in the community ("Ha, ha, hah, Blanche!) of its author's selling out to heterosexual fag bashers by painting a "down" picture of a life they were so very committed to publicizing as happy, joyous, boundless, and free--without so much as a nod either to old Harry Hay or old Leo Lerman or old Tobias Schneebaum or anybody else except that darling old wanker Dennis Pratt, out in full regalia with a television play all about him under the nom de theâtre Quentin Crisp. 

(By the way, the syntactical and referential demands that sentence makes on the reader are typical of the whole book.)

McCourt is not much concerned with being historically thorough. There is a paragraph on post-Stonewall gay men's fiction that does not mention Edmund White; McCourt decides Larry Kramer does really need to be mentioned, but at that point hands the narration over to Robert Weil, as though he would rather just not say anything about the famous AIDS activist and playwright..

In Queer Street, Sontag's "Notes on Camp" is of more moment than Stonewall, the Metropolitan Opera a more crucial institution than Act Up.

McCourt is not uninterested in politics--see his Delancey's Way--but he does seem to resonate more deeply to the gay culture of the old open-secret days, when homosexuality, at least in Lower Manhattan, was hidden in plain sight, as it were: a vital, complex culture that flourished gloriously but was visible only to its participants. I don't suppose he is actually nostalgic for getting arrested or being blackmailed or assaulted, but he does seem to prefer the nuanced to the broad, the indirect to the direct, the coded to the explicit. Style matters.

Is it a memoir, then? Not exactly. I can see we will have to take this up later.