Gay Cultural Evolution From Closet to Market

F. Lee

In the ebullient cartography of the imaginary Queer Street, the cross streets include Attitude and Camp, Jewelry and Lipstick. It is inhabited by everyone from World War II veterans to Bette Davis to Nietzsche, and rendered by the narrator "Queer Temperament" or Q. T., who calls the place "all out of sequence and Oz-like willy-nilly."As he adventures in the gay cultural wonderland, Q. T. channels T. S. Eliot, James Baldwin, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and offers lists of gay bars, bathhouse scenes, film essays and theories on homosexuality.Q. T. also mirrors the real author James McCourt, a novelist and short-story writer, who just published his first nonfiction book, "Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: Excursions in the Mind of a Life" (W. W. Norton). As the long-winded title signifies, it is as much a vision of gay culture right after the war as an adventure in the mind of the 62-year-old Mr. McCourt. In 577 pages "Queer Street" combines memoir, essays, bits of dialogue, lines from movies and walk-ons in an attempt to describe the social and cultural evolution of gay life in the 20th century.