Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947–1985
by James McCourt
Norton. 577 pages, $29.95
“I CAN imagine a book made up entirely of examples,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the first of many quotes that James McCourt uses as a chapter heading in his new book, Queer Street, and it’s a revealing one. In Wittgenstein’s compact but monumental Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), he comes close to producing just such a book of “examples.” The Tractatus is a series of “propositions” that, especially in the beginning, reads almost like prose poetry. It’s worth thinking about Wittgenstein because he, a gay man who was arguably the 20th century’s greatest philosopher, is one of the many ghosts who haunts McCourt’s Queer Street and who seems to have inspired its uncommon, arresting structure.
One other prominent ghost is Walter Benjamin, a philosopher and critic, and a contemporary of Wittgenstein. Fleeing the Nazis in the 1940, Benjamin committed suicide. He left behind the unfinished manuscript for a large cultural history in which he employed the idea of the montage or collage. Benjamin spent most of his life collecting quotations and citations to assemble a history that would be a kind of Wittgensteinian book of “examples.” No one is quite sure how Benjamin intended to tie all of these together, but the bulk of his work was published by Harvard University Press as The Arcades Project in 2000. McCourt mentions both Wittgenstein and Benjamin numerous times in Queer Street, and it seems clear that his book is modeled on Benjamin’s effort to construct a new kind of history.
With Wittgenstein and Benjamin looking over his shoulder, McCourt introduces his readers to “Queer Street,” his metaphor for the hard-to-pin-down locus of queer American culture. Like Benjamin, McCourt brings together essays and “examples” in a book in which all is “presented in windows inserted in the non-fiction roman fleuve which Queer Street finally is.” In other words, those hoping to find a standard, linear narrative history of queer culture from 1947 to 1985 better look elsewhere. McCourt’s book is an amalgam of autobiography, cultural history, and the commonplace book. It is unabashedly erudite, and it makes great demands of its readers.
McCourt has authored three novels and two short-story collections, and he brings the tropes of fiction to Queer Street, at least for part of the time. He also refers to himself (à la Henry Adams) in the third person as both “Author” and “QT” for “Queer Temperament,” his alter ego for a kind of gay consciousness. Despite its highly unusual structure, Queer Street is arranged more-or-less chronologically as an extended coming out story overlaid with an intricately woven cultural history that employs a wide array of stylistic maneuvers. The book is steeped in the lore of theater, Hollywood, and the gay literary tradition. McCourt pays homage to a legion of heroes and icons, in some cases presenting detailed studies of them (such as filmographies of film stars and detailed discussions of the work of GLBT poets and novelists). He also composes a few prose poems and dramatic fragments, and he even includes a gay gloss of the Biblical story of Jacob and an interview with Bette Davis.
There’s real richness to this collage technique of writing history. Like Walter Benjamin, McCourt has attempted a stream-of-consciousness portrait of a culture and a time that is anything but linear. Its structure is influenced by cinema, theater, and music. In his chapters about such sacred and vanished gay venues as the Astor Bar and the Everard Baths, McCourt brings the places alive with quotations, as if he were a reporter taking notes on the backroom conversations of the 20th century. Queer Street is not an easy book to read, but there are ample compensations for those who venture in.
