A welcome makeover for the textbook view of New York—and American—cultural history.
A brilliant account of the evolution of modern gay culture in post-WWII New York.
Not that such things can be pinpointed with any precision. “Queer Street,” as McCourt (Wayfaring at Waverly in Silver Lake, 2002, etc.) calls it, is really a state of mind: “It doesn’t start anywhere; there isn’t a beginning.” Yet a story has to begin somewhere, and McCourt locates his at about the time that armies of war-weary, liberated combat veterans returned home and decided to live on their own terms. Beyond Manhattan, the rest of the country wasn’t quite ready for the gay veterans “and their undecorated coevals,” McCourt adds: “Viewed by the world of straight America (primed to rescind the liberty and license vouchsafed queers under grueling combat conditions), [Queer Street] becomes the radical inverse of the renewed moral and civic duty prescribed in the triumphalist Republic.” If that snippet has your head spinning, it is typical of McCourt’s exuberant, elliptical style, which sometimes begs a Derrida to serve as translator. Blending personal and cultural history, McCourt takes a leisurely stroll along that long avenue, examining attitudes pro and con vis-à-vis the gay demimonde in a narrative that touches, dizzyingly, on the French martyr Simone Weil, Counter-Reformation Jesuitism, J. Edgar Hoover, Kaye Ballard, Broadway (when, in the 1950s, the “sensitive boy” à la Anthony Perkins, Roddy MacDowell, and Dean Stockwell emerged as an ideal), Method acting, Fire Island, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stonewall, and Bette Davis. This is magpie history, highly selective and full of shiny objects, but it is remarkably coherent for all its strange turns; McCourt’s notes on camp (which locates “the success in certain passionate failures”) are worth the price of admission alone. So is McCourt’s sharp reminder that not the larger culture, not recruitment, not seminary “makes any boy gay . . . the job is done by the parents in the first two to four years of life, the end.”
A welcome makeover for the textbook view of New York—and American—cultural history.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05051-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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