Queer Street

"James McCourt is a writer I adore. There is not a note of an opera, a frame of a movie, a page of a book that he hasn’t heard, seen or read in 50 languages. This is the only non-fiction he ever wrote. It’s a book you have to read to understand. I’ll do my best, but it’s hard to describe. When this book came out, it was badly, albeit favourably, reviewed in The New York Times . It was totally misunderstood. It is a geography and a history of what people would now call gay New York. I beg people to read this book. He tells you about a sensibility that has ceased to exist. In this book you see what the status markers were within the homosexual community in this era. And the status markers were how much you knew, how smart you were, how cultivated you were. It had nothing to do with money – that’s not what status was about. There used to be competing values in this culture. It set the city back culturally because these people died, and they died within a few years. People who invented the culture and participated in it just disappeared in the blink of an eye. Almost in the way that the British upper class died in World War I, it seemed to happen all at once and it changed us. We lost not just the artists but also the audience. But Aids also created the present, previously unimaginable, freedom of homosexuals to be homosexuals. Without Aids this would not have happened. I know that, I was here. Aids made the culture more homogenised, but it also enabled there to be such a thing as gay marriage. Let me assure you that the phrase “gay marriage”didn’t even exist until recently. It’s not that people didn’t think gay marriage would ever happen – no one had thought of it. The concept did not exist. So, of course, things would’ve been completely different. As a single person who loathes domesticity of any sort, I don’t think anyone should be allowed to get married. Or if they do get married, I don’t think they should get a tax break for it. One of the things that the proponents of gay marriage used to advance their cause was that there are economic advantages to being married. If one group gets advantages, everybody should have them – but maybe no group should have them."