The Gay Metropolis
The Landmark History of Gay Life in America
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Now featuring an updated introduction celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall
“The landmark portrait of 20th-century New York viewed through the eyes of gay New Yorkers.” —The New York Observer
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and winner of a Lambda Literary Award, The Gay Metropolis is a landmark saga of struggle and triumph that was instantly recognized as the most authoritative and substantial work of its kind. Now, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings, Charles Kaiser has brought this history into the twenty-first century. In this new edition he covers the three court cases that lead to the revolutionary legalization of gay marriage in America, as well as shifts toward inclusion in mainstream pop culture, with the Oscar–winning films Brokeback Mountain and Call Me by Your Name.
Filled with astounding anecdotes and searing tales of heartbreak and transformation, it provides a decade-by-decade account of the rise and acceptance of gay life and identity since the 1940s. From the making of West Side Story to the catastrophic era of AIDS, and with a dazzling cast of characters—including Leonard Bernstein, Montgomery Clift, Alfred Hitchcock, John F. Kennedy, and RuPaul—this is a vital telling of American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former New York Times reporter and Newsweek editor Kaiser's book on the evolution of the American gay community is a monumental work. Like George Chauncey's Gay New York and many other products of the current popularity of gay studies and gay history, Kaiser's book is at once expansive and specific, willing to draw cultural, historical and judicial correspondences previous reporters and historians avoided, given the traditional distaste for linking people and events homosexually. Though this effort is one of the book's strengths, it also becomes one of its most persistent weaknesses as Kaiser attempts to fit his tidbits in, disrupting the flow and logic of his narrative. But news of a threesome in which John F. Kennedy engaged with Broadway producer Michael Butler or of West Side Story co-creator Arthur Laurents's four-year relationship with actor Farley Granger are just about titillating enough for the structural imprudence to be forgiven. Though Kaiser does not make a concerted or effective case for the existence of the borderless American gay metropolis that the title is meant to conjure, the decade-by-decade breakdown of people and events provides an excellent portrait of the urban gay community.
