Rating: 
Summary: Not What It Appears
Review: Before you buy this wordy, strange tome, check it out at the local bookstore. If you're a gay history buff, this isn't what you're looking for--the title is very misleading. It's a digest of confused essays, the unorganized puffery and random (and very uninteresting) thoughts of the author. I think the desired result was to portray "hip," it succeeded in being boring and tedious. I perused it at the bookstore and passed on it.
Rating:
Summary: big mistake
Review: Expecting a readable history of gay culture, or at least an entertaining romp through Manhattan, I was disappointed on both counts. Reading became a chore rather than a pleasure. I got the distinct impression that the author was writing more to himself than to an audience, a journal of discovery that only the writer can fully understand and appreciate.
Rating:
Summary: big mistake
Review: Expecting a readable history of gay culture, or at least an entertaining romp through Manhattan, I was disappointed on both counts. Reading became a chore rather than a pleasure. I got the distinct impression that the author was writing more to himself than to an audience, a journal of discovery that only the writer can fully understand and appreciate.
Rating:
Summary: This book is not worth your money!
Review: I am not sure why the author bothered to write this book. I guess he needed some money but how he found a publisher is a mystery to me. This book is unintelligible, boring, stupid, pointless, confusing, obscure, convuluted and frustrating. It's rare, thankfully, that other authors don't have such utter contempt and disregard for their readers as this one does.
Rating: 
Summary: Emotional and factual information
Review: I had read reviews of this book in several newspapers which were attracting, and I'm so glad I got it. It was more than I expected. I understand so much more now and have so much respect for the experience of gay persons. The more I know, the more I love and admire them.
Rating:
Summary: False Advertising
Review: If you are someone who is interested in learning the actual history of gay culture from 1947-1985, then move on. This was the longest book I ever wasted my time reading. I'm sure the author is a very talented writer, but the title and cover were misleading as to the contents of this book. For someone wanting to do actual historical research, this book is a pointless collection of trivia centered around what would be considered extremely stereotypical gay 'interests'-most notably a continuing thread running through the book that rehashes the movie "All About Eve." Several times. A culturally elitist book about a whole lot of nothing.
Rating:
Summary: Exciting read
Review: Ignore the naysayers - this book deserves every bit of the massive attention it is getting. James McCourt is a literary god. But my favorite book is still 'Delancey's Way'.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, self-indulgent, amazing, impossible, required
Review: Imagine if James Joyce were queer and writing about the "Gay scene" of the pre-AIDS era. Now take away a little talent, add a little ego, season with post-modern perspective. At times I gave up. At times I wanted to throw it against the wall. At times I wanted to burn it. At times I wanted to have written it.
An amazing book, a lark, a voyage. Truly incredible. Oh, just buy it. Give yourself permission to dip in and out, and then just enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: Obtuse and infuriating, but .....
Review: The book is infuriating because it is willfully solipsistic. The author is clearly writing to an intended audience, but it's unclear who that audience is; the publisher would like you to think that the book is a "seminal" record of a "mad, bygone era," but it is more accurately described as an obtuse memoir of a particular high-culture gay man's adventures, and as an elegy to a period of time in that culture that is gone and is never to return. McCourt has said that this is a treatment of how gay culture moved from being marginalized and yet somehow pure, to commodified and therefore lacking. But that is not really what this book is about, either; it "ends" in 1985 (if not much earlier than that), with the death of Rock Hudson, and that can't be really described as the point in time at which it became okay for gay people to be treated as a mainstream target market by advertisers. Nor is it ever really clear what loss McCourt is bemoaning. The jacket copy says that he's bemoaning the "death of queer culture," but that's not true; he's lamenting the transformation of that culture from one thing to another. More than anything else, this book is a catalogue of reference points and lists from the late forties, the fifties, and the early sixties, with a lot of impenetrable language, a lot of name-dropping, a lot of tangential versification, dialoguing, and other stream-of-consciousness gibberish, a lot of metaphors from old camp-classic movies ("All about Eve" being the most prominent), and a hilarious "interview" with Bette Davis (it is hard to ascertain whether this interview really occurred or is a figment of McCourt's imagination). It's an occasionally compelling book if you have some connection to these reference points, either because you lived with them and through them or because you know people who did, or because you were "schooled" by people who did (and who forced you to watch "All about Eve" as many times as it took for you to "get" it). But if all of that is meaningless to you, this book will probably be meaningless as well, and McCourt sure doesn't go out of his way to make it less meaningless to you. McCourt makes Edmund White look like a minimalist.
Rating:
Summary: WHAT A RIP OFF!!!
Review: This book bills itself as a historical trip through gay culture from post WWII til the mid-1980's. What a bunch of hooey! The writing is so obtuse and convoluted it took me several readings of the same line to figure out what the author was trying to say (and I have a Masters degree too!). Thoughts begin and go nowhere or change in mid-sentence. Some sentences never end, just continue on and on until they have become fulblown paragraphs without end. And there is far too much camp exploration that has nothing to do with anything.
I feel bad that a tree was cut down to make the paper so that tripe like this could be printed. The author and the publisher should be ashamed.
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