The Big Apple's Gay Guides & Books

I have often read New York books before,
Watched the city recreated, walked words' corridors.
All at once am I several stories high!
Thrifty way to the life New York lives.
[sung to the tune "On the Street Where You Live" by Lerner & Loewe]

Non-Stop New York recommends these fine gay titles focused on New York City.
It's easy to purchase NYC books from this site in association with Amazon.com:
:

Click cover for info; order: click title!

Click any cover for details; to order, click on any title below!

Fodor's Gay Guide

Return to TOP of PAGE: Click Icon >

Hey! How about that NYC Hanky Code?

For those of us who live with books, what we read is as much a part of
our personal history as the events we participate in.
"I can't prove it," says Alfred Kazin, "but I'm sure New York
is the single most important factor in American writing."
New York has been making its appearance in literature
years before the first white settlers stepped ashore.
In Literary New York, Edmiston and Cirino insist:
"No other neighborhood in New York, perhaps in the world, has
been the birthplace of more literature than Greenwich Village."

-- from Literary New York: A History and Guide
by Susan Edmiston and Linda D. Cirino
[Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976] --

Here are recent gay guides and books set inside The Big Apple.
If there's a gay New York City-related book suitable for this page,
please send Non-Stop New York details about it.

Fodor's Gay Guide to NYC With Fire Is. & New Hope, Pa
by Andrew Collins, Jon Klusmire
List: $12.00 * Amazon: $9.60 * Savings: $2.40 (20%)
1st Edition; Paper, 160 pages [NY: Fodors Travel Pubns, Nov. 1997]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0679033785

The Gay & Lesbian Handbook to New York City
by Richard Laermer
List: $10.95 * Amazon: $8.76 * Savings: $2.19 (20%)
Paperback, 277 pages [NY: Plume, May 1994]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0452270227
This thorough and entertaining guide to everything that makes New
York City the place for gays and lesbians is packed with info:
from gay nightclubs, restaurants, arts, and bookstores, to many gay
and lesbian support groups as well as social/ political organizations.
Released on: the 25th Anniversary of Stonewall.

Stepping Out:
9 Walks Through New York City's Gay & Lesbian Past
by Daniel Hurewitz
List: $15.95 * Amazon: $12.76 * Savings: $3.19 (20%)
Paper, 240 pages [NY: Owlet, June 1997]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0805041583
A lively, campy guide presents 9 walking tours that celebrate gay
culture, history, and gossip, each taking in 20-30 locations, including
Stonewall, bars, clubs, and haunts of famous homosexuals. Original.

Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls
by Veronica Vera
List: $14.95 * Amazon: $11.96 * Savings: $2.99 (20%)
35 photos * Paper, 240 pages, [NY: Doubleday, Nov. 1997]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 0385484569
For every woman who's burned her bra, there's a man ready to wear
one. So says Veronica Vera, who founded Miss Vera's Finishing School
for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in 1992 as a resource for that part of
the male population who feels the need to dress in women's clothing.
Her book unveils naked truths about cross-dressing in a fun,
philosophical way for would-be girls--and real girls, too!
From the Publisher: It's estimated 3%-5% of the USA's adult male population
feels the need, at least occasionally, to dress in women's clothing. Judging from
enrollment at her academy, Miss Vera says that figure is low. Veronica Vera
founded Miss Vera's Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls in 1992,
starting a gender revolution. Working from the pink palace of the Academy's
intimate Manhattan campus, she has helped hundreds of students embrace
and master Venus Envy through expert instruction in the arts of dressing up,
making up, going out, and acting like a lady. In her new book, with sparkling
wit and dazzling insight, Miss Vera gives every reader the 411 on body hair,
foundation garments, make-up, and dressing, as well as valuable tips on
creating a "Her-story" (finding the real life story of the femme-self within)
speech, manners, walking in high heels, and--that biggest step of all--going out in
the real world all dressed up. Amply illustrated. Filled with real stories of
students and graduates, Miss Vera's Finishing School recounts the
fascinating history of how the Academy came to be, as well as Miss Vera's
own incisive gender manifesto.

The Drag Queens of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide
by Julian Fleisher
List: $13.00 * Amazon: $10.40 * Savings: $2.60 (20%)
Paper, 178 pages [Riverhead Books, August 1996]
To order this book: click its title! ISBN: 1573225525
Synopsis: A smart, witty, insightful tour of Manhattan's most dazzling
arena of style--the wildly popular culture of drag--has interviews with
Lypsinka, RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and many notorious queens.

The Gay Metropolis:
Offering the Cream of a Half-Century of Name-Brand Gay Life & Gossip
by Charles Kaiser
To order this book: click its title! ISBN !
The "Gay Metropolis" of Charles Kaiser's title is less a place than
a state of mind. We learn little in this book about the distinctly urban
character of gay life or about the bars, theaters and street corners
most gay New Yorkers have frequented since the 1940's, but much
about the cosmopolitan elite that made the metropolis appear
glamorous. From Truman Capote and Roy Cohn to Christopher
Isherwood and Paul Cadmus, this book offers a well-written, briskly
paced anecdotes about postwar gay male high and mighty of NYC. ...
Many of those stories are engaging and intriguing. It will startle
many readers to learn just how pervasive the gay presence was in the
postwar theater, for instance. "West Side Story," the classic post-war
drama of teen-age heterosexuality, was created by four gay men:
Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome
Robbins. Mr. Kaiser's long account of their collaboration prompts
one to wonder if the men's shared identity as homosexuals influenced
the way they created this tale of forbidden love or affected the way
they worked together. Might their collaboration tell us something
about the place of gay men in the arts or gay influence on the
larger culture or whether a gay sensibility exists?
Characteristically, Mr. Kaiser asks only briefly whether the play
reflected a gay sensibility. After reporting that Mr. Laurents thought
the fact that they were all Jewish was more significant, he moves on. ...

This is typical of the way the book's stories of long-ago trysts, affairs and
glamour tend to take the place of historical narrative and interpretation.
Curiously, Mr. Kaiser's book in many ways resembles 1940's gay folklore.
Before the gay movement developed more direct tactics, homosexuals knew
that spreading vicious gossip about homophobes' sexual foibles (or repressed
homosexuality) was a way to undermine their stature; Kaiser replicates this
strategy by repeating well-known rumors about J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph
McCarthy.
At the same time, adulatory gossip about the secret homosexuality of
respected figures in American culture was a way for gay men to place
themselves in the pantheon of cultural heroes from which they had
been excluded. "The Gay Metropolis" replicates the strengths and
limitations of this tactic as well. Some readers may find it satisfying to
learn that the creators of "West Side Story" were gay, but since the
significance of this is nowhere analyzed, the knowledge will do little to
change the way they think about American history or even gay history.
Nonetheless, the book is distinctly a product of the 1990's, which judges the
past from a contemporary perspective rather than trying to understand it in
its own terms. The pre-Stonewall years remain enigmatic and indecipherable
in this context, as Mr. Kaiser rehashes the old saws about gay self-hatred
while simultaneously regaling us with tales of gay cocktail parties, creativity
and joie de vivre. The stories seem random, included because they might
titillate readers rather than because they help develop a framework for
understanding the past. (Thus there's 3 pages on 1967's Middle East war because
it lets Kaiser reveal whom Bernstein slept with after a Jerusalem concert.)
Only in the 1970's does Mr. Kaiser, a former reporter for The New York
Times and The Wall Street Journal, find his story line. It's an all-too-familiar
morality tale of sexual hedonism leading to the AIDS calamity and a
heightened compassion among gay men. Nonetheless Mr. Kaiser's string
of oral histories becomes more engrossing here, in part because he has
found some wonderful raconteurs. Although the stories continue to focus on
the elite (the glamorous story of Studio 54 is told again, while the funkier
gay discos where most men went remain unmentioned), they have a greater
depth and complexity than the stories from earlier decades.
The story line also picks up in the 1970's because of the explosion then of
news coverage of gay issues, which gives Mr. Kaiser greater opportunity to
bring his insider's knowledge of journalism to bear. He uses his interviews
with key journalists to enliven the tale of how the nation's newspapers, and
particularly The Times, came to treat gay issues more extensively and fairly.
In keeping with the book's celebrity focus, Phil Donahue gets more credit for
increasing gay visibility than the never-mentioned Gay and Lesbian Alliance
Against Defamation does, and at times Mr. Kaiser seems simply to be settling
old scores with some of his journalistic colleagues. But his dissection of
anti-gay television specials and news reporting offers compelling evidence
of the bias once rampant in the nation's newsrooms.
Mr. Kaiser's preoccupation with the elite, though initially fascinating, is
eventually wearying and ultimately troubling. Most men in this book are rich,
white and beautiful (usually "very beautiful"), or at least a beautiful date or
hanger-on. It's telling that virtually the only glimpse the book gives us of
Harlem comes from Philip Johnson's account of visiting the neighborhood.
This is a narrow slice of gay life, masquerading as the whole.
-- excerpt from the review by George Chauncey
Copyright 1997 The New York Times
[Tuesday, December 30, 1997]

Return to TOP of PAGE: Click me!

more GAY NYC-based books to come; bookmark this page

Return to NYC Bestsellers
Where's Non-Stop N.Y.'s Literary Life?

N.Y. Magazine, 444 Madison Ave., NYC
The New Yorker, 20 West 43rd St., NYC 10036; [212] 536-5400
Jesse's Word of the Day www.randomhouse.com/jesse
New York Public Library, Fifth Ave. & 42nd St., NYC www.nypl.org/branch/
Time Out N.Y.: Weekly Entertainment Guide Time Out NY@aol.com
Metrobeat's Literary Listings www.metrobeat.com
NY Press, 333 Seventh Avenue, NYC 10001 themail@newyorkpress.com
New York Web Arts/ Readings www.nyw.com
Total New York Arts/ Readings totalny.com
Manhattan Spirit News Our Town @aol.com
The New York Times www.nytimes.com
Need professional help promoting a book?

For a Non-Stop New York Gay Time: