On Christopher Street

On Christopher Street Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall

by Michael Denneny

University of Chicago Press, 2023
Cloth: 978-0-226-82461-1 | Paper: 978-0-226-82463-5 | Electronic: 978-0-226-82462-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226824628.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Through the eyes of publishing icon Michael Denneny, this cultural autobiography traces the evolution of the US’s queer community in the three decades post-Stonewall.

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s have been captured in minute detail, and rightly memorialized in books, on tv, and in film as pivotal and powerful moments in queer history. Yet what about the moments in between—the tumultuous decade post-Stonewall when the queer community’s vitality and creativity exploded across the country, even as the AIDS crisis emerged?

Michael Denneny was there for it all. As a founder and editor of the wildly influential magazine Christopher Street and later as the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house, Denneny critically shaped publishing around gay subjects in the 1970s and beyond. At St. Martin’s Press, he acquired a slew of landmark titles by gay authors—many for his groundbreaking Stonewall Inn Editions—propelling queer voices into the mainstream cultural conversation. On Christopher Street is Denneny’s time machine, going back to that heady period to lay out the unfolding geographies and storylines of gay lives and capturing the raw immediacy of his and his contemporaries’ daily lives as gay people in America. Through forty-one micro-chapters, he uses his journal writings, articles, interviews, and more from the 1970s and ‘80s to illuminate the twists and turns of a period of incomparable cultural ferment.

One of the few surviving voices of his generation, Denneny transports us back in time to share those vibrant in-between moments in gay lives—the joy, sorrow, ecstasy, and energy—across three decades of queer history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Michael Denneny is a longtime book and magazine editor who played an outsized role in promoting openly gay writers from the mid-1970s onward. In 1976, he cofounded Christopher Street magazine, one of the first gay literary magazines. He is now a freelance editor and consultant living in New York City.

REVIEWS

“Because of his pivotal role in creating modern gay literature, Denneny has perhaps done more than any other single individual to actually create contemporary gay literary culture. On Christopher Street shows that there was a first-rate intellect behind his more familiar role as publisher and editor. While this volume is an important window on the recent past, it also demonstrates the extent to which one man’s lively and humane intellect influenced the creation of contemporary gay culture.”

— David Carter, author of Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution

“On Christopher Street offers a remarkable glimpse into the first decades after the Stonewall Riots, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a new culture in formation. A valuable and thoughtful account of a foundational moment in American cultural history.”

— David K. Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare

“There simply is no other person in the LGBT community who has been as pivotal for LGBT publishing, from newspapers and magazines to books. This important book is a testament to the history of our community.”

— Mark Segal, founder and publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News and author of And Then I Danced

"Michael Denneny’s memoir-in-essays On Christopher Street illuminates various aspects of gay life in the past half-century. . . . The book’s primary focus is the state of the burgeoning gay literary scene and its public and critical reception. In
preserving articles as they appeared at the time, the book revives the atmosphere, hopes, fears, ambitions, and challenges of the nascent community, as experienced by Denneny as a gay man living and working in New York. It also exposes the flawed, underdeveloped personal perspectives that Denneny spent subsequent years grappling with and refining."

— Foreword

"As a founder and editor of the wildly influential literary journal Christopher Street and later as the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house, Denneny critically shaped publishing around gay subjects in the 1970s and beyond. At St. Martin’s Press, he acquired a slew of landmark titles by gay authors—many for his groundbreaking Stonewall Inn Editions—propelling queer voices into the mainstream cultural conversation. . . . On Christopher Street revisits that heady period to map out the cultural forces, geographies, and storylines of LGBTQ in those decades. Through 41 micro-chapters, Denneny draws on his journal writings, articles, interviews, and more from the 1970s and ’80s to put us there in this formative and also tragic time."

— Queer Forty

"As the queer community has survived countless attempts at suppression and elimination, this book offers not only a historical account of the political environment of the 1970s-80s. It also showcases tried and true forms of activism and rhetoric, ones that have kept and continue to make our survival possible."

— Out in Jersey

"If you love reading about gay life, you owe a debt to Michael Denneny."

— Passport

Preface: Becoming Real

Part 1: Morning in Gay America (1970–1980)

Christopher Street Magazine

Dead Souls at The New Yorker: A Puzzling Case

Lovers: The Story of Two Men

“Everything Is Only Ten Years Old”: A Conversation with Felice Picano

Decent Passions: Real Stories about Love

Blue Moves: Conversation with a Male Porn Dancer

Part 2: Beginning to Count Ourselves (1980–1983)

Archeologist of the Present: Michel Foucault in New York City

Gay Politics and Its Premises: Sixteen Propositions

Sixteen Propositions: An Exchange

Scaring the Horses; or the Question of Gay Identity

Who Are We? What Do We Want? How Best Might We Get It?

Part 3: The State of the Tribe (1983–1987)

Gay Pride and Survival in the Eighties

The State of Gay Criticism

Oedipus Revised: David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes

Paragraph 175, or How Dark Can It Get?

A Culture in a Crucible

Part 4: Workaday Publishing, or Hegel’s Ernst (1985–1988)

Further Down the Road

The Universal Voice of Gay Writers

A Conversation with Allen Barnett

How to Review a Gay Novel

Chasing the Crossover Audience and Other Self-Defeating Strategies

Editing Fiction and the Question of “Political Correctness”

Part 5: On the Raft of the Medusa (1988–1990)

The Death of a Generation

An Intellectual Ambush

A Quilt of Many Colors

Preaching to the Choir

The Present Moment

A Letter to Ed White

Part 6: In the Gathering Darkness an Age of Heroes (1991–1996)

Eulogy for Allen Barnett

Honoring Richard Rouillard

Eulogy for Randy Shilts

Necessary Bread: Gay Writing Comes of Age

Stonewall: From Event to Idea

Three Takes on John Preston

Food for Life: A Dinner Party in Two Hours

Turning... Turning: The Boys in the Band

A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer

Key West Seminar

Part 7: Reconsiderations (1996–2014)

Hymn to the Gym

AIDS Books: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going

Affectionate Men

Last Letter to Paul Monette

Afterword: Looking Back

Appendix A: Out Magazine

Appendix B: A Few Words about Christopher Street’s Finances

Appendix C: The Stonewall Inn Editions

Acknowledgments