Love, Christopher Street

Representing some of the most talented writers at work today, the 26 original essays in Love, Christopher Street encompass revealing, intense, profound, funny, personal, and queer reflections that span forty years of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender life in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Together these essays create an LGBT love letter to New York City from native New Yorkers, American transplants, and international writers. This book continues the Lambda Award-winning series of LGBT tributes to great cities.

Just a few of the quintessentially queer essays include the Rev. Irene Monroe’s account of the hot summer night in 1969 when she witnessed police raiding the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street and the drag queens who fought back; Bob Smith’s memoir of his life as an out stand-up comedian in the 1980s and how he has kept his fierce humor while faced with the diagnosis of ALS; Penny Arcade’s saga of being a runaway in NYC and taken in off the streets by gay men who introduced her to Warhol’s Factory; Ocean Vuong’s chronicle of how he went from being a couch-surfing college student to homeless in Penn Station; and civil rights activist Brendan Fay reveals what took him all the way from Ireland to “Finding Jesús on Christopher Street.”

Contributors include Mark Ameen, Penny Arcade, Christopher Bram, Brendan Fay, Thomas Glave, Jewelle Gomez, Aaron Hamburger, Martin Hyatt, Fay Jacobs, G. Winston James, Michele Karlsberg, Shaun Levin, Amos Mac, David McConnell, Val McDermid, Rev. Irene Monroe, Rabbi Andrea Myers, Nicky Paraiso, Felice Picano, Charles Rice-González, Eddie Sarfaty, Justine Saracen, Bob Smith, Shawn Syms, Charlie Vázquez, Ocean Vuong, and Kathleen Warnock.