Description

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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.

About the Author

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Michael Denneny (1943-2023) was 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.

Praise For…

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“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