George Chauncey's gay New York: A view from 25 years later

Abstract

When George Chauncey's Gay New York appeared a quarter century ago, it did so with deserved fanfare. Reviewers celebrated it as brilliant, magisterial, exceptional, monumental, light-years ahead, masterful, seminal, groundbreaking, absolutely marvelous, a new beginning, and a landmark study. While reviews of Gay New York appeared in the usual American history journals, many of these were uncommonly long, indicating the book's immediate importance. This importance was also felt beyond the discipline of history with reviews appearing in sociological, anthropological, environmental, American Studies, and even speech journals. The Association of American Geographers held a roundtable on Gay New York in 1995 in which a participant dubbed it, one of the more important texts written by a nongeographer to be included in a canon of new social geography. Beyond the academy, the popular press also expressed considerable interest in the book, with the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Gay Community News each taking up the matter of Gay New York in its pages. And beyond the bounds of the United States, scholarly publications in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom also commissioned reviews of Gay New York. A year after its American debut with Basic Books, the parent firm of HarperCollins released it in the United Kingdom, and then eight years later the noted historian Didier Eribon translated it into French for the Parisian publisher Fayard. Within its first few years of publication, Gay New York also collected a number of notable prizes, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history, the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the Lambda Literary Award for gay men's studies, and the Merle Curti Award from the OAH.