Love, Christopher Street is an excellent collection of essays from a variety of LGBT New Yorkers. Its strength lies in the inclusion of multiple LGBT voices from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds. Overall it paints a real, moving and eminently readable portrait of New York's LGBT community past and present. Whether one is a part of this community or merely an outside observer, Love, Christopher Street is one of those books that will leaving you thinking - and feeling for days and months after you've put it down. An excellent read. ( )

This was a compelling reading. It’s not my first book with a real-life New York setting, if you want to consider your e-reader the modern bedside table, I have Gay New York and Gay Metropolis on my shortlist, plus Eminent Outlaws, another nonfiction I love, is mostly set in this same city, but Love, Christopher Street shift the perspective to more contemporary times, mostly of these stories are about the ’70-’80-’90, pre and post AIDS, with everything it implied. So this was a nice addition to my collection, and another reason to browse some authors I wasn’t aware of. I raise my hand, there are some friends among the contributors: Christopher Bram, Aaron Hamburger, Fay Jacobs, Shaun Levin, Felice Picano and Justine Saracen; I was already aware of the fiction and nonfiction by them, as I said Bram’s Eminent Outlaws is one of my reference texts, and so it’s True Stories by Felice Picano. Moreover there are authors I don’t personally know but admire, Thomas Glave, Jewelle Gomez, Charles Rice-Gonzalez (I was even to a reading of Mr Rice-Gonzalez, his puppy stole the scene at that one) and Bob Smith. For all the other it was a wonderful chance to “meet” them, and I’m sure this will be not the last time I will enjoy their experience.

What is probably the most important thing is that these women and men are not hiding anything to the reader, nor happiness or sadness, nor fears or hopes. There is love and death, mourning and joy, blood families and those built to substitute the ones who didn’t want you (and sometime they are stronger and more important than those made of relatives.)

Sure, the feeling is mostly bittersweet, but I also know of about at least four, if not more, of these contributors who found an happily ever after in real life, so there has to be a reason for everything it happened. I know that I must sound as ingénue, but for me love is one of the essential pushing forces of life.

And then we haven’t to forget the most important character of all the book, the city, New York City. She is like a great dame, not so old to be agé, but still old enough to be fashionable. She is at the same time like a spider that when she has you on her net, doesn’t let you go, and like a big mother bosom, suffocating with her love embraces. Someone once told me that you are never alone in this city, and even if it’s a big metropolis, sometime it seems to live in a Village (reference to the various “villages” in the city totally intended). Even if most of those authors aren’t originally from New York, they now consider it their city… and that is New York to you.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1937627071/?tag=elimyrevandra-20