ABSTRACT
ALONG CHRISTOPHER STREET, you can tell immediately that something is wrong. In Harmony Video, for years one of the principal porn stores on New York’s most legendary gay strip, they now display $3.95 videos of football teams, John Wayne movies, and music videos by the fundamentalist pop singer Amy Grant. Just up the block stands Christopher Street Books, the store that proudly bills itself as “New York’s oldest gay establishment.” In the front room it, too, sells bargain videos that seem to have been unloaded by a desperate wholesaler in Kansas: Bob Uecker’s “Wacky World of Sports,” Spanish-language children’s cartoons. Whose idea of gay merchandise is this? In the back room where the peep show booths are, they are showing films of wrestling matches. A few customers still come in, mostly gay men over 40. They leave quickly.1
