About the Book:
In New York, the party never stops and love’s always just around the corner. At least, that’s what queer journalist Esther Mollica told herself when she quit her job during the 2008 recession and moved three thousand miles away to become New York City’s first blogger on lesbian dating. Her hometown brought her nothing but heartache, and none more devastating than learning that the love of her life was secretly married to a man. On the other hand, New York, with its brazen, sadistic wiles, promised something more than just another walk of shame.
What it really delivered was the woman who became Esther’s hardest subject to write about: her editor. Soon, their tempestuous relationship turned into something as twisted and trauma-inducing as it was intoxicating. And even the haze of all-girl nightlife glamor at the height of pre-pandemic New York couldn’t help Esther hide from the truth: about their dysfunction, about her past, and about the life she longed for in the city she loved.
Gritty, dazzling, heartfelt, and hilarious, The Queen of Gay Street is a personal window into the queer dating scene and a promise that those in search of true love will find their own happily ever after.
Reviews:
“Mollica’s reminiscences are both a celebration of the promise of New York to a young woman hungry for connection and a plangent account of the pitfalls of bad relationships and isolation. Her depictions of lesbian life and dating are well observed and brimming with humor (“You lost track of how many people you’ve slept with?” “No! I, ah, I just mean that it’s more than twenty, and either at or less than thirty. I think”), but she also writes with penetrating subtlety about the pain of sputtering relationships: “This time, something in her touch and embrace had drawn me in deeper and shown more of her vulnerability than any time before, yet I felt something else fading and falling apart.” The result is an exhilarating ride on Gotham’s emotional roller coaster.
An entertaining, often poignant portrait of New York romance blending humor with heartache.”
~ Kirkus Reviews
“Mollica’s (I Feel Love: Notes on Queer Joy) memoir is a raunchy, fun, tell-all love letter to New York City and finding one’s place in it. Mollica left San Francisco to move to Astoria, Queens, in 2008 to recover from a devastating breakup and pursue her dream of writing. With the tart, self-deprecating humor that powers the book, Mollica reasons, “After all, wasn’t New York’s motto basically, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your undersexed’?” She also discusses with disarming frankness her family’s cycle of abuse, her efforts at establishing a career, her strings of unfortunate dates and lovers, and how she found love in the city. Especially engaging is her account of the heartbreak and hilarity of writing “Broads in the Big Apple,” a column in the lesbian magazine, GRL that became ‘comic relief for a microscopic subset of lesbian magazine journalists.”
~ BookLife
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About the Author:
Esther Mollica has written for Wired, GO, Bust, Curve, Autostraddle, Nonchalant and The Bay Area Reporter. Her short romantic comedy, Never the Bride, was featured as one of four films by up-and-coming women of color in San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival, 2010.
In 2011 she was named, “New York’s Most Eligible Lesbian Bachelorette” by Time Out New York, which ironically almost scared off her wife.