In Village Dreams, Jay Quint merges his own existential crisis and writer's block into a chronicle of the evolution of counterculture and the emergence of the world's famous Gay Villages. These special enclaves, at once havens and ghettos, were at the heart of the willfully overlooked transition period between the collapse of the '60s youth movements, and the rise of the "new urbanism" in the early '70s. In reconjuring the zeitgeists of these mythic decades, the insights of the most influential critics, including Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and many others, are placed side by side with those of "gay writers" like Edmund White ( City Boy ), Larry Kramer ( Faggots ), Andrew Holleran ( Dancer from the Dance ), and Armistead Maupin ( Tales of the City).