Village Dreams is about the famous Gay Villages—but it is not a history of them. The book reconjures the critical juncture between the collapse of the 60s youth movements and the emergence of The Villages, as well as the zeitgeist that prevailed within them in the 70s, in order to readvance the best of the era’s cultural criticism; in so doing, the sources of present-day contradictions are illuminated. Drawing on Baudelaire, Proust, Benjamin, Camus, Arendt, Mailer, Sontag, Wolfe and others, and using photographs (pulled up using QR codes and webpages for an innovative new form of “interactive reading”), Village Dreams takes readers on an unexpected and thoroughly unconventional spree through the quintessential themes of time and memory, urbanism, and counterculture.