McCourt is openly gay. His life partner since 1964 is novelist Vincent Virga; they met in graduate school at Yale.

McCourt is best known for his extravagant 1975 novel Mawrdew Czgowchwz, about a fictional opera diva, and his 2003 nonfiction book Queer Street, about gay life in New York City after World War II. His latest novel, Now Voyagers, is the first in a series of projected sequels to Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

McCourt has garnered praise from critics Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom, and has recently been championed by author Dennis Cooper. Sontag directed McCourt's first novel, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, to her publisher's attention, while Bloom named a later work, Time Remaining to his influential Western Canon. Mawrdew Czgowchwz was brought back in print in 2002 with a new introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum.

Fiction

• Mawrdew Czgowchwz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975)
• Kaye Wayfaring in “Avenged” (stories) (Viking, 1985)
• Time Remaining (stories) (Knopf, 1993)
• Delancey's Way (Knopf, 2000)
• Wayfaring at Waverly in Silverlake (stories) (Knopf, 2002)
• Now Voyagers (Turtle Point Press, 2008)

Nonfiction

• Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985 (W.W. Norton, 2003)