Off Christopher Street

Disco was one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the 1970s. Its explosion into a mass commercial phenomenon was driven by the 1977 box office smash hit Saturday Night Fever ; the film's soundtrack, featuring the Bee Gees, blanketed the Billboard charts for months quickly became the top-selling album of all time. Disco was so omnipresent by the end of the decade that it ignited a backlash from ro...

In this episode, we kick off our occasional series on Gay Therapy Slop, in which we’ll talk about how therapy discourse has shaped modern gay self-understandings. What better place to start than with some gay self-help that's not slop, a book that’s simultaneously a sex manual, a political treatise, and a literary experiment: Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s 1977 classic, The Joy of Gay Sex....

Assassinated less than a year into his term as San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk is remembered today as one of the first openly gay elected officials and a symbol of the struggle for gay rights. But he’s less known for the unique style of gay politics he pioneered: a pragmatic populism grounded in neighborhood power and tactical alliances, combined with a skillful use of the media to broa...

In this crossover episode with Eminent Americans , we take a step back from our regular programming to talk to our friend Dan Oppenheimer about the state of gay male intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located? We talk about why the editors of Christopher Street thought it was important to use new media strategies to cultivate a distinctive gay male identity and a shared, if...

Our reverence for Andrew Holleran is no secret, and the appointed hour has arrived to talk about his 1978 masterpiece Dancer from the Dance , not just, as we argue, the best gay novel of all time but one of the best American novels. Despite remaining untaught in universities, unlike other classics of minority literature, and really having no institutionalized means of transmission, gay men still d...

We’re back from our summer vacation and ready, naturally, to talk about dicks. We’re joined for our tenth episode by fellow historian Ben Bernard to talk about the strange career of circumcision in America, which the writer Edward Wallerstein in 1980 called “a solution in search of a problem.” Wallerstein’s book made an appearance in a Christopher Street dialogue between George Stambolian and Larr...

In this episode we talk about gay men and women: friendships, commonalities, and the often overlooked sexual tensions. We’re joined by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who deals with some of these issues in her book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men , from bachelorettes at gays bars to straight girls on Grindr to the women who fall in love with their gay besties. We talk about how some of these themes a...

Down with corporate Pride! Pride is a protest! Stonewall was a riot! Pride month has become as much about social media discourse as anything else, and in this episode, we try to look beyond posturing slogans and history-distorting morality tales to confront the many possible meanings and feelings one might have about Pride. We read Andrew Holleran’s 1984 Christopher Street essay, “We Must March, M...

We’re drowning in algorithm-optimized relationship slop, social media sob stories about the supposedly toxic gay dating scene, and ragebait on worn-out subjects like monogamy vs. open relationships. It can feel surprisingly hard to find real gay men talking honestly about what it’s actually like to be in a relationship. Even in the history of gay writing and thinking we talk about on this podcast,...

Did gay men invent cancel culture? Even before it was filmed, William Friedkin’s gay serial-killer thriller Cruising (1980) attracted massive publicity and protests from gay writers in New York, who feared it depicted the gay men of the city’s leather bars as sex degenerates in a moment of rising homophobia and right-wing politics. In this episode, we talk about Christopher Street editor Charles O...

We read gay novelist Andrew Holleran’s 1979 column “Fast-Food Sex,” in which he performs a playful exhaustion with gay promiscuity. Now cheap and abundantly available, gay sex has supposedly lost its power to thrill or even to signify. Already at the peak of post-Stonewall gay life, we see the outlines of discourses that persist today in the perpetual rants against Grindr, “hookup culture,” and op...

By day Terry Dolan coordinated the fusion of free-market radicalism and evangelical fundamentalism known as the New Right. By night he cruised DC's steamrooms and gay bars. In 1982, his face appeared on the cover of Christopher Street with an article about his radical, norm-breaking politics and his hookup with a federal employee. DANIEL LEFFERTS(author of the novel Ways & Means ) joins David...

Gays being masc has been making people mad for half a century now, and in this episode, we read Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 Christopher Street essay, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?” to find out why. We discuss the rise of “gay macho” in the 1970s, exemplified by the clone, the leather bar, BDSM, and urban gay male promiscuity. We talk about different gay male stances toward feminism, the enduring...

We read Michael Musto’s 1978 Christopher Street cover story “Every Night Fever,” about the gays who go to the disco every night of the week, an example of a journalism genre that fascinates us—cultural trend stories that simultaneously report and constitute a social phenomenon. We discuss the pleasures of displaying oneself in the gay social world, the way gays moralize about and evaluate each oth...

We read George Stambolian's "Interview With a Hot Man" from the February 1983 issue of Christopher Street and talk about the central, yet perennially controversial, role that physical beauty plays in gay culture. We compare notes on our own experiences of feeling hot and wanting hot people, and about the competing – but perhaps not ultimately opposed – tendencies in gay life toward competitive eli...