『Off Christopher Street』のカバーアート

Off Christopher Street

Off Christopher Street

著者： David Sessions and Blake Smith
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Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip through the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

2026 David Sessions and Blake Smith 社会科学 衛生・健康的な生活
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  • The Best Gay Novel of All Time (w/ Domenic DeSocio)

    The Best Gay Novel of All Time (w/ Domenic DeSocio)
    2026/09/01
    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 discover it 50 years later and see themselves in it.A lot of us initially read Dancer as a sociological account of how gay men were in the heyday of the 1970s, or even of how they are in some timeless, essential sense. We discuss how our own readings have evolved over time in different phases of life. But we also try to sort out sociology from artistic invention, and argue for reading Dancer as a work of literature rather than either a journalistic report or a philosophical inquiry into the nature of gay men. We talk about how Holleran constructed the novel from his own experiences and dispositions, and how he sometimes projected his own big thoughts and emotions onto gay life. We piece together Dancer’s complex chronology and unique, elusive style of narration. We consider Holleran’s debts to Proust and Fitzgerald, the stylistic influence of his magazine writing, and the novel’s pervasive Catholic imagery.None of that, of course, diminishes the novel’s powerful themes, which seem to perennially activate new generations of gay men: promiscuity, love, male beauty, aging, friendship. We talk about how Holleran uses the novel form to pose—yearningly, romantically—the search for answers to the Big Questions of gay life through his character Malone, and also to satirize the myopia of that quest with camp humor in the figure of Sutherland. We talk about the way Dancer is fundamentally a novel of gossip, and how gossip is a community-forming activity that holds the web of gay society together. And we ask whether the perennial doubts, anxieties, and questions that lead so many gay men to connect with Dancer are really what it means to be gay, or what it means to be human.Watch the video version of this episode on our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JwEz7iqW16 Subscribe to our email newsletter and support the pod:https://bit.ly/OCSnewsletter FOLLOW THE PODInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/christopherstreetmag/ Substack: https://christopherstreetmag.substack.com/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@christopherstreetpod X: https://x.com/OffCSPod/ MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODENovels by Andrew HolleranDancer from the Dance (1978): https://amzn.to/4qIQemJ Nights in Aruba (1983): https://amzn.to/3UdUWNv The Kingdom of Sand (2022): https://amzn.to/46ezDhz Christopher Street essays by Holleran“Dark Disco” (1978): https://www.christopherstreetmag.com/dark-disco-a-lament/ “Cities of the Plain” (1979): https://www.christopherstreetmag.com/andrew-holleran-cities-of-the-plain/ “Dancing: The Past Five Years” (1982): https://www.christopherstreetmag.com/andrew-holleran-dancing-the-past-five-years/ “We Must March, My Darlings” (1984): https://www.christopherstreetmag.com/andrew-holleran-pride-we-must-march-my-darlings/ “Tragic Drag” (1987): https://www.christopherstreetmag.com/andrew-holleran-tragic-drag-charles-ludlam/ Other sourcesBlake Smith and Domenic DeSocio, “Errands of Love,” Romanticon, October 22, 2025: https://romanticon.substack.com/p/errands-of-love Blake Smith, “Tyler Anthony Smith,” June 29, 2026: https://blakeesmith.substack.com/p/tyler-anthony-smith Andrew Holleran’s interview on Emerald City (1978): http://youtube.com/watch?v=JwEz7iqW16E Larry Kramer, Faggots (1978): https://amzn.to/4hWHzel Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reeve, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (2011): https://amzn.to/4xqRA8d Dennis Cooper, The Sluts (2005): https://amzn.to/4x0g2wr Robert Ferro, The Family of Max Desir (1983): https://amzn.to/3UdVV09 Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley, Atlantis: Autobiography of a Search (1970): https://amzn.to/4daX92z Philip Gambone (novelist): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Gambone
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    1 時間 38 分
  • The Scandalous History of Circumcision (w/ Ben Bernard)

    The Scandalous History of Circumcision (w/ Ben Bernard)
    2026/08/19

    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 Larry Mass at a time when gay men–and increasingly, Americans writ large–were skeptical of medical expertise. We learn that circumcision was recommended in the late 19th century as a masturbation-prevention technique; when this sort of moralism fell out of fashion, it was outfitted with new (but equally dubious) medical justifications. We talk about how our evangelical and Jewish backgrounds shaped our awareness of circumcision, Ben and Blake's experiences of uncut cocks in France, how gay guys think about their own dicks and other guys’ dicks, how sameness and difference can be eroticized in different ways, and why circumcision has never really become a major political issue despite people vigorously objecting to it.

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    Benjamin S. Bernard is a historian whose work focuses on education, gender and sexuality, and the culture of early modern France. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Public Seminar, Inside Higher Ed, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and others.

    Sources

    • George Stambolian and Lawrence D. Mass, “The Unkindest Cut of All,” Christopher Street, May 1982.
    • Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy (1980).
    • Ben Bernard, “The University’s Never-Ending Crisis,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2026.
    • Lawrence D. Mass, “The New Narcissism and Homosexuality: The Psychiatric Connection,” Christopher Street, January 1980.
    • George Stambolian, “Paris and Poppers,” New York Native, 1983.
    • Todd Shepard, Sex, France and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (2017)
    • Todd Shepard, “Against Vanilla History: Why and How Histories of Sexual Acts Could Matter to Intellectual Historians,” The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas (2023).
    • Danielle Spencer, Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (2020).
    • Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star (1994).
    • John Powers, A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism (2012).
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    1 時間 26 分
  • Are Straight Women Gay Men? (w/ Phoebe Maltz Bovy)

    Are Straight Women Gay Men? (w/ Phoebe Maltz Bovy)
    2026/06/30

    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 appeared in the past, in Christopher Street, and also how Phoebe uses them in her book to think about our cultural understandings of gender and desire. We talk about some famous intellectual straight women who were problematically horny for gay men and some gay men who were oblivious to the fact that their women friends were horny for them. We recover the core commonality that gay men and straight women have—being horny for men—and note how new cultural ideas about sexual fluidity and queerness mistakenly suggest that gender doesn’t matter in who we desire, leading to discourses that are strangely detached from reality.

    Chapters

    (00:00) Introducing the last straight woman

    (08:40) Being bloggers and bad grad students

    (12:39) Gay men and straight women in Christopher Street

    (20:55) The fake lesbian straight woman who got Me Tooed

    (24:18) Are straight women and gay men really platonic friends?

    (31:39) How we came to think all women are queer

    (37:34) Phoebe’s concept of “frumpy but horny”

    (43:02) Are that many people really bisexual?

    (59:38) You can’t figure out your identity online

    Follow Off Christopher Street on Instagram for video clips from our episodes and subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes and bonus content.

    Phoebe Maltz Bovy is an editor at the Canadian Jewish News and a columnist for the Globe and Mail. She co-hosts the podcast Feminine Chaos with Kat Rosenfield and writes on Substack. Her new book, The Last Straight Woman, was released in May 2026.

    Mentioned

    • Seymour Kleiberg, “Friendship: Gay Men and Women,” Christopher Street, October-November 1979.
    • Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage (2017).
    • Blake Smith, “The Ethics of Self-Interpretation,” Tablet, November 18, 2024.
    • Melissa de la Cruz and Tom Dolby, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men (2007).
    • Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954).
    • Zoe Greenberg, “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist is the Accused?” New York Times, August 13, 2018.
    • Rachel Aviv, “Martha Nussbaum’s Moral Philosophies,” The New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
    • Rachel Aviv, “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2023.
    • Cartoons Hate Her, “I Dress for My Personality, and My Personality is Annoying,” June 16, 2026.
    • Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)
    • Phoebe Maltz Bovy, “Lena Dunham’s Frumpiest-Horniest Scandal, Revisited,” May 13, 2026.
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    1 時間 10 分
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