『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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10月19日まで。※適用条件あり

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip about 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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  • Where Have All the Gay Writers Gone? (w/ Dan Oppenheimer)

    Where Have All the Gay Writers Gone? (w/ Dan Oppenheimer)
    2026/09/15

    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 not homogenous, literary culture around it. Are today’s gay writers part of anything like a common identity or intellectual world? We talk about Gay Twitter, non-gay Substack, the “house gays” at straight magazines, the gay podcasts and the gay slop. We name all the names. Not because we think we have all the answers, but because we hope, in asking the questions, to provoke you to interest in the gay writing and thought we now have to inherit.


    Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube.


    David and Blake on Eminent Americans:

    • David: “The David Sessions Session” (July 2026)
    • Blake: “Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a Soupçon of Porn)” (January 2026)
    • David: “Left Behind” (May 2025)
    • Blake: “The Fall of the White American Gay” (May 2023)


    Sources

    • Michael Denneny, “Why Gay Men Need a Literary Magazine,” Christopher Street Reader (1983).
    • Ben Nichols, Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020).
    • "A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Christopher Street, May 1982.
    • Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023).
    • Michael Denneny, “A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer,” On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall (2023).
    • Paul McAdory, “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” Gawker, September 9, 2021.
    • Tom Crewe, “My Hands in My Face,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025.
    • James Kirchik, “Transgendering Stonewall,” Tablet, July 11, 2019.
    • James Kirchik, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Liberties, Spring 2023.
    • David Sessions, "The Year of the Gay Sex Zeitgeist," December 22, 2025.
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    1 時間 48 分
  • 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.

    Click here to subscribe to the Off Christopher Street newsletter.

    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
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