As vaguely promised, my essay “My Lavender Marriage” is now online at The Point. It’s about how lavender marriages went from something seen as regrettable or tragic to a cute social media trend that is progressive and “queer,” interspersed with the story of my own mixed-orientation marriage. The personal part is largely about how I rationalized going against my desires, which has a strange parallel with the sad, paranoid sex and romance discourses of our moment: arguing with your desire, trying to shove it into the narrow logical frameworks of Online rather than feel it, follow it, become it. Read it here.

The Cultural Gossip of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

In our latest episode of Off Christopher Street, we continue our Andrew Holleran obsession by going deep on his first novel, the nearly unchallenged classic of modern gay literature and possibly the only novel besides The Great Gatsby that I have ever read more than twice, Dancer from the Dance, which has powerful debts to Fitzgerald and is loosely patterned on Gatsby. But I actually read them in succession this summer in preparation for this episode, and was left in no doubt: Gatsby is great, but Dancer is better. It is without question the best gay novel, but if it is better than Gatsby, and I mean purely on aesthetic and technical terms, subject matter aside, then it’s time to consider whether Dancer is actually the Great American Novel, or, if you want to Hannah Horvath it, a Great American Novel.

If one is aware of Holleran’s debt to Proust and Fitzgerald, we hear considerably less about the distinctive way he combines those authors’ nostalgic apprehension of time with the more immediate facticity—and humor—of gossip and the cultural trend journalism. In preparation for this episode I also rewatched Holleran’s appearance on Emerald City, an almost-impossible-to-believe gay channel that had a short life on Manhattan public-access TV and is now a time capsule of New York gay cultural life in the late 1970s. I watched it a few years ago, probably after I read Dancer the first time, and didn’t think it more than the typical author interview or a gesture at some of the novel’s themes. A few things stand out a lot more now, especially after having read so many of Holleran’s Christopher Street essays.

There’s what seems like a passing exchange that is in fact revealing about an aspect of Holleran’s craft:

The closet scene is from the first chapter, when the unnamed narrator returns to Fire Island to go through the clothes of the disappeared main character Malone. The part that Judell quotes, or rather misquotes—it’s “shoe trees” in the novel, not shoehorns—comes from the very first use in Dancer of one of Holleran’s signature techniques: the list. Holleran constantly deploys the paragraph-long list for different purposes: in the first chapter, lists capture the sartorial practices of the “circuit” gay (the inventory of Malone’s closet), to catalog the social diversity of the dancefloor, and to sum up the previous season in the Pines by combining, in one almost two-page paragraph, a laundry list of trends in music, fashion, drugs, and sex acts with a host of increasingly campy, exaggerated vignettes. I’ll quote this last one (almost) in full since it’s particularly virtuosic:

In reference to the forty-four shoe trees, a real-life detail a friend had reported after a hookup, or references to particular New York clubs in which the dates in the novel didn’t line up with reality, Holleran says, “It was artistic license, you wanted to get a lot of stories, and you had to condense it.” Holleran’s “lists” decorate passing time with concrete social detail while also flattening it into a “blur.” They are also a way to assemble the gossip he has accumulated from friends and informants. We talk on the pod about how Dancer is a novel of gossip, featuring not only scenes that feature elaborately structured chains of gay gossip but also these chunks that blend camp invention and sociological reportage.

We’ve referred several times to Christopher Street’s cultural trend stories, the sort of which New York was then and is now still the mainstream torch-bearer, and the way Holleran’s columns in particular function as a platform for gay cultural gossip and trendspotting.1 Blake has compared this to Carrie Bradshaw’s episode-framing columns in Sex and the City, which pose a “bullshit question” and then poll lovers, friends, acquaintances, and strangers about it in order to assemble a sociologically revealing snapshot of discourse. Holleran is an avid observer of cultural trends of all types and loves to declare things he once loved over, hopelessly bowdlerized and trampled upon by the late-coming hordes (disco, casual sex, etc). Even as he’s given to grand metaphysical reflections on Time (which, in his 2022 novel The Kingdom of Sand is capitalized like so), he also tends to grasp time through the rise and fall of cultural trends, as in his 1982 reflection on the gay “clone”: “A clone was as quaint as a hippie by 1982. His clothes hung on racks in Saks in expensive versions by Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: the real death knell of street fashion.”

In one of his early Christopher Street columns, titled “Nipples” (1979), Holleran almost seems to be parodying this aspect of his own writing:

Whether or not nipples are suddenly in vogue seems like the ultimate bullshit question in much the same way that dating the beginning of nude sunbathing to Fire Island in the 1970s is the ultimate bullshit statement. These sorts of declarations are recognizable in our own day, even if they are now hurled into digital maw today with too great a frequency for them to have any basis in reality or to structure a moment of humorous subcultural reflection. To take only examples from this year: Is there a “top shortage” (This one is somehow still going.) Is gay hookup culture over again, like Holleran said it was in 1979? Are men posting bush on main? Is chest hair back, or is it, rather, the summer of the “hairless he-man”?

Holleran’s lists are not all humor and camp; they often capture the passage of time in a regretful or nostalgic register, and thus are one of the technical engines of the novel’s famous atmosphere of yearning sadness. But this dimension of them: their grounding in community gossip, their connection to magazine trend reporting, is a part of Holleran’s craft that constantly intertwines with and undercuts his tendency to grand, Proustian morosity, giving Dancer its elusive, dialectical doubleness.

I jolt awake in my seat to see Jason clutching my phone and passport in his lap. His little shoulders are hunched forward like wings, mantling my effects from invisible predators. I immediately deduce what happened and feel the familiar twinge of guilt when I realize a person I am supposed to be taking care of is actually taking care of me. I look into his eyes, wide, round, on alert, though not categorically different from what I call his “resting troubled face.” The only other person on the train is a lone black guy across from us, facing the direction the train is moving and seeming to pay us no mind.

What happened? I whisper just to acknowledge that something did.

Twenty minutes before I was taking photos of his outfit on the platform while we waited for the train: oversized crop top with a Nike swoosh, jean shorts that cover his knees and don’t cover the waistband of his black Nike jock strap. He looks little and naked.

“You were G’ing out.”

Obviously, I think, but I was the one who asked. Another question to which I already know the answer: “Why do you have my phone?”

“You kept dropping it.”

I do penance by letting him hold it and assuming the exaggerated sobriety I effect when I’ve just embarrassed myself by being not sober. I sit up straight and still and try not to blink erratically—endeavors that, to be honest, have required strenuous effort my entire life, drugs or no drugs. I smile at Jason and pull him close to me, kiss his forehead and lips, feel a prick of fear that I’m only in a dream.

It seems absurd to be taking the El in the middle of the night. After being away from New York for a decade, I’m no longer used to being exposed to the harsh light and the public gaze when I’m in a state of advanced decomposition. On the other hand, it also seems absurd to pay $25 for a ride that could be $2.50 and, we quickly learned, takes the exact same amount of time. I also realized earlier this afternoon that I had only reserved the hotel, not paid for it, so now I have another thousand less in the bank account than I had anticipated. I propose some gay math: “If we take the El every time we go to Boystown, we can almost pay for the hotel.”

I stand up to look at the map, feel the wooze in my legs, and am suddenly intensely conscious of everything: the time, our clothing, the other people on the train or lack thereof. I am not the type person who worries, but I do experience waves of what I call worry about not worrying when it dawns on me that I have taken something insufficiently seriously and I then panic at the possibility that my obliviousness will someday have consequences all the more bitter for having being preventable. It never occurs to me, for example, that we might be in danger, either in general or specifically because we look like fags. Other gay guys I know are hyper-conscious of how they present in public, turning their gayness up or down like a knob depending on the perceived hostility of the environment. I can’t even imagine the mental energy it would take to think about that, and rebel at the very idea. Trans women of color died at Stonewall so we wouldn’t have to think about that shit.

We realize we’re long past our stop.

“I’m sorry,” Jason says, constitutionally apologetic. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Well neither was I, to put it mildly,” I offer, but he seems to consider himself responsible since he was conscious.

He stands up next to me, and the black guy looks up at him. He gives Jason’s outfit a once-over and says, “Pull up your pants.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Jason says. He slides his shorts higher on his waist and they immediately fall back down.

I feel of rush of something to the head; it’s not immediately clear if it’s rage or fear. I say loudly to Jason, “You don’t have to do that!” The guy doesn’t look up again.

We move further away from him, toward the doors, but I keep speaking loudly enough for him to hear. “I don’t know why people don’t mind their own business here.” I’m picturing the New York subway, where it seems unimaginable that even the prissiest old white woman would comment on the rise of someone’s pants. I wonder why I didn’t say something back to him, Um, excuse me, can you mind your own business? I realize that part of me wants to experience a homophobic incident in order to see how the new me would react. I also realize the only two physical fights I have ever been involved in, if they can even be called that, were with other gay guys.

This is not even the worst act of public aggression we’ve experienced in the past hour. At Charlie’s, which is open until 4AM and one local gay described as “the end of the night place,” a short young man, hardly older than a teenager, tried grab one of the three Gatorades the bartender had lined up for Jason to pay for. I felt a commotion at my side and turned to see Jason snatch a bottle back from the guy, and then to see the guy go for a second bottle that was still sitting on the bar. It was so quick I couldn’t make out any of the movement; he walked back to his friends a few feet away and stared at us. I glowered back. But it was dark and the Gatorade bottle wasn’t in his hand or anywhere I could see. I quizzed Jason on the details I had missed.

“Did you drop it or something?”

“No, he just took it from me and I grabbed it back!”

“Is he drunk?”

“I don’t know. But I’m so pissed!”

“Whatever, it’s not worth making a big deal out of.”

The guy is still standing a few feet away. The Gatorade is nowhere in sight; he hasn’t taken it out of his pocket or handed it to someone else. I feel more puzzled than angered. Bar conflicts almost always begin with wild misperceptions of other people’s behavior; stealing something basically worthless and then standing directly next to the person you stole it from, acting like nothing happened, makes zero sense.

Jason’s face is flushed with violation. “Can we at least move away from him?”

“He must have been wasted,” I say a few minutes later on the dance floor, and then again as we walk to the train. “Is there any possibility he thought it was funny or was trying to flirt with you?” It’s funny how your mind demands a rational explanation even when none is available.

“It makes me so fucking mad,” he had said as we walked to the train. “People think they can just walk all over you, and it it it it it it triggers me because I let people do that to me my entire life.” His stutter is worse when he’s high and it makes me want to scoop him up and carry him.

For a second, half-listening, I think he’s referring to one of the two old men who had been circling him like vultures right before we left. “Who do you mean, the old guy at the end?”

“No, not him! That’s fine, that’s just gays on drugs. I mean the Gatorade guy.”

Gays on drugs, definitely not a category of which we have any right to install ourselves in judgment. What feels so odd is that this stuff never happens to me; in this many years of being around gays on drugs, very little of it has turned even mildly unpleasant, much less violent. Gatorade guy had to be on drugs, too. You don’t just do that if you’re sober! Right? “Right,” I say. I feel like I should affirm his feelings but don’t know what else there is to say about the Gatorade guy, so I wind up some philosophical pablum superficially grounded in lived experience: “That’s how I felt when the guy punched me at Battle Hymn. It’s unsettling to realize that that other people can just be crazy in a way that makes no sense.”

Jason seems less perturbed by the pull-up-your-pants comment than I am, and we get off the train to switch to the other direction, back through the Loop to our hotel on the river. We get onto what we think is the opposite-direction train, which we then begin to understand is also going the wrong direction. What the fuck. I give up trying to untangle how we got turned so badly around and order a Lyft. The wait is 15 minutes, and Jason sits down on the curb. I find our hotel in the app, but the driver takes us to the wrong hotel—a different one with the same name. We walk another fifteen minutes to the right one, and I marvel at how fast one can go from being ready to make out with the entire planet to feeling ready to die if you have to be on your feet another thirty seconds. In the back of my mind I hear a voice call out, Hey! A few minutes later I hear it again, louder. Jason is staring at a black car on the other side of the street.

“He’s he’s he’s following us,” Jason says. “He keeps pulling up.” He clutches his elbows as if it were cold even though it’s nearly eighty degrees. I watch as the car speeds down the block and waits for us at the next intersection. The window is rolled down, and the driver yells, “Hey!”

If the night didn’t previously have a surreal, menacing air, it does now. We keep walking and don’t acknowledge the repeated interpellation. At the final crosswalk before the hotel, the two corn cobs from the cover of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot looming overhead, the car speeds around the corner into the crosswalk and halts violently, with a cartoon-style screech it’s impossible to believe we’re hearing in real life, as if a group of thugs is about to burst out and whisk us inside. But we don’t even have time to panic before the car abruptly accelerates again and disappears down the block.

“What the fuck,” we say, not quite in unison but close.

In the elevator a pair of circuit husbands are holding hands; they grin at us like indulgent parents even though I’m probably their age. In our room, through the crack in the curtains, the sky is turning white. I wrap my body around Jason, relieved to find that, no thanks to me, he has survived both theft and vehicular pursuit. It’s 5:45AM and I’ve been awake for 24 hours. Day one.

I’m looking out over Embden Pond in central Maine, where I’ve spent a week the past few summers. I’m always the first one up; I like looking out in the morning from the screened-in porch to see the sun on the water. I can’t see the clouds for the treetops, but I can follow the giant, charcoal smudges that crawl across the green mountainsides on the far side of the lake and then slide over the surface toward me. I always have this thought whenever I’m trying to describe the natural world: why is it normal for painters to have to look at things in order to picture them, while writers have to make it up in their heads? Has a writer ever, like, taken a notebook out to the beach and tried to write down what they see?

I’ve realized that one of the best resolutions one can make is to do exactly the same thing every year. Not everything, but some things, the big things. That way you never have to decide again if you’re going to do that thing or something else; after my fifth consecutive summer charade of “I’m sick of Provincetown, I need to do something else this year,” not finding something else to do, getting to Provincetown and realizing, seeing again the fiery sunset in the hydrangeas, “Oh, right, I always come back here because it’s absolutely stunning,” I’ve decided to stop pretending and just accept that I’m going to Provincetown every year, that there is no need to feign interest in diversifying my travel destinations. No need to improve upon the already perfect.

When you do the same thing every year, you experience the pleasure of repetition, of anticipating emotions and sensations you’ve had before, and which have a greater weight for recurring at a designated point in a familiar sequence. As always, in Maine I gather the intimations of fall: the cool mornings and evenings, the smell of fire and the taste of bacon from cast-iron that reminds me of deer hunting trips when I was a boy. I begin to feel the outlines of the season that follows the bright, slack days of late August, when work and ambition return.

But repetition is the condition of possibility of difference; I also notice the variation. The one in the group who yaps at me in the morning when I’m trying to write has not come this time. This year, as opposed to last year and the year before and the year before, I am actually, truly not in love with Situationship anymore. I mostly wasn’t last year, but now I’m not at all. What I feel for him now is an affection that no longer has anything to do with me, the kind that remains after all the fantasies and projections have burned themselves out and what’s left is only the real person. It still has something of the shape of that old, yearning ache, but not the ache itself; it has twisted, in the past year, from a residual pain into a pleasure. When you do the same things every year, the instances begin to blur into one—it begins to feel that you were in Provincetown so many times that you never left—and they also become a measure of evolution, even of progress.

In 2024, on the bank of the pond just around the bend from our cabin this year, I read Dancer from the Dance for the second time. I laughed at the part in the opening chapter where Malone gets sentimental about the sleepy, picturesque town of Sayville, where they transfer to the ferry to Fire Island:

“Why don’t we take a house here next summer instead?” But he knew we wouldn’t, and he knew he wouldn’t, for even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasure-seekers, so bent on pleasure they were driving right through Happiness, it seemed, a quieter brand of existence that flourished under these green elms. We kept driving right through all the dappled domesticity, like prisoners, indeed, being moved from jail to jail imprisoned in our own sophistication.

Two years ago I read that after the annual week in Provincetown and thought about how every year I say the exact same thing, It’s really such a beautiful town! We really should come here some other week and do something besides—general gesture in the general direction of the hectic events of July 4th week—all this. I never did that until this year, and when I read Dancer again this year I remembered all the white-picket-fence reveries in the rest of the novel and better understood how sentimental that scene is supposed to be, that scene I took two years ago to be straightforward. Evolution, even progress.

Jason arrives from Boston and his forehead is flaming even though he told me he hadn’t had fever for two days. I kiss him anyway. Only four months and already three days without him felt like torture. I immediately have him drive me to Walmart because, as usual, I feel trapped and bored out of my mind in Nature. I love nature but will never pretend to have any kind of mystical connection with it; anyone who imagines they feel such a thing forgets that they learned it from books. They are not feeling some sort of natural resonance but rather inserting themselves into a secondhand fantasy, a fantasizing tradition. Our streak of miserable logistical luck continues. I didn’t bring a physical credit card and Walmart doesn’t accept payment by tap or Apple Pay because they have their own “wallet” system. I type in my card number from a saved photo on my phone, but it is rejected due to a “security error”; the machine says it “cannot read chip” in Jason’s physical card. All this the week after I had to rebook a flight for the next morning after I went to the airport without an ID. I begin to understand the appeal of fantasies of a world not pointlessly overlaid with technology.

The other momentous thing one can resolve is never to do something. I decided, for example, that I am never going to read Bret Easton Ellis, despite French people being obsessed with him, despite the recommendations of people I like. I tried again, I read the book descriptions again, but I just can’t. Cynicism and alienation are the polar opposites of my affective makeup. I hate violence, especially when writers think it is transgressive, deep, or morally significant. People who think criticizing consumerism is interesting are generally morons. Yes, Ellis is supposedly gay, sort of, but clearly has no real interest in it. I am not going to like it, and as of today am not going to waste any more time trying to talk myself into it.

Instead I read Allen Barnett’s story, “The Times As it Knows Us,” which Blake recommended weeks ago but I rediscovered yesterday by accident, having had Barnett on my reading list but forgetting he was the author of that particular story. It’s about a group of gay friends on a summer trip to Fire Island, half of whom are dying of AIDS or fear they’re coming down with it, and all of them angry with one of the group who talked to a New York Times reporter for a story about how gays on Fire Island are coping with the epidemic. Blake told me about it because I had been thinking about this very phenomenon, the way that gay social relations constitute themselves in reference to the New York Times, both obsessed over and resented. I had tried to write a sociological piece, ultimately unpublished, about how Provincetown metabolized Matthew Vines’ controversial Times op-ed about “gay vs. queer” the weekend of July 4th. There are too many characters in Barnett’s story to keep track of or for them to really have distinct personalities, but there’s a touching subtlety in his attention to relational dynamics that is something different than Holleran’s stylized projections. In Dancer there are so many groups of friends on Fire Island, but they’re all part of an interchangeable mass, all a Symbol, whereas Barnett’s characters are actual people.

An actual person, what Situationship is now that he’s no longer a character in the novel of my life, refusing to play the role I wrote for him in my head. In Maine he becomes himself. He loves seeing his dogs; they squeal with delight when he gets out of the car. He says almost nothing the entire week, but at night he calls to the loons and they answer.

He is awake now; I hear him stumble around the cabin for a few minutes, then he stands over me, glowering wordlessly, until I realize I’m wearing his sweatshirt. Now he’s out on the dock below; the late-morning sun makes his golden hair and golden skin look the exact same color. The wind is high now, hoisting the branches and whipping at the surface of the lake as if against the direction it wants to move, breaking its ripples into whitecaps. Not the linear, rhythmic kind one sees in the ocean, but scattered, random ones that blink in and out against the dark water. The scene is strenuous, aggressive, and the sound of the wind is a relentless roar, but if you squint the movement of the whole looks like a kind of sparkling.

Another week, another entry in the heteropessimism files. Although these things are starting to all sound the same, are arriving at a kind of consensus about what is causing heteropessimism, they each bring a new little horror; in this case the phrase loneliness influencer.

One reason I’m so fascinated by heteropessimism is that it’s become my go-to case study for trying to understand how “real” social discourses are. My working understanding of this is that they are both real and not-real at the same time: vastly overstated, exaggerated, performed online for attention and engagement, because most content is just copying other people’s content. As the Times ladies point out, social media encourages people to put a label, an “ism,” an identity, a brand on their life choices, which may sometimes be a lack of life choices in disguise. But someone still has to make loneliness and heteropessimism content, and someone has to watch it or engage with it, which suggests it strikes some kind of chord or offers some way to self-interpret that resonates with people.

I think a lot of reasonably-adjusted people treat “the discourse” as a kind of semi-fictional universe that overlays reality, which they refer to like it’s a thing or at least a source of conversation and humor, even if they don’t actually believe the things that are said in it or practice them in their real lives. I personally don’t know anyone who believes or practices heteropessimism. But I have heard tell of people who are TikTok-brained into believing completely fantastical things about what other people want (the impossible standards they have to meet to ever be loved or fucked), and/or are completely paralyzed by internet-driven anxiety about dangers whose probability in the real world is basically zero. Both types are in abundant evidence on Reddit.

The going explanations for heteropessimism include:

• A sequence of unusual historical experiences: Social media > Trump era/Me Too > pandemic

• Discursive gender wars: Young men and women (but not only young!) being siloed into gendered discourse universes that are increasingly skeptical of/hostile to the other gender and, more importantly, rife with fantastical notions about what the other gender is like or wants

• The anti-social option: Digital simulacra of social/sexual experiences becoming widely available and satisfying enough that accessing the real thing seems overwhelming/risky by comparison and loses out in a cost-benefit analysis

• Class/lifestyle inflation: Social media-addled notions that life cycles (jobs, relationships, etc) are supposed to happen according to a predetermined script1 in which key life moments/turning points are supposed to be summations, spectacles of achievement and content creation that mimic the luxurious lives of celebrities and internet personalities, as opposed to just normal steps on the road of life that may happen in different orders for different people, or have to be endured with, like, an average amount of money. A relatively normal-for-2026 version of this would be something like, I have to spend my 20s getting a perfect body or creating a passive income stream so I don’t have time to date, and crazy-even-for-2026 versions would be things like I can’t get married until I can have an Instagram wedding that costs $100,000 or I can’t have a twink boyfriend until I can afford to fly him around the world.

A summary of all of that would be something like: Heteropessimism is an internet-induced form of gender conflict, social anxiety and life paralysis that is both shaped by and retrofitted with ideological explanations.

Why is there no homopessimism?

In principle all of these factors except for the crucial one—gender wars—would apply to gay men as well as straight people. Which perhaps tells us right there, without any thought at all, why there’s no homopessimism: the core of heteropessimism is a paranoid, imaginary gender conflict, which simply doesn’t apply to us. But the case of gay men is more interesting than that, because it’s one where, without the dimension of gender difference, some of the same structural features may actually work the other way.

The crucial one of these is what I called the “anti-social option” above. Gay men have abundant anti-social options, if we can really call them that: There are rivers of gay porn, nearly infinite numbers of OnlyFans creators offering custom videos, apps like Grindr, Sniffies, and Snapchat on which one can trade photos and videos and have digital sexual experiences without ever meeting anyone in real life. Have those reduced the amount of real-life gay sex? Possibly! Probably? Or maybe they have just changed what people jerk off to, or the amount they jerk off, and left the amount real-life sex relatively constant.2 There is a very loud contingent of gaycels on Reddit and Twitter who openly avow living a completely internet-driven sex life, but I doubt their numbers are greater than any past era; they are just now able to constitute themselves as a visible social group in a way previously unavailable to the anxious, the socially awkward, and others who take odd comfort in imagining themselves to be unfuckable.

That being said, the interesting fact is that the very same factors that have driven men and women apart and created an anxious distance from the real world have, paradoxically, reconnected gay men with the real world. This is one of those cases—maybe they are more common for straight people than I realize, I can’t be bothered to know—where social media has actually reinvigorated some physical space or in-person practice that recently seemed to be obsolete. And this is where we come to an even hotter take, which is that OnlyFans saved a certain historic gay sex culture by moving away from corny, scripted studio porn scenes toward images of real-life gay guys doing real-world things.

A lot of OnlyFans content is produced by a jetsetting global class of younger hot guys who get Botox and do steroids, rent mansions and film “collabs” in stereotypical places like Fire Island, a fact that has generated no small amount of populist freakout and backlash (see below). But just as not-rich guys with normal bodies manage to go to Fire Island, relatively normal-bodied, non-Prince-Charming-looking guys also make OnlyFans porn and get large followings.3 They make videos of themselves doing gay subcultural things that used to be shrouded behind skeevy unmarked storefronts and otherwise hidden from view: fucking in club bathrooms and at sex parties, cruising outdoors and in public places, waiting “ass up” in hotel rooms, and a whole range of niche and kink practices. These illustrate the variety of gay sexual practices and the fact that they are not the exclusive purview of a narrow slice of privileged gay men or ultra-hot porn stars. Every one of these things is its own genre of OnlyFans porn, which has absolutely exploded interest in doing those things in the real world. As in, I’ll say it, I know a large number of normal gay guys of all types who regularly do these things offline, all of whom have otherwise normal, non-pathological lives, friend groups, and even boyfriends. (Last year’s “gay sluttiness” reporting and the Penn Station cruising sting are just downstream of that.)

I don’t know, maybe something about the male brain pushes us toward risk or makes us feel intensely left out of a group of men doing something that looks so fun. But for Gen Z gay guys, and even for me, as a chronologically Gen Z gay guy, I think it’s crucial that the dissemination of OnlyFans clips on Twitter made it possible to do a very Gen Z type of thing: to preview an experience digitally from beginning to end before engaging in it. In this particular case, social media content actually allays social anxiety, or at least makes an experience look so accessible and enticing that one feels the agency to overcome social anxiety. Now, all of a sudden, all of these gay sexual practices that used to be seen as outmoded and “dying” as gay bars closed and life moved online, have to some extent come back to life. Generationally out of character, Gen Z gay guys have an unusually digitally mediated relationship to sex and have used that as a way to access in-person, real-life sexual practices and reinvigorate physical gay spaces.

Now for the massive asterisk. A lot of gay guys hate this porny sex stuff and feel like it is imposed on them as some kind of “dominant” gay culture, or a default of gay representation. A lot of the backlash comes from the Twitter and Reddit gaycels, but I imagine also from other gay guys who just find all this a bit ridiculous and off-putting. They may or may not dress it up in class critique or woke/privilege critique, which has at least a grain of truth to it even if it is often ignorant of what the supposedly “privileged” gays are like. (Or, specifically, the actual variety of gay guys who do the things that supposedly put one in the “privileged” bucket.) These dissenting gay guys might hook up on Grindr or have boyfriends, or have gay friend groups who play board games and never go to clubs. To be clear, I’m not painting them as somehow marginal or outsiders to a single legitimate “gay culture,” they are also gay culture, perhaps even its dominant form. The majority of them, I think, don’t really care what other types of gay guys do or feel any particular way about it. But a significant subset of them are very vocal about their distaste for and alienation from the porn culture, an alienation that gives rise to all of the Twitter slop discourses about friend group photos, muscle gays, body standards, open relationships vs. monogamy, and how “gay culture” is shallow and an outgrowth of our collective trauma and damage, etc.

None of that is new: Even in the days of Dancer from the Dance, the circuit gays were a subset of gay men, of which Holleran’s novel was to some extent a social critique. Discos and promiscuity always provoked backlash and battles between subcultures of gay men, as well as self-hatred among the circuit gays about their own practices, self-hatred that sometimes leads even them—the so-called “privileged,” “dominant” type of gay guy—to take up the simplistic binaries of the Twitter haters and the slop discourse.4 There have always been feminist gay men trying to chalk up everything deplorable about gay male culture to a toxic investment in masculinity. There have always been therapeutic discourses among gay men that try to “essentialize” their behaviors and practices in relation to the trauma of the closet or whatever. My point is, social media has actually not changed this much: it has created new digital versions of these old divides, but it hasn’t necessarily widened or intensified them. In a way, it has reconstituted the themes and fault lines of a gay culture of the past.

With asterisks that big and so much sad slop discourse among gay men, it might be going too far to say there is no such thing as homopessimism. There are certainly faux-transgressive gay intellectual types trying to start homopessimist discourses, another thing that has been with us since even before the internet. But thankfully no one asked them, and broadly speaking, my sense is that gay men have somewhat uniquely resisted the anti-sociality of the social media age, not by rejecting social media but by taking it up as a tool to mediate the gap between content and reality, to overcome, to a certain extent, the hypermediated paralysis that characterizes heteropessimism. And the simplest reason, of course, is that whatever divides between gay men social media can create, the one thing it can’t create is a gender war.

Eminent Americans

The David Sessions Session

My guest on the show today is returning guest and all-around friend of the pod David Sessions, a Boston-based freelance writer and the co-host, along with Blake Smith, of the relatively new Off Christopher Street Podcast and and Substack newsletter…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · Daniel Oppenheimer and David Sessions

I suggested this topic to Dan after I wrote this post a while back and then did a bunch of reading to try to reach a more informed position on what Max Read calls “Platform Temperance.” (In the background of a lot of what I say is sometimes-critical readings of work by Max Fisher, , , Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, , and others). I wanted to try to bring my competing impulses into friction with each other: that, yes, anyone can see social media is Bad, stupid, a miserable slop experience, and surely in some sense socially and politically corrosive; at the same time, it isn’t straightforwardly anti-social either, as it provides new forms of networking, connection, and in-person interaction. I’m trying to reconcile my general affinity with technology and new media with the fact that it has become such a site of political anxiety, contestation, and a sense of social crisis. Dan’s approach makes him a congenial interlocutor because he’s willing to just explore such questions as opposed to approach them from predetermined ideological schemas.

Not to get too meta here, but this type of conversation is the sort of intellectual practice that appeals to me most at the moment. Starting from “the discourse” but seeing how it can be elevated by stepping back, reading, drawing larger connections and historical lines of movement. But also just reasoning through those things publicly without presuming a responsibility to provide policy solutions, and without obscuring the highly personal positions from which we approach them. I’m not going to posture, for example, by writing anxious lines about the threat of climate change when I in fact do not lose any sleep over climate change—a completely normal, average relation to politics I think a lot of people share, even people who worry about politics for a living. Similarly, I’m not going to freak out about social atomization when I am not socially atomized myself, and in fact neither are most of the people I know, including some of the ones whose brand it is to fret about it. I guess I want to see how much we can discuss these things, some of them real and serious problems, while still being normal about them.

A couple of notes in relation to this conversation: Blake and I have recorded another episode with Dan on the state of gay intellectual life that goes into where we think gay culture is at and what we’re trying to do with our podcast. I’ve listened to it a couple of times and I’m very excited for it to be out in the world as soon as I have time to edit it. I also enjoyed Dan’s recent conversations with Jacob Siegel and Damon Linker. I say in the forthcoming episode that Substack is trash, but Dan is one of the exceptions to the rule!

I’ll leave you with a transcript of one of my monologues from the episode:

I don’t believe that people are meant to be exposed to infinite, unfiltered, unlimited information. This idea from the 2010s that WikiLeaks dumping emails online, or releasing the Epstein files, is going to lead to any kind of enlightenment or clarity rather than just fuel more conspiracy is just completely insane. Truth and trust and social agreement are a product of authority, a product of someone saying, “this is what’s in bounds and this is what’s not, these are the rules of the road, the structures we agree on.” That depends on elites, it depends on authority, it depends on institutions.

And the way that social media—and I don’t think it’s just social media, this is an explicit project of Silicon Valley, they have always from the beginning, their ultimate aim has been to unseat the East Coast institutions, to unseat the “old world.” And they thought, and some of them like Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, that in a sort of left-anarchist way this would be a win for decentralized democracy and truth. But that ultimately that leads to Elon Musk; Jack Dorsey’s Twitter leads to Elon Musk’s Twitter. It leads to a total vacuum of authority and structure and it being filled by an authoritarian crazy guy.

I don’t know what you do about that; I guess I’m kind of okay with Platform Temperance in the sense that, maybe it works that we just stigmatize these tech companies and social media and the crap they currently produce and the way they’re forcing that on us—as much as possible, and make everyone hate them and think they’re bad, or think that phones and social media are bad for you. Maybe on balance that’s a good thing if people feel a little bit guilty about scrolling on their phone and at least try not to do it.

But personally, the thing that has the strongest evidence and is most persuasive to me is that these platforms have seized a part of the public commons and the public information infrastructure that they have no right to, that they should have to earn the right to, or that the political community should have the authority to structure or revoke if they don’t handle it in a responsible way. So like, people have hated the media for decades, and one of the most common, low-information voter things to believe about the media is that it’s divisive—intentionally divisive and sensationalist, which maybe is not wrong. We have to remember that these attention logics have always been part of the media, they’re not entirely new.

So I wonder if it’s something like that, if we can say, “Facebook is bad because it is making money off of dividing people. It has designed a technology that gives Facebook more money when people are divided and argue and hate each other.” And that’s not what any of us want, why would let that happen? To me that’s a more persuasive case than, like, “Facebook is addicting you like tobacco companies addicted you to cigarettes,” but maybe I’m making too fine of a distinction, maybe just stigmatizing them in general is enough.

Blake and I have a new episode of the pod out today talking with about gay men and straight women. We’re putting the full episode video on Substack for the first time, and as usual have the audio version on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere.

Phoebe is a fellow ex-French historian who is a model of how to write about pop culture and online discourse in a smart, revealing way. I’ve been reading her 2017 book, The Perils of “Privilege,” which was a critique of how the concept of privilege ended up dramatizing and reinforcing privilege rather than challenging it. What I especially like about it that she is able to reconstruct arcane online debates in a way that somehow isn’t tedious to read and to draw out the logical structures underneath them. It’s an argument but never a polemic; her measured, wry tone and touch for letting other people’s hot takes hang themselves is one of the pleasures of reading her.

She brings that same sensibility to her new book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men, which is a kind of “state of the straight woman in contemporary discourse” that she assembles through close readings of old sitcoms and 2010s articles alike. One of the overarching themes of the book is how we’ve gotten to a point discursively, in the arc from Me Too to heteropessimism and sexual fluidity, where a seemingly very obvious fact—that straight women are horny for men—has been discoursed out of existence. You might be tempted to imagine, But no one thinks straight women don’t exist! Having read Phoebe’s book, which marshals a vast trove of empirical evidence, I assure you they do.

On the pod we talk about some of the themes in her chapter “Are Straight Women Gay Men?” which uses all of the various discourses about straight women and gay men—about them being platonic friends, about what girls who go on Grindr or to gay bars are actually up to—to illustrate this strange figure of the straight woman as a merely responsive, non-desiring entity, or (things in discourse world do not have to make sense) whose desires are kind of always-already queer. A thought Phoebe entertains in the book and that comes up in our conversation is: if sex itself is now “queer” or things straight people are doing is now queer, what have we gotten ourselves into?

You might also wonder why we’re talking about this on a gay-man podcast, or perhaps more likely, since my readers seem to hate me writing about gay subjects, Thank god that annoying gay podcast is talking about something not-gay. The subliterate hordes seem to think Phoebe’s subject is decidedly not-gay, since they are mad about her releasing it in any month adjoining Pride month. But I would submit that it is, while not a work of queer theory or really intended to theorize gay people, at least queer theory adjacent in that carefully examines how we use categories and descriptors about our sexual identities, and also the weird situations that happen when those categories take on a kind of online-esoteric double life that is divorced from what most people do in the real world most of the time.

We throw some cold water on sexual fluidity and bisexuality, not to deny that either of those things exist but to question whether they have perhaps become, shall we say, discursively expansive in a way that is unhelpful for making sense of a lot of people’s experience. To that end I talk more than I have publicly about how I interpreted my own sexuality whilst married to a woman and how some of the notions that now pass for “queer” were actually, in my case, rationalizations or defense mechanisms that kept me from what I wanted. (I’m working on a longer piece about that, hopefully coming soon.)

Off Christopher Street

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

Off Christopher Street is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Pocket Casts, and many more. (Click here to see all platforms…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · David Sessions, Blake Smith, and Phoebe Maltz Bovy

This Pride month marks five years since I came out very belatedly, and that thankfully now-unusual-if-still-not-unheard-of trajectory is perhaps why I haven’t had many long years in which to grow bored with and jaded about the Pride routine. I haven’t, to be honest, even had that much time to figure out how I felt about it politically, or if I even felt anything political about it; for the most part, for the first few years, Pride was an occasion for a massive annual catharsis, a cyclically renewed wonder at what my life was able to become and bafflement that it took so long to get there. It was, at least initially, the opposite of politics, the opposite of everything I had unhealthily spent my life forces on as a substitute for the basic matter of, and I’m afraid there’s no way to improve on the cliché, “being myself.”

As I talk about in the episode, the sequence of events unfolded in way that, whether this was truly accurate or not, one of the vectors on which I experienced coming out was as a transition from being a left-wing intellectual to being a gay, I’m not sure what, lost person? Failure? Fuck-up? (Blake sums it up as: “Bernie Sanders Made Me Gay: The David Sessions Story”; to be slightly more precise, “Bernie Sanders Losing Made Me Gay.”) I obviously approached becoming gay as any PhD-haver would, by reading “the literature,” but there was simply no way I was going to come out of the gate at the same level of erudition I had on other subjects that, almost overnight, and much to my chagrin, seemed no longer to hold any interest.

In retrospect I think this was a good thing; for maybe the first time since college in my early 20s, life was so much that I was forced to just live it without being able to theorize it or affix some sort of intellectual framework for interpreting it. It was tempting to try to continue doing what I had been doing, just the gay version of it; to start parroting gay left stuff about how identity politics was neoliberalism, or gay marriage was baleful centrist “assimilationism” that only did any good for rich cis white gays (“did little for queer people on the factory floor,” in one particularly obtuse formulation). But I couldn’t do it. It all sounded so hollow, performative, and nostalgic. When one of my little brothers got married, my mind couldn’t help but drift to how radical it would be to have a second wedding, to force all of these same people, all the people whose love and approval my first wedding had been a performance to secure, to watch me kiss and dance with a man. To do it in my hometown, no less, where even in my childhood, people’s gay sons disappeared and were only mentioned in hushed tones. They would do it, probably—the world had changed in my lifetime and so had they—but it still wouldn’t be easy, it would be uncomfortable, it would be an event, a thing that still doesn’t happen.

I even had the thought, in those first years, looking out across all the boys in the club every weekend, the beautiful and the non-beautiful all doing the same things together, all kissing each other, almost as one: “These are my people. This is the only thing I know for sure I believe in.” I would often say to other people, “Don’t you love being gay?” They would always agree, and sometimes someone else would say something like, “Can you believe we are grown-ass adult men and we get to do this?” I would like to imagine I thought the words, “These are my politics,” but my memory is terrible and that would probably be too perfect. But a line in Holleran’s essay—which I forgot to bring up on the show—did immediately grab me as a version of something I had thought before. As his mood flatlines into a post-march depression, Holleran says:

Later that night I would go to my local park and watch the men on the benches and think: These are my politics. And sometimes meet a man who had marched himself, and if I was lucky, end the long, dusty day with the unspoken agenda of that army of men: a kiss on the lips.

At first it may have felt vaguely “bad” or anti-political to have a thought like, This—these people, this scene before me—is the only thing I believe in. Maybe tribal or even nationalistic, like I was now letting down the wretched of the earth I had previously appointed myself as a spokesman of, by only caring about my people. But over time it became clear not only that that old interpretation of myself was to a large extent a performance, one that had a lot to do with my own vanity and ambition (not that there’s anything wrong with vanity and ambition); that not one thing would be different for the workers of the world if I chose to think about gay people instead. More importantly, that these were not opposites, that, on the contrary, gay people were who I belonged to, they were a community in which I was already organically embedded, and therefore might—not certainly, but certainly more than the general category of “the working class”—be able to do something about, do something for.

We chose that Holleran essay almost randomly because it was about Pride, but it turned out to express quite beautifully, almost off-handedly, how politics can emerge from a relatively straightforward attachment to what one loves. The Pride march is not a political program or an ideology, but a ritual or a practice that holds open a space that can be turned as needed toward different ends. It’s not a protest by definition, but it can become a protest if one is needed. Five years in, this is something like what my “gay politics” have become, not trying to figure out the correct ideology we should have or pronounce on What is to Be Done, but to start from a fact of experience: the gay world exists and thrives, its inhabitants understand and believe in it intuitively, even if they currently have little more than memes, tweets and Instagram reels as tools to elaborate it or reflect it back to themselves. To want to preserve, love, and carry on that world is a different kind of politics, but one that has the virtue of not being almost entirely abstract.

Off Christopher Street

Pride Doesn’t Have to Be a Protest

Off Christopher Street is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Pocket Casts, and many more. (Click here to see all platforms). If you’re enjoying the show, please consider a paid subscription to help us cover our production expenses…

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3 months ago · 2 comments · David Sessions and Blake Smith

Pride is, for me, always a time of gratitude, and this year I will risk embarrassing Blake with my sap to say I am indebted to him for being a model of that and doing so much spadework that made it easier for me—and hopefully many others in the future—to find my way. It’s a great pleasure to talk through the gay world with him.

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If I had been born a half-century earlier I suppose I could have been Perry Deane Young: born on a farm in North Carolina in 1941, one of 13 children, ashamed of his southern accent when he left home to eventually become a journalist in the liberal media, where he, too, covered evangelicals and, decidedly unlike anything I ever did, completed Army basic training and arrived in Saigon the night before the Tet Offensive to cover it for United Press International. I can certainly relate to this: “I was caught between the mind-crippling force of fundamentalism and the promise of freedom and life through learning on the other. If that conflict has often been painfully frustrating and confusing, it has never been dull.”

Off Christopher Street

The Messy, Sordid Spectacle of Right-Wing Gays

Renewed Cold War tensions. A miniature reprise of the Lavender Scare. Stories on the news about a ring of congressmen who had sex with teenage male pages and gay escort service that was a front for Soviet spying. All fabricated…

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5 months ago · 5 likes · David Sessions, Blake Smith, and Daniel Lefferts

Young relates some of his personal connections to the world of reactionary evangelicalism in his 1982 book God’s Bullies, an excerpt of which Blake and I talk about with Daniel Lefferts on the latest episode of Off Christopher Street. This is presumably why it originally bore the odd subtitle, Native Reflections on Preachers and Politics (later changed to the more fitting Power, Politics and Religious Tyranny).1 That notion of “native reflections” can’t help but pique my interest; apparently hayseed southern gay boys were using their religious background as a brand even before I was born.

God’s Bullies is an odd book: part memoir, part investigative report, part potted religious history, part discursive polemic. Young frames it as a reckoning with his own family history—his biological grandfather was sentenced to a chain gang for fornicating with a pastor’s daughter, and his adoptive one was an abusive Biblical literalist—and as a sort of broad argument against religious intolerance. There is a critique of bad Christianity in the name of good Christianity, namely, his mother’s racial tolerance and acceptance of his homosexuality and his siblings’ liberal Protestantism. Young suggests that by rejecting Christianity and looking back at his origins from the outside, he was able to appreciate it more rightly than those who claim to speak for it—that classic posture of “I, the apostate, am a more authentic Christian than you are”:

By facing up to and overcoming the very real hatred I felt for my preacher ‘granddaddy’ and his kind, I was finally able to understand and love those people, my people. It was necessary to hate the man in order to love him, necessary to become a non-Christian in order to understand and appreciate the enduring truth and beauty of the teachings of Christ himself.

The polemical thrust of the book is that the New Right is a dangerous, theocratic assault on American ideals, but also one that is riddled with contradictions and which does not have anything like broad public support. One picks up traces, as Blake suggested on the podcast, that no one is quite sure how seriously to take these people yet. Who is screwing whom in the New Right hodgepodge? The barely closeted Terry Dolan appears to be a social libertarian despite collaborating with Falwell, and many Republicans see Reagan as caring about taxes and foreign policy, not abortion and homosexuality. What Young seems to be suggesting in this scattershot, unfocused book, is that it doesn’t matter; despite the disclaimers and qualifications, everyone in the New Right is collaborating with the religious nutjobs, they know they are doing it, and it’s bad.

We spent most of our time on the podcast talking about Young’s confrontation with Dolan about his homosexuality, which he builds up as a dramatic scene (“I was nervous, sweating, in my discomfort over what to say and how to say it.”) Young couldn’t resist psychologizing some of his subjects, but it’s noteworthy that most of his scene with Dolan is about the latter’s political doublespeak. Dolan had, to the annoyance of Paul Weyrich, an actual social conservative, given repeated, all-over-the-place interviews to gay journalists, including one with Larry Bush in The Advocate in which he said he favored federal discrimination protections for homosexuals and that “sexual preference is irrelevant to political philosophy.” This was trumpeted in the mainstream press as a major development: the Washington Post noted that “this clearly sets Dolan apart from a host of his allies on the political right who have vigorously campaigned against gay rights,” at which point Dolan denied the quotes and re-emphasized his intimacy with Falwell.

We might say that Young gets carried away with the story of Dolan and includes the not-that-salacious details of his sex life because of some dark gay fascination with the self-hating homosexual. (Will Dolan kill himself if I confront him? Will he kill me?!) But the surely legitimate journalistic mission he sets out to accomplish is to pin down a powerful political figure who is constantly blathering out of both sides of his mouth and thereby to establish how seriously to take New Right fundamentalism, indeed how seriously its leaders take it. Young doesn’t quite deliver this—Dolan continues prevaricating—but he does establish that this person is a liar who is used to shaping reality however he pleases, and whatever he tells any gay journalist, he is at best a cynical collaborator in the anti-gay project. Though maybe that should have been obvious to begin with?

The reported chapters of God’s Bullies overflow with detailed facts about the origins, networks, and funding structures of conservative organizations, like the outline of an early draft of Reaganland. (Young even says all of this is Jimmy Carter’s fault!) But he does like his out-of-pocket (in the Gen Z sense) psychologizing, visited in much more amusing ways on targets like Anita Bryant, who he describes as so lonely and sexually repressed that she clamors for personal attention from any journalist who writes about her. The journalistic fascination with repressed, contradictory subjects apparently isn’t only for gays:

Ken Kelly, whose interview with Bryant in Playboy exposed her to further ridicule for her naive musings about sex2, came away with even stronger feelings for and about Bryant. He had despised her husband and what both of them were doing and saying, but at close range he could only feel pity for the woman herself. For weeks after Kelly did the interview, he would get phone calls from Bryant. There was no reason for them—she just wanted to talk to somebody.

It finally dawned on me and others that the woman was lonely. She was starved for affection and had serious sexual problems of her own. Hers was the shrill voice of sexual repression. She was a far worse victim of oppression than most of us homosexuals are. We all have suspicions of such motivations every time we hear somebody raging on about other people’s sex lives, but rarely has anyone defined and explained them as bluntly as Bryant has.

That is certainly a take. Howard Phillips, the former Nixon man and co-founder of the Moral Majority, is profiled in a chapter called “The Gauleiter Jew”:

In the company he keeps, Howard Phillips is often the only Jew on the speakers’ platform, and more often than not the only Jew in the whole auditorium. Any suggestion that there is anti-Semitism in the new right is invariably met with the statement, “Howard Phillips is a Jew.” … Thus it is understandable that while Howard Phillips’ religious background is not a difference he tries to hide, neither is it one he chooses to emphasize. One is led to the inescapable conclusion that along with his hatred of homosexuals and denigration of women, he also shares this other hatred of Jews, his own kind, himself. Phillips was the only new-right leader I interviewed who was evasive and reluctant to talk about his childhood.

Young’s speculation about how Dolan and Phillips manage having identities to which the New Right is hostile is probably best understood as attempts to support his overall thesis, which is something like that all of these people are hypocrites. Dolan the anti-gay homosexual, Phillips the anti-Semitic Jew, Falwell the opportunist, Weyrich the “congenial” theocrat who reporters all love because he’s nice but then talks in private about how he wants as few people as possible to vote. And poor Anita Bryant, who is, in her words, “just a woman.”3 Charges of hypocrisy have long been one of liberals’ favorite ways to deal with the religious right, but it doesn’t work today and arguably never has. So much of the great foulness of our time goes back to the fact that these people have always cared about nothing but crushing their enemies.

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But I also thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you a bit more properly what it’s about.

Christopher Street was originally published from 1976 to 1995. It’s often referred to as the “gay New Yorker” and nourished the careers of giants like Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, as well as criminally forgotten figures like George Stambolian. One of its editors, Michael Denneny, is well remembered as a gay publisher but not well enough as a student of Hannah Arendt and political theorist of gay male identity. I got interested in the magazine partly through On Christopher Street, an anthology of Denneny’s writing published in 2023, just before his death. I had been looking for a way to think about the gay world I was a part of, which seemed to exist in practice but not in thought, strangely orthogonal to the discourses on social media and the surviving husks of queer media. Reading Denneny from the 70s and 80s often felt like someone describing the gay world of today, which one now finds truly represented only in memes, tweets, and the occasional trend story in a straight magazine.

Last year I started digitizing the archives of the magazine. Partly because I was itching to design a website again, something I hadn’t done in almost 20 years. But mostly because Christopher Street, despite the prominence of its contributors, is very difficult to find. Unlike when you’re doing research on French history, when you’re interested in gay history, you often find that the foundational humanities work that is crucial to historical preservation and transmission, arguably the main thing the humanities should be for, lies untouched. When I was a “regular” historian, anytime I thought, It’s impossible no one has written about X, I was usually right: the article or the monograph was out there, I just hadn’t found it yet. With gay stuff, the opposite is true: if you think, Surely someone has written that, chances are they haven’t. Somehow, despite the humanities supposedly being nothing but woke gender ideology.

Christopher Street is historically important, sure. But more important than the stuff of the original magazine is what it was trying to do: to create a space for gay men to be fully who they are, to enter their own kind of public sphere, and to talk to, write for, and argue with each other. This is what we hope to do on Off Christopher Street: in each episode, we start from an article from the magazine that opens onto themes that still resonate in our lives today, from the fun stuff like being hot and going out to gender presentation and what gay identity politics might still mean in the twenty-first century. I hope it’s a version of the conversations I have with friends over drinks; it is quite literally an edited, longer-form version of mine and Blake’s voice notes to each other.

I’ve always thought the best projects feel like a somewhat inchoate but urgent impulse that pushes you to jump into them without fully knowing what you’re doing. (I’m certainly glad I didn’t know I was going to barely sleep for a few weeks as I learned the basics of audio production.) It’s exciting to try a new medium with different rules than writing, and to explore building an audience for thinking in this Wild West era of fragmentation and slop, which is nonetheless also a golden age of making things and finding one’s people.

Off Christopher Street is extremely gay, so I understand if you’re not the target audience, though I also hope that our thinking about life, culture, and politics at least somewhat transcends the narrowness of its immediate sociological focus. If it interests you in any way, I hope you will subscribe so we can reach you. (You can also subscribe on Spotify and Apple if you listen to podcasts there, or add the RSS feed to any other app. If you are feeling especially generous, giving us a rating or a review on those apps is also a huge help.)

Our first three episodes are below, and more on the way: pretty soon we’ll be hosting our first guests and talking about the gay Republicans in the Reagan-era New Right and the controversy over William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising.

Christopher Street

Gay Masculinity and Its Discontents

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5 months ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · David Sessions and Blake Smith

Christopher Street

Going Out and the Pleasures of Impersonal Intimacy

In the late 1970s, gay writers often treated New York’s bar and club scene as both a magical realm where a new type of gay life was being invented, and also as an alluring trap. Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the Dance portrayed a world of gay men devoting themselves to going out every night as devotees of…

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6 months ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · David Sessions and Blake Smith

Christopher Street

Gay Men and the Politics of Hotness

You may have noticed that hotness is in the news, so we decided it would be a good moment to drop the first episode of our new podcast, which is about exactly that…

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6 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Off Christopher Street Podcast, David Sessions, and Blake Smith

Wired’s latest cover story, “Inside the Gay Tech Mafia,” makes last year’s celebrated but journalistically undercooked Harper’s story about gooning look like an FBI investigation. (Maybe the kind of ginned-up FBI investigation that once got thousands of gay men fired from their jobs, but one that at least went through the motions.) In this case, the story can be summed up with only the slightest exaggeration: Rumors, anonymous tweets, and off-the-record phone calls suggest gay men run Silicon Valley.

What’s especially funny is that the story is haunted almost from beginning to end by the possibility that it is perpetuating a non-story, or perhaps even a homophobic conspiracy:

On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry. Sure, there were gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on. But the idea that they were operating some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia, the indulgence of which might play into the hands of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who, in 2024, tweeted that the “high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”

The problem is that people just won’t stop talking about it.

Journalism is a cyclical business, and Wired has resurrected a twenty-first century version of the Homintern conspiracy. “The Homintern theory,” Gore Vidal wrote in 1970, “is a constant obsession of certain journalists and crops up from time-to-time not only in the popular press but in the pages of otherwise respectable literary journals.” Homintern was a play on the Comintern or Communist International, founded by Lenin in 1919 and widely seen as a front for Soviet subversion in interwar Europe. Possibly coined by W.H. Auden, it was initially an inside joke about a group of European gay writers who knew each other in the 1920s and 1930s, but one that turned deadly serious, particularly in the Cold War United States.

The Homintern conspiracy played on gay male artists’ self-aggrandizement as a cultural elite and served as a screen onto which to project anxieties about subversion, both of national security and of moral order. It came down to the idea, the main component of the conspiracy still present in the Wired story, that gay men are so tightly networked with each other that they subvert normal divides between nation, class, age, etc, and are therefore more likely of being political subversives. As the historian Gregory Woods writes:

The salient feature of the widespread, paranoid association of homosexuality with espionage is the suspicion that homosexuals may form stronger allegiances to others of their own kind, across national boundaries, as well as across other social subdivisions such as classes, than to their own fellow nationals. In this respect, the cosmopolitanism of homosexual people was thought similar to, and congruent with, that of the Jews.

At the same time the U.S. government was systematically investigating alleged homosexual subversion in the government, the Homintern provided an update to the classic artists’ conspiracy that blames elite cliques for “gatekeeping” and blocking honest outsiders from success. In both the U.S. and Europe, journalists and other cultural commentators complained about the gay mafias secretly running cultural fields and perpetuating subtle contempt for straight society. These connected gay men all knew and (presumably) slept with one another, despised women, kept honest straight men from success, and, as Time put it in 1969, were waging a “vengeful counterattack” on “things that normal men take seriously.”

Some of these articles are worth quoting for the flavor—how silly and amusing they sound in retrospect.

New York Times theater critic Howard Taubman, 1961:

‘Tis time to speak openly and candidly of the increasing incidence and influence of homosexuality on New York’s stage—and, indeed, in the other arts as well. The subject is too important to be left forever to the sly whisperers and malicious gossips. Criticism, like playwriting, is crippled by a resort to evasions. The public is deluded and misled if polite pretenses are accepted at face value. The infiltration of homosexual attitudes occurs in the theatre at many levels.

Robert Doty, in the front-page 1963 Times story that bore the now-infamous headline “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Widespread Concern”:

Their presence in creative activity is not, as an old myth fostered by homosexuals would have it, because inverts tend to have superior intellect and talent. Most students of the subject agree that the significant factor in homosexual colonization of some of the arts is that men who would find difficulty in winning acceptance from fellow workers in more prosaic activities naturally gravitate toward solitary, introspective endeavor. The list of homosexuals in the theater is long, distinguished and international. It is also self-perpetuating. There is a cliquishness about gay individuals that often leads one who achieves influential position in the theater-as many of them do-to choose for employment another homosexual candidate over a straight applicant.

Erick Foster, “How the Homos Are Ruining TV” (1964), dispensed with the Times’ respectable reserve:

Nobody knows for sure how many pansies there are in TV. But things have gotten so out of hand in this new Sodom...that you can’t tell the he-men from the she-men without a scorecard. Right now the twisted twerps not only are in a position to tell you what you can see as entertainment, they are recruiting others of the lavender set to give it to you!

Time, “The Homosexual in America” (1969):

On Broadway, it would be difficult to find a production without homosexuals playing important parts, either onstage or off. And in Hollywood, says Broadway Producer David Merrick, “you have to scrape them off the ceiling.” The notion that the arts are dominated by a kind of homosexual mafia—or “Homintern,” as it has been called—is sometimes exaggerated, particularly by spiteful failures looking for scapegoats. But in the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop. Art Critic Harold Rosenberg reports a “banding together of homosexual painters and their nonpainting auxiliaries.”

The gay mafia of the mid-century cultural sphere was said to be infiltrating, cliquish, self-perpetuating, recruiting, running a closed shop—exactly what the gay mafia is now alleged to be doing in Silicon Valley.

Obviously it’s 2026, so the gay mafia allegations don’t have quite the homophobic edge they did even in the 1990s, when magazines were obsessed with a “Velvet Mafia” in entertainment. The Wired story is, as mentioned, aware that it runs the risk of perpetuating a conspiracy theory suggested by right-wing figures; it even packages itself in an overarching skepticism. But it’s remarkable—almost comical—how it continues to insist on the gay mafia despite repeatedly coming up with either banal facts or vague rumor. The number of times we are told that, despite the lack of evidence, people can’t stop talking about it!

And yet, similar rumors persisted and compounded, originating as often from outsiders (sometimes with dubious political motivations) as from insiders. When I call up my longtime industry sources to get their thoughts on the gay tech mafia, not only have they heard of it—they have highly specific notions of how it works. These are credible people who believe seemingly incredible things. One San Francisco investor tells me that he believes the Thiel Fellowship is a training ground for gay industry leaders. (When I run this notion past a couple of former Thiel Fellows, they tell me they met Thiel one time at a dinner, where he appeared “slightly bored,” says one of the fellows, a straight man. “I mean, I wish Peter tried to groom me.”) Meanwhile, people’s gaydars are practically overheating. I hear, more than once, that anyone in Silicon Valley who has achieved outsize success is probably gay.

We have the classic straight guy claiming discrimination at the hands of the Homintern:

Last spring, at a venture capitalist’s party in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at length about how he was struggling to raise his new fund. The problem, he explained, boiled down to discrimination. … He looked exactly like the sort of man Silicon Valley has been built to reward. ⁠⁠And yet here he was, insisting that the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble,” he said. “That’s the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break,” he claimed, “is if you’re gay.”

Among the other scandalous facts we learn:

• Wealthy men in the same industry who have things in common know and sometimes do deals with each other.

• Wealthy men in the same industry who have things in common are sometimes in group chats with each other.

• Gay men have Halloween parties for gay men where no women are invited.

• Barry’s Bootcamp in the Castro, a gym in one of the gayest neighborhoods in America, is full of gay men with abs.

• The lines between friendship, professional network, romance, and sex tend to be blurrier for gay men than for straight people.

• Gay men gossip about and accuse each other of sleeping with each other for favors, whether they actually do or not.

I cannot stress enough the degree to which the story constantly debunks itself:

None of this is necessarily unfamiliar in the clubby world of Silicon Valley, where the smart, successful, and wildly rich have always formed in-groups. There’s the so-called OpenAI mafia and the Airbnb mafia, and before those the PayPal mafia—alumni of moonshot companies who bankroll the next wave of startups. So some of what reads as advantage is, on closer inspection, structural and unremarkable. San Francisco combines two things in unusual density: one of the country’s largest gay populations and a tech industry that has reshaped global power.

What makes this a truly twenty-first century Homintern story is the degree to which gay men are happy to play up the idea that they are a special, influential elite—even though, as the reporter wistfully tells us, they kept their juiciest gossip off the record.

The only real air of scandal here comes from the fact that Silicon Valley power, and its growing association with the MAGA right, is increasingly in the cultural crosshairs. We get the weakest gesture that there’s an untold MeToo story the reporter couldn’t deliver. It turns out the Homintern myth can also serve skepticism of Silicon Valley elites and the AI cult, giving us visions of a cabal that plays by its own rules and has contempt for normal society. But none of that really needs revealing; we already know this about Silicon Valley, and it’s unfortunately far too endemic to be a gay thing.

Like I said, I don’t think the story is deliberately homophobic or anything to be terribly exercised about. But, you know, people just won’t stop talking about it.

It is perhaps not very sportsmanlike to respond to a mere note with a full-on essay, because who among us hasn’t dashed off a despairing, splenetic, or otherwise insane note that we later found embarrassing. But this one condenses, too exquisitely to resist, a strange, thoughtless kind of opposition to caring about one’s appearance and resisting aging. So I’m going to examine this note line by line as a way of putting some long-gestating thoughts into words. But I assure you I am not trying to dunk on one person in particular; there is a whole Substack sub-universe of this stuff.

I would rather not live at all than live like this.

I’m going to assume this is rhetorical exaggeration because the alternatives to doing so are bleak.

not only is it an unfathomable waste of one’s limited time and resources on this earth, it is an absolute and decadent enslavement to the gaze of others.

I will admit that the maxxing routine described in the Laura Reilly post that Kate was responding to here is rather cartoonishly extreme! It at least seems like a lot. But I also recognize that I don’t know what her time and resources are like, and my impression may be inaccurate. Getting Botox only takes half an hour every few months. Skincare is no big deal when it’s routine, no matter how many steps. Who am I to say this woman I don’t know is wasting her limited time and resources? (And a lot of this is just like, normal medical stuff she happened to do all in the same month?)

Let’s first turn to something that will come up several times: a moralistic presumption that scarce resources are being squandered on health and beauty, as if all resources should be going to an urgent, pious activity or cause instead. This is not so different from self-hating gay Stephen Adubato’s “you shouldn’t have time to work out” shtick, demonstrating, to wit, the lockstep agreement of slop feminism and slop Catholic reaction in the opinion, If you’re living as God intended, i.e. not as a vapid neoliberal bimbo or a decadent faggot, you should not have time to be hot.

This sentence also introduces a blinkered understanding of what it means to care or not care what other people think. It suggests that being concerned with how one appears socially, and thus one’s aesthetic being in the world, is “enslavement” rather than a core feature of human sociality and a marker of civilization. It harbors an implicit antisocial individualism, as if one is “supposed to” be—as if it is somehow morally superior to be—indifferent to other people’s thoughts and tastes rather than performing for and provoking them. (We were put on this earth to serve in the gay sense as well as the Christian one.)

what is most insulting about it is the fact that we (which is to say we women) will all grow old anyway, which, one must clearly be reminded, is a privilege rather than some kind of moral failing or gross misallocation of resources — in neoliberal parlance, a bad investment.

The fact that we will all grow old and die someday has precisely nothing to do with the choices we make about how we look while we’re alive. OK, in the most general sense, it’s always good to remember you’re going to die. But again, appreciation of life does not have to be a scarce resource or a pole in a zero-sum game. One can be grateful to live a long life, fully aware that most things have little existential weight, and still zestily pursue pleasure, health, and ongoing aesthetic improvement.3

that a whole industry has developed around the lie that entropy can be reversed is one of the great delusions of contemporary fascism which maps itself onto the body in languages of hygiene, optimization and superiority.

No one would deny that there are resonances between Trumpism and the “languages of hygiene, optimization and superiority” teeming on social media, or that some purveyors of those languages have explicitly aligned themselves with MAGA.4 But maps itself onto the body is the kind of language academics use to remain deliberately vague about the causality or the precise nature of the relation. Discourses of strength, health, hygiene, status, etc, are present in all modern ideologies, not just “fascism.” It is probably more accurate to say that these concerns are irreducible features of human nature and society; they re-emerge in different forms in moments of uncertainty and crisis.

The “industry” here is not specified—GLP manufacturers? Med spas? Content creation?—but whatever it is, we can be assured that it does not make this sentence make any more sense. To equate all of these things—Trumpism, scientific research that has discovered something that is transformative to human health and medicine, and looksmaxxing discourse—as somehow rooted in a common “lie that entropy can be reversed” is to generalize so recklessly as to make the entire thing nonsensical. So Trumpism has a stupid narrative about reversing American decline, and some hacking/maxxing people take it to an off-putting extreme. Does that make any of these “entropy-reversing” impulses—to manage American decline, to use the latest technology to improve one’s health or slow aging, or to get excited about improving your appearance if you’re ugly and lonely—inherently suspect? Inherently fascist?

One of the great humiliations of being a woman in contemporary life is the constant reinforcement of the idea that our bodies are both objects and commodities…

Sigh. I cannot express how dismaying it is that no one can come up with a better language for talking about bodies and social-sexual relations than this.

Objectification generally refers to surface assessments of someone’s value, generally their sexual attractiveness, at the supposed expense of their personhood. It is said to be “good” to treat someone as a whole human/person and “bad” to do the opposite, i.e., to treat them as an object/body. Objectification is a particularly bad thing that men do to women and, if they’re gay, to each other.

I understand how this notion could have arisen from situations where women were fighting for respect and inclusion, where they are trying to be taken seriously in a profession and continue to be treated as exoskeletons of hot body parts that lack personhood. But this is generally not what is meant by objectification today, where it is divorced from any concrete political meaning and used as a generalized swear word for any sort of assessment of physical appearance whatsoever. Which puts everyone in the bad-faith situation where assessing other people’s appearance or sexual attractiveness is officially “bad” or verboten and yet we all do it relentlessly in our heads, in our group chats, or wherever. There has to be a better way.

My off-the-cuff proposal would be to reject the imagined binary between person and object altogether. We are quite literally objects, embodied physical things in the world. An enormous amount of our sociality, virtually every aspect of our interactions with other people, implicates our objectness, our flesh. “Person” and “object” are not opposites, we are always both at once, and both of those can be lenses through which we view other people at different times, from different angles of concern. Or even at the same time.

And why must “object” signify inferior, misrecognized, abused, as opposed to things like fashioned, created, given? When I look at my body in the mirror, I see an object, yes, but an object that incarnates my personhood. A thing, but a thing I have made, a physical monument to a much more expansive work of self-fashioning. A thing that I continually remake for the sheer pleasure of doing so and, secondarily, for the enjoyment of anyone else who wants to do so. There’s a line in the gay writer Mark Merlis’ novel An Arrow’s Flight that expresses this:

He remembered when he would look at his body and see: a gift to men. Not with narcissistic self-regard, with joy that he had it to give, that it was built, every contour and concavity, for pleasure.5

Don’t we all secretly want to be treated as objects, to feel the joy of having something to give in that particular sense—far from the only one, far from the most important one, but an important one?

and beyond that, that the commodification of the female form grows ever more specified and the pressure to concede to this commodification grows greater still.

I realize that the stance I just articulated may feel alien to some people for any number of reasons, including simply not caring that much about, or wanting to put that much effort into, how they look. The good news is that the actual number of people who are getting plastic surgery and biohacking—even the number of people getting a non-invasive, inexpensive yet miraculous treatment like Botox—is still pretty small. It’s a vanishing minority! The great, vast majority of people put a normal, that is to say quite minimal, effort into their appearance. Informality and the utilitarian bare minimum reign comfortably supreme as the stylistic ethos of mass-democratic culture.

Which means that this commodification of the female form growing ever more specified, if it even exists, is just…discourse. It’s just what a few people are doing, a few people are talking about, a few people are hawking and influencing and marketing. Most people don’t participate in it, and certainly not to an extreme degree, and you don’t have to, either. We might note that a few sentences back, caring about what other people think looks good was a baleful indicator of “enslavement”; now it’s somehow unfair to have to go against the “pressure” of the supposed herd.

Faced with the choice, I would rather be ugly. Not only that, if this is the way beauty is to be sustained, then ugliness itself should be reclaimed as a morally superior way of being.

The petulance of this final bit is revealing, but the first-person framing also is what makes it a respectable sentiment: If this is what it takes, *I* would rather be ugly. That’s a statement of personal value and choice. But people do not want their own rejection of what it currently takes, or their discourse-based fantasy of what it currently takes, to be only a personal choice; they want to politicize it so that the people who make a different one can be comfortingly labeled avatars of commodification or sexism or neoliberalism or even fascism.

It’s one of the greatest achievements of advanced industrial civilization that it makes socially unnecessary luxuries available on a mass scale for our personal pleasure, self-creation, and social presentation; that it gives us the means to simultaneously remake ourselves and beautify society. I think the reasons we should not want those things to become associated with fascism are self-evident, but that’s just me.

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Entering 2025 on a “vibe shift,” it could be difficult to tell if the shadows that fell over gay world this year were alarming or a little ridiculous. Busily working toward the Führer in the first half of the year, American corporations withdrew their support for Pride events across the country, which correspondingly shrank or were canceled altogether. At World Pride in D.C., headline sponsor Marriott insisted that already-produced signage for the event be reprinted without the term “presented by,” even as they maintained their financial support. Across the information economy, DEI commitments disappeared from corporate websites even as, in some cases, they were forcefully reiterated internally. The Supreme Court unnervingly heard another case by the gay-rights villain Kim Davis, but everyone agreed it had no chance of going anywhere in the first place.

Even the standout moments in gay discourse blurred the silly and the sinister. In mid-summer, the New York culture magazines took a sudden interest in gay sex. The New Yorker led the way in July with a profile of the cruising app Sniffies. The Cut followed in August with a report on “peak gay sluttiness,” which framed the current renaissance of gay promiscuity—Sniffies, again, was front and center, along with the major and minor drugs that enhance sluttiness—as a FOMO-inducing cultural trend. “Everyone is doing drugs. Everyone is getting laid more than you,” declared the author, a gay man at least adjacent to the scene. “It’s no longer gay culture that has captured the zeitgeist, but gay sex.”

“Peak gay sluttiness” was polarizing across a number of incommensurable axes. Many of my text correspondents reported a mixture of amusement and embarrassment at what we take for granted being treated as a trend story. (“I hate everything about this article,” one said. “Or maybe I hate our lives.”) Some thought it exaggerated the dangers of GHB, while others thought it was too flippant about them. Some had quibbles that sounded, to my ear, like internecine squabbles over which drugs and parties—and by extension, which type of gays—were better. Nearly everyone found the rah-rah tone a little disconcerting. To the article’s credit, it did reveal a thirst for this type of debate, and only highly fragmented ways to have it.

Thus saith The Cut: “In a year of wild partying … it is easy enough to ignore the country’s swing to conservatism and mute the feed quickly filling with tradwives.” But less than a month after the culture mags uncovered the gay sex zeitgeist, the American moment showed the other side of its face: Amtrak police in New York launched a 1950s-style entrapment scheme and began mass-arresting gay men for cruising in the restrooms at Penn Station. Many had their trumped-up charges expunged, while others were handed over to ICE for deportation. It is impossible, of course, to establish any direct correlation, but that didn’t stop people from speculating; we’d taken the bait on straight magazines airing our degenerate proclivities only for the baiting to turn a bit too literal.

Especially after that grim turn of events, the claim that gay sex had “captured the zeitgeist” seemed wishful at best. But now, in December, there is, to put it mildly, new evidence to be admitted. Over the past couple of months, Heated Rivalry, a TV series based on a series of steamy “M/M romance” novels, rode a groundswell of online enthusiasm to a pickup by HBO and a siege of the digital public sphere. It follows Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) young hockey stars who, before they’re even signed into the NHL, become obsessed with each other and begin secretly fucking every time they’re in the same city even as league marketing paints them as implacable enemies. There are three sex scenes in the first episode and almost as many in each subsequent one. To say that Heated Rivalry is an engagement juggernaut would be an understatement: in addition to the rivers of fan art and edits and reaction TikToks, every major American publication has cashed in by dissecting its cultural appeal (Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, everybody); fawning over its stars’ sexual chemistry (Vanity Fair, GQ, everybody), ass workouts (Vogue) and skin care routines (The Cut again); reviewing its sex scenes (Slate, Vulture, Out); or making fun of the whole thing (The Onion).

I discovered the show the same way everyone else did: via the sweaty, steamy clips that started circulating on Twitter shortly before the premiere. I was previously in the dark despite loving a boy who reads M/M sports romances, had read this particular M/M sports romance years ago, and had also long known the show was in the works. (“Why didn’t you tell me there was a gay sex hockey show coming out?” I asked. “I did,” he said, “but you never listen to anything I say.”) We watched the first episode with hands spontaneously wandering into sweatpants, which I soon learned was a widespread practice and on the tamer end of the spectrum; I’m told that the irrepressible New York gays circulated an event on Sniffies bearing the title “Heated Rivalry Watch Party + Orgy.”

Early adoption may be a gay specialty, but we’re relative latecomers to the Heated Rivalry phenomenon. Director Jacob Tierney even seems to have counted on the particular affinity of our kind for bandwagons and cultural moments. “I always said,” he told Teen Vogue, “Once you film this, gay men will watch it, but we’ll watch anything with gay men in it. We’re not wildly discerning in that way.” Tierney is gay, but his source material is steeped in the horny female internet; written by a Canadian author named Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry originated as smutty Marvel fanfiction before it evolved into a “spicy hockey romance.”

Hockey romance is a sub-subgenre of “sports romance,” a subgenre of “M/M” romance, or gay romances predominantly written by women for other women. The sub-subgenre has, the New York Times informs us, boosted the historically low popularity of hockey in Australia and led to real-world clashes between the NHL and its readers, who have applied the modern fandom repertoires of “stanning” and “shipping” to real NHL players. A frankly uncountable number of women on Twitter, or people who claim to be women, or bots, admit to screaming “KISS EACH OTHER!” at hockey games. When the wife of Seattle Kraken player Alex Wennberg complained on Instagram about this fan behavior—which included the admittedly brilliant chant “KRAK MY BACK”—her account was flooded with harassment. Updated Rule 34: if it can be imagined, there are insane stans of it.

This origin story sheds a lot of light on the absolute explosion of gay sex discourse in which gay men are kind of a sideshow. A great deal of that is devoted to dissecting, as Cosmopolitan’s headline helpfully summarizes, “Why Every Woman You Know is Frothing-At-the-Mouth-Feral for Heated Rivalry.” (The Carrie Bradshaw voiceover writes itself: “What I had to find out was why the hottest women in New York were all suddenly obsessed with gay sex!”) No gay journalist has thus far rivaled Cosmo’s cultural sociology, which, surveying a range of women, chalks up the fascination with hockey players fucking to a fantasy escape from the structures and disappointments of hetero sex—in other words, to something like heteropessimism. Gays are left to once again talk to each other via the pages of New York, from whence the gay comedian and I Love LA actor Jordan Firstman launched his attack on Heated Rivalry. “I’m sorry, I watched those first two episodes and it’s just not gay,” he complained. “It’s not how gay people fuck.​ … I go to art to be confronted and to think, but a lot of people just want entertainment or to see two straight hockey players pretending to be gay and fucking.”

Firstman is far from the only gay man to react with indifference, but the skeptics seem to be in the distinct minority. Scattered across the broader zeitgeist there are distinctively gay responses to Heated Rivalry. First and most importantly is the gut level: it’s competent, entertaining smut. I’m typically not a reader of romance novels of any sort unless you count Jane Austen or Sally Rooney (which, why not?), and I was charmed by the book’s formal similarity to online gay erotica. The first half is organized around snappy, no-frills sex scenes that keep characterization and plot to a minimum and lean into the classic gay fantasy of team sports and locker rooms. Before I thought about it much, I also instinctively related to a relationship that builds from repeat hookups. As David Mack wrote in Slate, “For many gay men, it’s fucking first that can later turn into feelings, not the other way around.”

There’s another reaction promoted by Tierney and widely echoed in the social media discourse. “I’m thrilled, as a queer person, to be putting out a romance into the world that is not punishing and that is not full of dead, miserable gay characters,” he said. “This is a gay story where no one dies of AIDS, and no one goes back to their wives.” That’s probably a reference to Fellow Travelers, but it’s been quite a while since that description fit gay TV in general; Heated Rivalry is nowhere near the first show to feature nuanced depictions of gay men or tragedy-free gay romance. But if we put Tierney’s comments in the context of the fujo stanning of the book and show, which at its most extreme equates romance representation with political activism, it becomes clear what he’s suggesting: that “positive representation” equals uncomplicated happy endings, equal opportunity fulfillment of romance-novel tropes. These, naturally, don’t have much to do with a story being authentically gay in the sense of being informed by the lives most contemporary gay men live, or the stories they’ve told about themselves in their own literature. What’s celebrated as a great leap forward here is actually just gay trappings used to re-energize timeless romance tropes of hidden, thwarted passion.

But the NHL is super homophobic! There’s still never been an out gay hockey player! These widespread defenses of the show’s authenticity are correct in a narrowly factual sense. But one possible reading of Heated Rivalry’s NHL setting is as a deliberate choice of anachronistically homophobic terrain for the purpose of retelling one narrow, extremely familiar part of gay experience: the path from isolation to coming out. As Jim Downs argued in a thoughtful Slate essay, this is gay storytelling stuck in the past, arriving over and over at square one. “Gay narratives still tend to treat confession as the plot—the moment when life supposedly begins. But for most people, coming out isn’t an ending or a climax. It’s the threshold.”

If there’s an identitarian critique of Heated Rivalry, it’s not the skin-deep cultural appropriation lens that tediously obsesses over who is allowed to tell which stories. Rachel Reid is perfectly capable of writing fun, competent gay smut; her hockey romances are better than some of the ones written by gay men. But surrendering gay sex to a general cultural zeitgeist—content for female fandoms, an escape from heteropessimism, a trend story for straight magazines—has its ambivalences. It may mean gay stories never advance much beyond their most familiar and culturally legible dimensions, even if they have happy endings instead of deaths from AIDS. The discourse they inspire raises lots of questions, but not necessarily our questions. That’s nobody’s fault, exactly; no individual gay writer or producer can single-handedly change the structural conditions that have attenuated the cultural spaces for those questions. But it’s worth asking: do we want to explore our lives in conversation with each other, or are we content with the tropes of the zeitgeist?

My working hypothesis is that neo-atomization discourses have formed a knot of moral panic about technology that is being used as a Trojan horse for social conservatism. In some quarters, like the drafters of Project 2025 or Michigan’s outrageous proposed ban on porn and VPNs—that revived social conservatism is simply the usual Christian-right suspects doing their thing. But even among Christian social conservatives, explicit appeals to God and natural order have been replaced by a pseudo-public health language of “epidemics,” “addiction,” and social breakdown. What’s perhaps even worse is the extent to which essentially the same ideas have conquered liberal discourse in places like the New York Times op-ed page; a liminal figure like Christine Emba stands as something of a bridge between the two.

Emba’s book Rethinking Sex is a perfect example of this: you don’t even have to say that porn is immoral and casual sex is damaging (though she does that, too); you can say technology is alienating; apps are disrupting our natural, healthy forms of relation and association, harming women and children; our sex and relationships are dehumanizing and socially corrosive because we basically treat them like ordering DoorDash. You can even throw in some superficial anti-capitalism to give it a progressive spin. I’m not sure people even realize how dominant these views have become among liberals and how, in the absence of true ethnographic curiosity about the forms of life the social web has created, authoritarian policy responses are starting to sound like bipartisan common sense. Uncritical, monocausal discourses about technology-driven alienation are the core of the knot, what makes it all sound reasonable, socially conscious, and even progressive. We poor, helpless automatons need to be saved from what technology is doing to us.

Obviously I’m not automatically endorsing a polar opposite position that everything about contemporary technological mediation is good and healthy, that we’re living in a golden age of sociality, etc. I’m not saying there’s no contemporary alienation or pathological forms of socialization—far from it. But we should at the very least be aware that these are old tropes in American history that have arisen several times in very similar forms, and that those theories had serious political and policy implications. The 1950s, in particular, were host to a very widespread alienation panic that colonized media discourse and liberal social science but was more an index of contemporary political anxieties than a description of social reality. (This was the origin of the theories of atomization that Dylan Riley and John Ganz recently discussed in their conversation about fascism and civil society, which informed “mass society” books like Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and social-science bestsellers like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills’ White Collar.) Theories of the masses as alienated, manipulated automatons infused liberalism with a heavy dose of German mandarin pessimism and technophobia, which in some cases blinkered its perception of what American society was actually like.

Here are just a few reasons contemporary tech panic needs to be pressed further than it often is: social scientific research about the “loneliness epidemic” is in fact highly contested, as are linkages of depression and poor mental health to phones and social media. “Porn addiction” is a made-up, faux-medical rebrand of classic right-wing evangelical ideology, and the evidence that porn is all somehow “increasingly” violent and misogynistic is flimsy enough to basically constitute a folk myth, no matter how many times it’s repeated in the New York Times.

Whenever the clouds of consensus gather, it’s worth at least asking: what is this causing us to miss that we should be seeing? Are we stuffing reality into recycled tropes instead of taking a genuine interest in what it’s like? Why—and what is that creating a permission structure for?

I have never been especially invested in whether or not we call Trumpism fascism, but one of the benefits of this type of conceptual debate is that it provides a framework for discussion and for sharpening one’s analysis. What I’m going to say here is not about who is “right” in the fascism debate (it’s mostly summary, anyhow), but what feels like productive new emphases that are emerging. In particular, Ganz and Riley’s recent conversation focuses on the state of “civil society,” which in retrospect I think has been an overlooked or taken-for-granted point of Riley’s past analyses; I had also personally failed to assimilate some of Ganz’s arguments about civil society that seem pertinent to where my own thinking had felt “stuck.” That is: what do we make of American civil society? Is it caught up in social media-addled expressive individualism and therefore completely passive in the world of real politics, or is it taking on a new, unfamiliar form of political agency?

A certain strain of contemporary left analysis may put too much emphasis on the virtuality of American political activity. We might call that the “view from the New Left Review,” because not only has the NLR long taken a withering view of democratic agency in the West, but the doctrine of a hopelessly disorganized and addled American masses in the age of Trump has often been expounded by its contributors—notably Anton Jäger and Dylan Riley. They have tended to interpret all of the sound and fury of American politics since 2008 as ultimately signifying little besides more of the elite-managed status quo. That is the upshot of Jäger’s Baudrillard-inflected writings on “hyperpolitics,” which acknowledge a recent upsurge in mobilization but paint a bleak portrait of America’s “vitiated social landscape” and the predominance of a politics that is “low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value.” Looking for signs of a revival of golden-age socialist mass politics, Jäger tends to dismiss America’s recent political agitation as mostly a virtual spectacle. “Hyperpolitics comes and goes, like a neutron bomb that shakes the people in the frame but leaves all the infrastructure intact.”

Until recently, Riley was even more summarily dismissive. In his introduction to the 2019 Verso edition of The Civic Foundations of Fascism, he drew a sharp contrast between the highly mobilized civil societies that produced classical fascism and the depoliticized, atomized American present. “‘Trumpism’ and its various European correlates have arisen…in the context of a fragmented and depoliticized civil society: the product of the long historical ebbing of the socialist project, and of basically pacific relations in the capitalist core.” And: “While fascism was a product of intense civil society and associational development, Trumpism is an expression of the etiolation and weakening of civil society.”

Especially in view of Trump 2.0, I have wondered if this type of claim is too historically rigid or too wedded to a left schematics that treats anything that doesn’t look like “classical” mass politics as somehow not counting—to wit, if the masses aren’t organized in a way that looks like the socialist politics we believe in, then whatever they’re doing is somehow merely performative, virtual, or otherwise not “real.” Ganz, however, has drawn on the original text of Riley’s book, which was an intervention in theories of fascism in sociology and political science written before fascism was in the headlines every day. With a somewhat looser interpretive touch, Ganz argues, Civic Foundations can be read against Riley’s previous analysis of Trumpism.

Civic Foundations was aimed against one of the dominant theories of “totalitarianism” in social science, namely that it emerged in countries with “weak” civil societies, where the masses were “atomized” and thus susceptible to authoritarian movements. Drawing on Tocqueville, liberal social scientists argued—or probably more accurately, assumed—that a strong civil society (voluntary associations, clubs, etc) automatically went with liberal democracy and served as a defense against totalitarianism. Riley blew a hole in that notion by showing empirically that, on the contrary, fascism emerged from highly developed and intensely mobilized civil societies whose demands the state was unable to integrate into the existing order. He drew on the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to theorize this situation as a “crisis of hegemony”: that is, the social legitimacy of the ruling classes and the existing order collapses in the face of an “overdevelopment” of civil society that it is unable to contain. Fascism arises as a response that positions against the ruling order and against politics itself, but, crucially, in the name of a deeper, truer representation of the people: Riley’s most controversial—but in my opinion brilliant—move was to refer to fascism as a “democratic authoritarianism.”

Ganz picks up on these political crisis terms of Riley’s analysis and wonders why they aren’t applicable to the present: an agitated civil society that rejects the existing order, a crisis of hegemony, an authoritarian movement that claims only itself can restore true democracy, etc. This bit from his conversation with Riley caught my eye:

As for civil society, many argued that Americans were increasingly atomized, citing Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But I thought the internet had perhaps created a new form of civil society, an excess of associative activity and democratic demands beyond the traditional party and state’s representative institutions’ capacity to contain them—similar to what you described in Europe.

This is clarifying thought, because it suggests we should take online politics seriously as more than mere performative virtuality rooted in atomization (Jäger) or a means of top-down manipulation through conspiracy and “disinformation,” arguably the dominant liberal view. What has become a general moral panic in the American media about social media, phones, fragmentation, and the “loneliness epidemic” perhaps leads us to overlook the real associative power of those technologies, the way they have created public spheres that extend beyond the internet and produce their own forms of organization. Just because their outbursts seem ephemeral and haven’t given rise to new political parties doesn’t mean we can take their weakness for granted. Personally, and only semi-jokingly, I would call armies of citizens getting people fired for kissing at a Coldplay concert an overdevelopment of civil society.

In the conversation with Ganz, Riley seems to concede the point:

The online component has become clearer to me in the second term. At first, I saw it mainly as a Twitter spectacle. Now it’s obvious how these infrastructures can rally allies and discipline opponents. It’s analogous to classic fascist mobilization, though the form is different. Instead of party cards and dues—not everyone is going to join the MAGA party—it’s online threats and employer pressure, sometimes promoted from the White House. That is the organizational form emerging now. If you listen carefully to J.D. Vance when he took over Charlie Kirk’s podcast immediately following the assassination, he calls for people to get involved. He even uses the terminology of civil society. He is essentially exhorting people to attack their opponents online and flag posts that express inappropriate views about Kirk.

This all seems more productive to me than thought-terminating clichés about “atomization.” What if the sense of alienation provoked by the internet is not an indication of isolation or “loneliness,” but rather a pessimism or even nihilism resulting from the fact that civil society’s excess of political consciousness has “nowhere to go” in the existing structures of politics?

Listening Sessions

Reflections of a Semi-Political Man

On n’arrête pas une guerre avec des mots; mais la parole ne prétend pas forcément changer l’histoire: c’est aussi une certaine manière de la vivre…

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2 years ago · 25 likes · 2 comments · David Sessions

The latest is this conversation with and on Dan’s podcast, (which is great and you should subscribe to! He just interviewed , one of my favorites, about which more soon.) I lucked out and got on a free episode, which you can listen to here:

Eminent Americans

Left Behind

This episode of the podcast, with Sam Kahn and David Sessions, was recorded after Sam, David, and I happened to have all written essays about our divorce from, or ongoing issues with, the American left…

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a year ago · 7 likes · Daniel Oppenheimer, Sam Kahn, and David Sessions

This came about after I wrote the piece below in response to Sam’s kiss-off to the left, and we talk about our respective arguments and differences. I remain as unconvinced as before that there is some deep philosophical difference between liberalism and the left that has any relevance to the present, but we nevertheless end of up much of the same place. I express, hopefully not too indulgently, some of my hopelessness about the media environment that conditions politics now and what that means for the prospect of anything besides muddling through.

Listening Sessions

The Left Will Be Statist Or Will Not Be At All

I’ve been thinking for a while about articulating my defense of left statism, and Sam Kahn’s recent post, entitled “The Left Should Off Itself,” is as good an opportunity as any. I think I share the basic frustration behind Kahn’s piece—that the left can seem more concerned with moralism than with power and governing effectively—while also thinking his characterization of the left is too schematic and historically inaccurate to be very useful…

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a year ago · 32 likes · 3 comments · David Sessions

This followed yet another dialogue, a three-part (written) discussion with , which focused more specifically on the recent history of the left as opposed to the deeper philosophical and historical themes we touch on in the podcast. You can find that here:

The Point’s Substack

Jon Baskin and David Sessions on the Millennial Left

This dialogue took place over the past six weeks in response to a series of Substack posts looking back at left intellectual life in the late 2010s. It has been divided into three separate posts for the sake of readability. The first is below. Click for the…

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2 years ago · 24 likes · 2 comments · Jon Baskin and David Sessions

Douthat and Keeperman passed relatively quickly and unsatisfactorily over the question of what makes good political art, but Douthat pursued the inquiry in a later conversation with Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy, who strongly protested the idea that Andor is a left-wing show. He insists it’s about characters on all sides, about human experience and morality.

Douthat: So this is a show — it’s a story — where you are rooting for revolutionaries against a fascist regime, right?

Gilroy: OK. All right, all right.

Douthat: As you said, you’re not rooting for the Empire in the end, right?

Gilroy: No, no, no.

Douthat: That to me is the political foundation of the work. And that’s why I use the term “left wing” — not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you’re telling a story in which basically you’re on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries.

At the same time — and this is why I think it is effective art — what I think you’ve been able to do, maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading, is give people a window into why the radicals, even if you’re rooting for them, you can see how things can go wrong. But that is what I really like about the show’s approach to politics, is that it’s ——

Gilroy: But what’s fascinating is, particularly in the second season, I was really eager to get into the idea of using Stellan Skarsgard’s character, Luthen, and Forest Whitaker’s character as the original gangsters, and the difficulty of integrating the inceptors of radicalism into a coalition.

But there’s never anybody, I don’t think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than: Please leave us alone. Stop killing us. Stop destroying our communities. Don’t build the Death Star and kill us.

I never have a character, I don’t think, stand up and say: This is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.

Douthat: That’s fair. That is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying: This is ultimately a show about localism and leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny.

Gilroy initially rejects the question outright, but ultimately gets around to articulating what I think is the correct response to Douthat. Douthat is the one who is trying to impose rather shallow political classifications on art—a reminder that conservatives have also long been energetic progenitors of skin-deep political readings of pop culture—along the lines of: if revolutionaries are the good guys, it’s left-wing, and if an “African American lesbian professor” is the villain, it’s right-wing.

Perhaps it’s worth digressing into the actual history that inspired Andor and how Hollywood uses history for popular entertainment. Considering Andor through the lens of the specifics of the histories and tropes with which it paints its canvas shows Gilroy made an excellent show that, while certainly open to a left reading, captured some deep truths about politics in general without exactly being left-wing art.

Gilroy, it turns out, is an avid reader of history, fascinated by the French and Russian revolutions, Stalinism, fascism, and colonialism. (I was most impressed that he’s read Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government.) But Andor seems above all to be, as Gilroy told the French newspaper Le Point, an “homage” to the French resistance in World War II. The French press picked up on the fact that Gilroy is a fan of Un village français, possibly the greatest historical TV series of all time; Andor seems to draw heavily from its kaleidoscopic social portrait of occupied France, the tense interplay of Nazi officers, local politicians, Communists, the self-organized bands of rebels known as the maquis, right-wing (anti-Nazi) French nationalist militias, rogue actors, Jews, and the ordinary French people in between. Though Andor is simpler, the narrative heart is the same: the disparate motivations and personal turning points that motivate resistance, the struggle to maintain organizational continuity amid secrecy and losses, the atrocities that are inevitably committed in the name of a righteous cause, and the deep moral ambiguity of war. Gilroy even swiped some of the cast of Un village français, who portray the people of the besieged planet Ghorman in Andor and whose native language is an invented faux-French.1

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Kahn sets up a binary between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, or liberals and the left, where the former in each pair is in favor of pragmatic, efficient centralized power and the latter is attached to a romantic ideal of “perfect collectivity and egalitarianism.” The latter will always be a fantasy because it is simply impracticable: “The state ‘withering away’ really isn’t very high level political science.” According to Kahn, the contemporary left is not just the more-radical conscience of liberals, it is their opposite: a force that is simply against the constructive project of governing or exercising power.

Kahn seems to think that the entire left has always believed simplistically in the “withering away of the state,” while in reality that notion has been the source of over a century of bitter theoretical debates and nasty factional splits. It is not the case historically that the left was attached to some romantic, Rousseauist notion of the “general will” that will produce a perfectly unified, perfectly equal collectivity with some kind of benevolent bare-minimum state. To be sure, there have always been currents, (or roughly speaking one “side”) of the left tradition that believes something like this, which goes by varied names like anarchism, syndicalism, or libertarian socialism.1 But the whole twentieth century was a struggle between this side of the left and what became its (much) more dominant side: statist or government socialism, exemplified first by European socialist parties, and then by the Soviet Union and European communist parties and communist-socialist electoral formations.2

When people today think of “Leninism” or Bolshevism they think, rather incorrectly, of a minoritarian revolutionary cadre that stirs up popular revolution and then installs itself as dictators. This ignores what is most fascinating and historically instructive about the Russian Revolution: the practical challenge of building a state in a backward, falling-apart country being invaded by the world’s mightiest militaries and by its own elites and expert class. Lenin and Trotsky very much believed in Marxist theory, but Marxist theory to them was something alive and being elaborated in practice. They were not voluntarist romantics; they had systematically studied types of states and government institutions, and did not in any way, ever for a moment doubt that the USSR needed the sort of well-structured state required to govern a modern industrial society. Even though their vision “lost” by the late 1920s, they are exemplary figures in the left tradition for the way that they thought about the pragmatics of power and distinctly modern governance, in a way that romantic lefts of all eras have repeatedly failed to do.

By and large, this was also true of European communist leaders, though they were kept in a somewhat infantile position by the Cold War divide and their varying degrees of servility to the now-Stalinized USSR. European socialism always had its anti-statist strongholds, particularly in trade unions whose syndicalist ideology harkened back to the nineteenth century, when socialism was entirely outside the political system. There were always dissident left groups and intellectuals who maintained fanciful notions of decentralized communitarian socialism without a state, or with the kind of self-contradictory mechanism Kahn describes, somehow centralizing and completely egalitarian at the same time. But government socialism was overwhelmingly dominant; communist and socialist leaders were politicians (and, increasingly, technical experts) who envisioned running a modern state, not watching it “wither away.” A regrettably large amount of oxygen in left discourse was consumed by tactical battles over the Cold War, but a significant part also went to technical details that are no less important for seeming “boring” or for being forgotten today: What exactly does a socialist state do? How does it handle geopolitics and war? Does property have to be nationalized or not? If so, how much? What does an egalitarian political system look like when a certain amount of leadership by technical elites is necessary and inevitable? Which kinds of equality matter and which ones don’t? What is an appropriate amount of workers’ control? Etc etc.

The New Lefts of the 1960s were a challenge to government socialism, one we might see as opening the era of the left in the shadow of which we still live today. Kahn writes that the New Left “isn’t necessarily wedded to Marxism, but it is tied to collective action—to these myths of moments of glorious revolution and solidarity, of the people all united together.” A more instructive way to put it is that the New Left was a revival of the anti-statist strain of socialism that had grown marginal in the first half of the twentieth century, a socialisme libertaire that really did come close to wanting to destroy—or in its favored-but-ill-appropriated Leninist term, smash—the state as opposed to take it over and run it. To be fair to the New Left, in their time the USSR was the unfortunate personification of government socialism; to them “states” were all the same: nuclear weapons, colonialist domination, labor discipline, enforced social traditionalism, and the like. They were also mostly very young people, and childishly associated all hierarchy—even the sort necessary for effective political action or governance—with authoritarianism.

The New Left also strongly revived the romantic themes of early socialism, something like what Kahn attributes to leftism in general: pure, unmediated community; the idealization of the local, the pastoral, the non-rationalized, the ungoverned. Tactically, this was expressed in its valorization of communal uprising, protest and occupation, “new forms of living,” etc. I’m oversimplifying radically, but the New Left was an anti-modern turn in the left3, away from the political and technical project of building mass democratic legitimacy, exercising power, and governing. It only seemed confirmation of their position that as the government socialist left eventually gained power in Europe, it became basically indistinguishable from the governing parties of the center-right, and eventually from neoliberalism. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the left was either the sort of clear-eyed but resigned critique-without-a-movement of people like Perry Anderson and the New Left Review4, identitarian and single-issue radical groups, or scattered romantic protest movements with no strategy but refusal and disruption.

To my mind, the arc of the left in the Long 2010s was a one-two reckoning with the legacy of the New Left, a partial reconsideration of the weakness engendered by that model of being “beautiful losers,” of being morally correct but powerless.5 First came Occupy Wall Street, which was textbook post-New Left in its strategy of affective, communitarian mass protest, of situational theatrics and refusal of structure or program. Occupy was understandable in a situation of a long defeat and attrition of left institutions, in a moment where one simply didn’t know what else to do. Its inevitable failure brought a more interesting second moment: an attempted revival of government socialism, a renewed interest in the labor movement and the “old” left, and a more structure- and power-focused strategy. This was partial and contentious, of course: the DSA was riven with bitter disputes between all factions of the historical left, but principally between government socialists and anarchists, the latter of whom referred to themselves as “communists” and used terms like “electoralism” and “government socialism” as derogatory epithets. The socialism of the 2010s was an admixture of the two: an effort to revive the left as an organized institutional movement that aimed to build democratic legitimacy and run the state, and a radical protest politics attached to revolutionary theatrics and a fantasy of state-smashing that was already thoroughly discredited by the late 1970s.6

Here I will pause this chronological narrative to address what Kahn writes about liberals, who he makes into the government-minded, pragmatic foil to the moralistic romanticism of the left. Again, Kahn is not wrong that a kind of resigned, holier-than-thou self-satisfaction with its powerless moral correctness has a marked presence in the late-twentieth-century left. A politics of mourning a lost cause. But if that posture accomplished anything, it was indeed to serve as the conscience of liberals who were celebrating the bleak, bland end of history. Which Kahn denies; instead, he argues that it was a performative position that basically just obstructed and prevented liberals from governing effectively. Here, the left becomes the naysaying Jefferson to the liberals’ pragmatic, state-building Hamiltonianism. But that, too, is historically wrong.7 Twentieth-century liberals obstructed their own power with no help from, and even against the wishes of, the left. The statist midcentury liberals that Kahn admires had many of the right impulses; they even served as the model for most of postwar European government socialism. But they backed away all on their own from wielding state power as countervailing force to private interests; it was liberals that guzzled down totalitarianism theory in the 1950s, began to associate the strong, managerial state with authoritarianism, and dressed their reticence in appeals to—you guessed it—Jeffersonian decentralization.8

In defense of the big, bureaucratic state and its experts

The current moment has certain echoes, for me, of the late Obama era: the disappointment of a failed idealism; a stagnant, immobilized political system incapable of pursuing any common purpose or vision of the future; and a resignation about democratic agency altogether. Except of course that it’s much darker: because it follows a decade of efforts to revive democratic agency, the resignation and cynicism seems to have metastasized, opening the door for a regime that is simultaneously wielding state power in lawless, violent ways and destroying it from within.

The Trump assault on the administrative state—on every aspect of its role as a guardian of the people against the exploitations and distortions of private interest—highlights what the central political battleground is, what the left has to think about if it is even to exist at all.9 The 2010s left began to do that; it saw budding shoots of what we might call “left technocracy” or a left expert class: political organizers and operatives, policy wonks, and people who generally were thinking not about how to play-act revolution, but things like how a Bernie Sanders administration would run the United States military. It was a tough thing to do out in the open of a populist moment where expert rule was so associated with the out-of-touch Democratic Party. But if we learned anything from that moment, and from the bumblings of the first Trump administration, it was that even populism needs technocrats; indeed, they are what determines whether it succeeds or fails. Even if any successful politics in the hyperpolitical era will have to be nominally populist, the real battle line of power in our time is between an elite still committed to an ideal of serving the state on behalf of the people and a new onagocracy that sees the state as a vehicle for megalomaniacal fantasies and science-fiction dystopias.

The middle decades of the twentieth century were a curiously double-sided period in political thought, one in which the massive expansion of the administrative state was taken to be an inevitable structural development of “industrial society” at the same time it became a source of widespread intellectual anxiety and romantic dissent. The association of bureaucracy with totalitarianism became commonplace in liberal and dissident-left thought by the late 1950s and reached a crescendo in the anti-bureaucratic politics of the New Left. (It’s no accident that the most dramatic spike in left discourse on bureaucracy took place in the 1970s.) For a brief moment, young leftist theorists—the New Left wasn’t all bad—began to think somewhat positively about the social role of the “professional-managerial class” (technicians, engineers and knowledge workers), though they still largely fitted that into a Marxist class critique and simply turned white-collar workers into the new revolutionary vanguard, the nouvelle classe ouvrière. But generally speaking anti-bureaucracy dominated, democratic in intent but always susceptible to romantic anti-modernism: a recurring feedback loop of age-old tropes (“mechanization rationalization big dangerous centralized alienating”) unable to look forward to different possible futures. It turns out that the maligned administrative body of the state was not the gravedigger of democracy, but its last line of defense.10

Even if I disagree with Kahn that what remains of the left is nothing more than just obstructionist romantics, he’s correct in spirit that it should be primarily concerned with elaborating a vision of power grounded in technical mastery and public-spirited idealism. Generations of leftists return with clockwork predictability to the scholastic texts, to Marx and Engels, to the tactical treatises of Lenin and Trotsky, and especially to the literary, aestheticized canon of leftist thought known as Western Marxism. But the more relevant canon is one still too hidden in archives and dull histories of government, that of the people tasked with developing policies, running bureaucracies, and facing all the technical challenges of actually wielding power.

The wager of government socialism was always that the state could be more than the organizer of capitalist interests, that it could, finally, live up to its full Hegelian promise. I don’t know if “socialism” has any meaning today, or if it could ever be delivered by a mass upheaval of democratic agency. But it’s pretty clear that the leadership of the state—big, powerful, imaginative, vigorous, and efficient—is the only thing that could possibly produce a non-dystopian response to things like America’s imperial decline, the chaotic worldwide unleashing of artificial intelligence, and the looming threat of climate change. I don’t consider the construction of a left force capable of delivering that very likely, but that’s the job—it’s either that or the abyss.

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That the left half of the American political spectrum has higher “human capital”—smarter, more educated, more competent personnel—than the right half has been a structural fact of American politics for my entire lifetime, if not for most of the twentieth century. That is not to say that there aren’t smart conservatives or brilliant intellectuals with right-wing politics, but that the American conservative movement has been defined by a long history of constructing an “alternative” ecosystem where ideological purity and partisan loyalty trumped evidence and expertise.

I used to try to explain this to conservative family members back home as I was explaining it to myself in my early 20s, when I moved abruptly from one of the bastions of far-right evangelical movement conservatism into working in the mainstream media in DC and New York. As a still barely ex-conservative, it was obvious that all of my media colleagues had liberal politics, and that in some cases those amounted to partisanship for the Democratic Party. It was also obvious that they were first of all committed to journalism and truth, including when it was awkward for Democrats or complicated their own worldview. They thought it was interesting when the facts didn’t line up with what they thought, or an issue didn’t break down neatly along partisan lines.

I tried to articulate it many times before I got it right: the conservative critique of the liberal media, so central to the political worldview I grew up with and partly responsible for my interest in media in the first place, was right about the basic fact that most of the media was liberal-leaning, even “biased” in some sense. But that right-wing obsession missed the forest for the trees. I would say things like, “Of course the media is liberal, but liberal things are not ideological in the same way conservative things are. Ideology is in the background of liberal institutions, but it is the only thing in conservative institutions.” In the era of 2000s neoliberalism, liberal spaces were much more heterodox and open to dialogue with conservative arguments than the right-wing world I was familiar with, which for all its intellectual trappings still primarily groomed one to recite dogmatic mantras, misdirect, own and discredit. I saw it firsthand in the way very young conservatives were whisked into prominent positions in right-wing media and politics simply because they had the right beliefs; conservative institutions had to take anyone who hadn’t defected from the project by age 22. When people accused me of abandoning my beliefs, I would say, “It’s not even about the beliefs! It’s about the style.” In the broadest sense, it seemed clear that one side in the political discourse cared about learning, accurate information, and rational debate—all of the things my conservative education had ostensibly trained me for—and one side didn’t.1

I’ve been thinking back to that time the past few months as I reacted in disgust to a seemingly ascendent sentiment that the second Trump era—or the “vibe shift,” or the end of wokeness, whatever you want to call it—marks the entry into some glorious new era of free speech and cultural vitality. I thought about it as I started spending more time on Substack and picked up on a puerile anti-elite, anti-institutional animus, vastly disproportionate to the failings of its targets, that seems more prominent here than elsewhere. I thought about it again over the past few weeks as the headlines were dominated by the mass, indiscriminate firings of federal workers at the behest of a billionaire madman with no legitimate democratic authority or mandate.

And I especially thought about it when I realized how much I had been reading Richard Hanania.

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Happy end of January! The times are dark, but we read on.

This was supposed to be more of a list of what I read over the past month, but turned into a loosely-interconnected manifesto—the sort of thing I find useful for forcing myself to clarify half-conscious thoughts, but is probably an interminable slog to most everyone else. Hence this table of contents for people who might want to skip to what they’re interested in:

• How I approach thinking about the present

• The gay reasons I wanted to read Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and other stuff I’ve been reading in connection with that

• Straight people problems (sort of)! Featuring Foucault, Plato, and the TikTok relationship guru Jillian Turecki

• Novels by Tony Tulathimutte, ARX-Han, and A. Natasha Joukovsky

• Links to articles, essays, and podcasts I recommend this month

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This is Part 2 of my series on Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Part 1 is here. For an overview The History of Sexuality as a whole and its place in Foucault’s work, start with my introduction.

In the last post, we covered the introductory section of The Use of Pleasure. Part I is called “The Moral Problematization of Pleasures,” and is about the logic with which the ancient Greeks approached pleasures as a moral problem. This post is about aphrodisia (“the works of Aphrodite”), the Greek equivalent—but as we will see, it is not equivalent!—of our concept of “sexuality.” The next will cover what Foucault argues were the concepts they used to talk about the right ways to enjoy sexual pleasures: proper use (chrēsis), self-mastery (enkrateia) and moderation (sophrosynē). These terms set up how Greek moral thought is recognizable to us in some ways, and very strange in others.

A note on Foucault’s ancient sources

I didn’t say much up front about the kinds of sources Foucault is using to make his argument, but they are important for evaluating his “reading” of ancient sexuality and moral thought. He uses a wide variety of sources, but so far he is principally drawing on philosophical texts from classical Athens (roughly the 500-300s BC), especially Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon.

Athenian philosophy articulated a particular view of sexuality that did not encompass Greek behavior in general, nor even all of the minority of Athenians who were interested in philosophy. Plato himself was not necessarily representative of Athenian philosophy: as K.J. Dover notes, “Plato differed from most Athenians of his time in possession of wealth and leisure, in boundless zeal for the study of philosophy and mathematics, in a suspicious and censorious attitude to the arts, and in contempt for democracy.”1 Philosophy was modest and circumspect, whereas other literary genres, like poetry—Aristophanes’ plays, for example—presented sexuality in a much more graphic, bawdy fashion. But Foucault’s choice of sources makes sense, because unlike Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, which makes much of legal texts and vase paintings, he is not primarily interested in what Greeks did in bed, but their moral reflection about it. The important thing to keep in mind—important for Foucault’s later arguments about Romans and Christians—is that there were competing schools of thought even in Athens, and especially in “Greece” over time.

Aphrodisia, or the works of Aphrodite

The Greeks did not have a concept of “sexuality” that corresponded to all of the things people today group under that category, nor did they have a concept of the “flesh” in the Christian sense, an inherently “fallen” part of the whole. Foucault makes constant comparisons between Greek thought and those later concepts, warning against conflating them and refuting the “clichés” he himself operated with earlier in his work.2

What the Greeks did have was the goddess Aphrodite.

One of the twelve Olympians, Aphrodite was allegedly born from the sea foam near Crete. (Aphros means “foam” and, according to the poet Hesiod, Aphrodite emerged from the white foam of Uranus’ severed genitals. Don’t forget that part.) Aphrodite was the goddess of love, desire, passion and beauty; she played a central role in starting the Trojan War, in which she supported the Trojan prince Paris, whom she had promised Helen of Sparta in exchange for voting her the most beautiful goddess. She also famously destroyed Hippolytus for being chastely devoted to her rival, the hunting goddess Artemis (a tragedy told differently in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra, and in the early modern French poet Jean Racine’s Phèdre.)

In place of a concept of sexuality, the Greeks spoke of the aphrodisia, which they defined—very specifically and helpfully!—as “the works, the acts of Aphrodite.” (This catégorie d’ensemble, “blanket category,” Foucault says, could be translated as “pleasures of love,” “sexual relations,” “carnal acts,” “sensual pleasures,” but since no precise translation is possible he decides to leave aphrodisia untranslated.) Here we immediately get a sense of the ride we’re in for; we are not used to concepts being personified by goddesses! Ancient Greek language and thinking are strange to us, and so is the “logic” that holds together their thinking about acts, desires, and pleasures.

Foucault notes that while Christian moral thinking will (eventually) be full of precise descriptions of which sexual acts are acceptable, Greek moralists said almost nothing about specific positions or sex acts. This might have been due to “modesty,” as the Greek “representation of sexual acts they suggest in their written works…seems to have been characterized by a good deal of reserve, despite the impression one gets from the entertainments they staged and from certain iconographic representations that have been discovered.”3 But a better explanation, he says, is because of the way they understood the aphrodisia. While Aristotle’s zoology treatise History of Animals goes into detail about animal copulation, the Greeks did not see the need to do the same for humans, because sex acts were not the core of the issue.

The unit of analysis relevant to Greek ethical thinking was a whole made up of three parts: “In the experience of the aphrodisia…act, desire and pleasure formed an ensemble whose elements were distinguishable, certainly, but closely bound to one another.” (42) These elements had a kind of circular relationship: an act produces a certain kind of pleasure, which then produces desire to repeat the pleasurable act, since, according to Aristotle, we are naturally driven by “desire for the agreeable thing.” But the Greeks were not concerned with any of the three elements by themselves. Foucault: “The ethical question that was raised was not: which desires? Which acts? Which pleasures? But rather: with what force is one transported ‘by the pleasures and desires’?” (43) In other words, they were more interested in the animating movement of pleasures and desire than the precise physical form that was taken to satisfy them.

Foucault says that there were two variables according to which Greek ethics conducted moral inquiry into the aphrodisia. The first was quantitative: “not so much the type of objects toward which [men] are oriented, nor the mode of sexual practice they prefer,” but the “intensity of that practice. The division is between lesser and greater: moderation or excess” (44). In Plato’s Laws, what goes “against nature” is not a specific type of act but “a lack of restraint with regard to pleasure” (akrateia hēdonēs). In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, “immorality in the pleasures of sex is always connected with exaggeration, surplus and excess” (45).

The second variable was active and passive sexual roles. Here’s where we get back to “foam.” Foucault introduces the verb form of aphrodisia—aphrodisiazein—which meant more narrowly, to have sex or even to come. (Here’s where we get back to aphros meaning “foam”: according to the Loeb Classical Library’s glossary, the Greek poet Hesiod related aphrodisiazein to “foam” in the sense of semen.) If to aphrodisiazein meant to fuck, then its passive form, aphrodisiathēnai, meant to receive the action of the active partner, to be fucked, which, of course, free male citizens were not supposed to like. The point of this terminology is to demonstrate that, unlike Christians, Greeks did not have a general sexual morality that applied to both males and females; immorality had to do with roles, not genders. The two ways to commit sexual immorality were thus 1) by being excessive, and 2) by abandoning one’s proper role—which, for the free adult men these texts address, meant the role of the active partner.

There is one final point to make about the aphrodisia before moving on to the Greek ethic of struggling against them. The reason the Greeks considered the aphrodisia to be potentially dangerous was not because they were evil or unnatural, but because they were so natural that they had an exceptional power. Sexual pleasure was an inferior kind of pleasure because it was shared by humans and animals. Because it was so important for the propagation of the species, nature made it an especially intense pleasure, as Plato says in his Laws. It was for that reason, Foucault says, “people were induced to overturn the hierarchy, placing these appetites and their satisfaction uppermost, and giving them absolute power over the soul” (49). The Greeks frequently related sexual pleasure to the pleasure of food and wine: all of these bodily pleasures were so intense that they naturally tend toward excess—and thus called for a particular kind of struggle for self-mastery and moderation.

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