the magazine of gay culture and ideas

David SessionsBlake Smith

When Gay Men Reinvented Love

Christopher Street's "Anatomy of a Love Affair" in the age of sad gay dating slop.
Read More →
February 1978 Michael Denneny

Anatomy of a Love Affair

In interviews with 'Christopher Street' editor Michael Denneny about their three-year affair, Philip and Neil try to make sense of what they meant to each other and what it was like to invent a modern gay relationship.
Read More →
Podcast David SessionsBlake Smith

Why the Gays Tried to Cancel 'Cruising'

'Christopher Street' editor Charles Ortleb saw the film as an opportunity to forge a gay "people" in the shadow of a looming fascism.
Read More →
Podcast David SessionsBlake Smith

What's So Casual About Casual Sex?

From Andrew Holleran's "fast-food sex" to today's Grindr angst, the gays have always been fretting about their own promiscuity.
Read More →
Podcast David SessionsBlake Smith

Gay Masculinity and Its Discontents

Critics saw 1970s "gay macho" as an abandonment of feminism for male privilege and heteronormativity. But they missed the emergence of a new, distinctively gay culture.
Read More →
"We always thought our task was to open a space, a forum, where the developing gay culture could manifest and experience itself."

The Petrification of Clonestyle

I met the best-looking clones seated across from me in public clinics, doctors’ offices, waiting for our laxative to work.
Read More

Gay Men and the Politics of Hotness

Introducing our new podcast, 'Off Christopher Street.'
Read More

The Gay Men of the New Right

The D.C. power brokers behind Christian social conservatism in the Reagan era were living double lives as closeted homosexuals.
Read More

Going Out and the Pleasures of Impersonal Intimacy

Why gays love the club, and worrying that they love it too much.
Read More

The Art and Politics of the Male Image

George Stambolian and Sam Hardison discuss the importance of the male image in twentieth-century art, and the struggle to overcome taboo and homophobia in the art establishment.
Read More
More