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Relationships between gay men and straight women, Phoebe Maltz Bovy writes in The Last Straight Woman, are now understood to be “easy friendships, devoid of the competitiveness that exists between female friends, but also of sexual tension.”
But there’s always been more to the story. In Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, a 2007 essay collection, several women described falling painfully in love—or lust—with their gay friends. Further back still, Seymour Kleinberg’s 1979 cover essay in Christopher Street, though it vaunted a supposed higher morality of friendships between gay men and women, suggested that such relationships are often something more than straightforwardly platonic.
Kleinberg recounts his own close friendship with Sonia, whose intellectual brilliance and exotic background he idealized. (She narrowly escaped the Nazi extermination of her shtetl in rural Poland.) Kleinberg understands himself and Sonia to have an almost spiritual connection that is deeper and richer than his friendships with gay men. But he also confesses that they awkwardly tried to have sex, with disastrous results and, at least briefly, hurt feelings. When Sonia eventually chooses a traditional life with a husband and children to which he thought her unsuited, Kleinberg imagines she has exchanged a higher form of relationship for dull, depressing normality. But reading between the lines, we wonder if she might have just been horny. As the aging fag hag Adriana la Chaise says of loving gay men in Larry Kramer’s Faggots: “The only trouble…one does so want now and then to get laid.”
In this episode, Phoebe joins David and Blake to talk about the different ways that relationships between gay men and women can both be fraught and reveal our broader cultural assumptions about gender and desire. The Last Straight Woman takes up a number of these issues, from bachelorettes at gay bars to straight girls on Grindr, and presents a novel reading of straight women’s fantasies of loving gay men or having sex like gay men. These bring us to a fact that seems obvious but is strangely occluded by contemporary discourses about women’s supposed universal sexual fluidity and purely responsive desire: that women are in fact horny for men, perhaps in the same way gay men are.
Also discussed in this episode:
- Our trajectories between grad school and public writing
- The feminist theorist Avital Ronell, the most prominent woman to be Me Too-ed
- Horny intellectual women from Hannah Arendt to Agnes Callard
- Phoebe’s concept of “frumpy but horny,” that straight women have desire and a sexual orientation that is not based on men finding them beautiful
- How our definition of bisexuality became so broad
- Blake and David’s evolving interpretations of their experiences having sex with women
- The misguided impulse to understand real people and one’s relationships through cultural scripts and slop categories
- The disjuncture between extremely online identity discourse and lived experience
Sources
- Seymour Kleiberg, “Friendship: Gay Men and Women,” Christopher Street, October-November 1979.
- Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage (2017)
- Blake Smith, “The Ethics of Self-Interpretation,” Tablet, November 18, 2024.
- Melissa de la Cruz and Tom Dolby, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men (2007).
- Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954).
- Zoe Greenberg, “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist is the Accused?” New York Times, August 13, 2018.
- Rachel Aviv, “Martha Nussbaum’s Moral Philosophies,” The New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
- Rachel Aviv, “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2023.
- Cartoons Hate Her, “I Dress for My Personality, and My Personality is Annoying,” June 16, 2026.
- Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)
- Phoebe Maltz Bovy, “Lena Dunham’s Frumpiest-Horniest Scandal, Revisited,” May 13, 2026.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is Opinion Editor at the Canadian Jewish News and a columnist for the Globe and Mail. She co-hosts the podcast Feminine Chaos with Kat Rosenfield and writes on Substack. Her new book, The Last Straight Woman, was released in May 2026.
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David Sessions
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