ARGUABLY THE GREATEST living gay male novelist, Andrew Holleran has also been a prolific essayist for a half-century now. Beginning in the late 1970s until the magazine folded in the mid-1990s, Holleran wrote the "New York Notebook" column for Christopher Street, which featured musings on gay life in New York City and the United States, including nipples, disco, the West Coast, casual sex, the sartorial style of the gay "clone," the holidays, hookups, promiscuity and more. While some of these essays have been collected in Holleran's books Ground Zero (1988) and Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited (2008), many of them remain inaccessible in the scattered print runs of Christopher Street. And though the thematic range of those works extends well beyond the AIDS crisis, the primary focus of those two collections, Holleran's Christopher Street essays are devoted to a wider range of subjects, some of them blessedly lighter and all of them as relevant to gay life today as they were when they were originally published. They include, as time goes on, a tragically growing list of elegies for Holleran's friends and contemporaries, from Charles Ludlam to George Stambolian to John Preston.
Holleran's columns are notable for their characteristic combination of campy humor and existential pondering, and their role as sandboxes or sounding boards for ideas that reappear in his fiction. To take just one example, already in Dancer from the Dance (1978) Holleran waxes nostalgic about the gay club before disco went mainstream, a subject he returns to in several columns, from his Christopher Street debut, "Dark Disco," to his 1982 retrospective, "Dancing: The Past Five Years." As we discussed on a recent episode of the Off Christopher Street podcast, his 1984 column "We Must March, My Darlings," uses some of the same formal moves that make Dancer from the Dance such an enduring demonstration of stylistic technique, and also serves as a kind of political elaboration of the Pride march scene at the end of the novel.
This page is intended to serve as an evolving bibliography of Holleran's Christopher Street essays as we're able to digitize them from the archives. If you're interested in a particular essay that's not online yet, send us an email. And happily, Holleran is still writing today; his most recent essays can be found in the Gay and Lesbian Review, where in 2026 he contributed "In the Age of Christopher Street," a reflection on writing for the magazine.
1970s
“Dark Disco: A Lament,” December 1978 (no 29).
“Nostalgia for the Mud,” January 1979 (no 30).
“Cities of the Plain,” March 1979 (no 32).
“Fast-Food Sex,” April 1979 (no 33).
"Nipples," December 1979 (no 40).
1980s
“Journal of a Plague Year,” November 1982 (no 70).
“The Petrification of Clonestyle,” October 1982 (no 69).
“Dancing: The Past Five Years,” December 1982 (no 71).
“Dicks and Daffodils,” January 1983 (no 72).
“Bugs,” March 1983 (no 74).
“The Sunlight of Previous Summers,” May 1983 (no 76).
“A Survivor’s Guide to the Holidays,” July 1983 (no 78).
“A House Divided,” September 1983 (no 80).
“Snobs at Sea,” December 1983 (no 83).*
“My Last Trick,” April 1984 (no 87).*
“We Must March, My Darlings,” November 1984 (no 94).
“The Names of Flowers,” January 1985 (no 96).*
“Circles,” September 1986 (no 103).*
“(Artificial) Marble,” May 1987 (no 111).*
“Tragic Drag” (on Charles Ludlam), July 1987 (no 113).*
“Notes on Promiscuity,” August 1987 (no 114).*
1990s
“Fragments,” January 1991 (no 155).
“Blood Work,” April 1991 (no 158).
“George Stambolian: The Professor of Desire,” March 1992 (no 173).
“Preston,” July 1994 (no 215).
* Collected in Ground Zero (1988).
** Collected in Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited (2008).
David Sessions is a writer and historian living in Boston. He co-hosts the Off Christopher Street podcast with Blake Smith, and writes about gay life and culture, among other subjects, on Substack.
