If you're reading this, you're probably already interested in Christopher Street. The more emails we get from people who have stumbled across our site, the more we realize there's a scattered community of CS readers and collectors who, like us, wish the magazine were easier to find, and that we had some kind of equivalent today.
So we're excited to announce a new podcast that we hope will at least partially answer that desire. In each episode of Off Christoper Street, we read an article from the CS archives as a jumping-off point for the conversations ranging from sex to relationships to beauty to gay history and politics. Starting from these primary documents gives us a window onto the gay life of the past, but also provokes new versions of the kind of conversations that inspired Christopher Street in its time and which are as crucial a dimension of gay culture now as they were then.
As CS editor Michael Denneny wrote in the early 1980s: "The only way to consolidate the gains of the past decade of gay liberation is to forge a new imagination of our lives and the world, and this can only be done by a serious interaction with our writers and artists, for these after all are the people who have elected the task of reporting and imagining and celebrating and criticizing how we live now."
To get new episodes of Off Christopher Street in your regular podcast player, subscribe on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Episode 1: Gay Men and the Politics of Hotness
We kick off our first episode with George Stambolian’s “Interview With a Hot and Handsome Man,” from the February 1983 issue. Stambolian, a professor of French, contributed a series of fun, often sexy interviews with “archetypical” gay men to the magazine in the early 1980s, later published in his collection Male Fantasies / Gay Realities (1984). In this one, he talks to a man who had recently left his marriage to a woman, glowed up, plunged into gay New York, and now takes nude photos of himself in an apartment full of mirrors. Not only is he hot, but he’s philosophical about it.
One of the interesting things about the interview is how it models a more open, curious stance toward physical beauty and aesthetic self-creation than moralistic discourses that would associate those things merely with shallowness and vanity, or, as was the case both then and now, with elitism and exclusiveness. The Hot Man describes a number of situations, from letting an older man jerk off to him on a brief elevator ride to watching people try not to watch him at the bar, in which the power dynamics of attractiveness become erotic and playful. He has a lot more to say than we have time to talk about, including the jerk-off groups he attends with his partner.
From there, we talk about our own experiences of desiring and being desired, from Blake’s twink days to David’s go-go dancing. We explore the competing tendencies in gay history toward aristocratic elitism on the one hand and democratic communitarianism on the other and how, despite their apparent tensions, they manage to coexist in actual gay worlds, from drag queens to circuit gays.
Discussed in this episode:
Joe Bernstein, “Handsome at Any Cost,” New York Times, February 13, 2026.
Jordan Castro, “Getting the Pump,” Harper’s, February 2024.
Blake's Substack posts about George Stambolian's interviews and his archival diary
George Stambolian, “Interview With a Hot and Handsome Man,” Christopher Street, 1983.
George Stambolian, Gay Fantasies / Male Realities (1984).
David's Substack post about looksmaxxing and contemporary anti-beauty discourse.
To get new episodes of Off Christopher Street in your regular podcast player, subscribe on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
