Off Christopher Street is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, Pocket Casts, and many more. (Click here to see all platforms).
Love has a strange presence in gay writing, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The canonical gay novels may be saturated in romanticism and desire, but tend to portray love as elusive, one-sided yearning. Queer theory is preoccupied with fucking, transgression, and the existential creation of oneself, but not with what it’s like to be in love with—let alone part of a couple with—another man.
Into this void has rushed rivers of algorithm-optimized relationship slop, with its babbling about boundaries, red flags, attachment styles, and “icks.” The internet-constituted gay world has not been immune to the current nadir of heterosexual relations, exemplified by straight people’s parallel separatist discourses in which women just can’t anymore with men and men desiring women is “gay.” Sad gay dating slop runs on paranoid discourses of its own, from the toxicity of Grindr to the cornucopia of traumas that supposedly make gay men unable to form relationships.
Christopher Street editor and gay publishing pioneer Michael Denneny seemed to feel a similar dissatisfaction with the relationship discourse of his time. As he wrote in 1984:
By some odd psychological trick—or perhaps it’s just mental laziness, a numbness induced by the watered-down social science vision of life the media saturates our world with—we increasingly tend to see ourselves as exemplifying various generalities. We nod our heads as we are told in countless books, magazines, and talk shows that we are alienated from a dehumanized social system, suffering from the frantic narcissism of the ‘Me generation,’ fleeing intimacy and fighting responsibility, or suffering the shock of a breakdown of values.
But even if this is true, what in the world do you do with this knowledge? This type of thinking leads us to being spectators in our own lives—and inattentive spectators at that. Made drowsy by the surfeit of artificial images of what life is like we fail to see the reckless improbability of the real thing. Strangeness—peculiarity, singularity—is the hallmark of reality.
Denneny was one of the relatively few people who tried to document the “singularity” of gay love. In February 1978, Christopher Street published what the cover heralded as a “special issue on gay love”: a nearly issue-length feature that interviewed two gay men, Philip Gefter and Neil Alan Marks, about their recently ended relationship. Using photos Philip and Neil had taken of each other as a guide, Denneny interviewed the two men separately and then had them read each other’s responses before each writing their own postscript. In 1979, longer versions of the interviews—which appear in full on our website—were published as Lovers: The Story of Two Men, with another round of postscripts.
Michael Denneny
Philip and Neil, aspiring young artist types in New York, may have been too young to build a long-lasting relationship, but they put enormous energy into the attempt and were remarkably thoughtful about their desires and dynamics. Their willingness to publicly analyze their experience offers a refreshing antidote to the hopelessly abstract debates that roil gay social media today and a broader culture that still encourages us to define ourselves as figments of a “watered-down social science vision of life.”
In this episode, we revisit Philip and Neil’s story a half-century later and talk about our own experiences of situationships, long-term relationships, and friendships. Our hot takes—or rather, Serious Thought—considers such matters as:
- Hookups and cruising vs. relationship sex
- How sexual positions and gender expectations shape gay relationship dynamics
- The unique dynamics of the male-male couple
- Boyfriend twins, similarities vs. differences, and competition
- Sexual attraction vs. common interests
- Straight people’s insane rules about following hot people on Instagram
- How gay lovers are different from gay friends
- The importance of not talking so much about how you feel with your partner
More episodes of Off Christopher Street
David Sessions
David Sessions
David Sessions