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We’ve often referred to a type of social media content we call Gay Therapy Slop: corny, barely-literate Instagram carousels asking things like Why are gay men just racing to ghost each other?, often promoting the services of the latest gay man who’s decided to be an unlicensed life coach. Since therapeutic discourse is an important site of cultural understanding, we’re going to be doing a few episodes on texts we can placed in a broadly-conceived tradition of Gay Therapy Slop or popular therapy talk aimed at gay men.
But to kick things off, we start with the ultimate precursor of the gay therapy tradition, a book that is not really slop. This one is simultaneously a technical sex manual, a self-help book, a rousing text of gay liberation, and a literary experiment: Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s 1977 classic, The Joy of Gay Sex.
Organized A-Z as an encyclopedia of how to be gay, The Joy of Gay Sex is full of surprises, from its powerful introduction about the historical novelty of modern homosexuality to its entries on everything from cocksucking to how to make friends to Cosmo-style acrobatic sex positions no one has ever actually tried. It’s also a turning point in the literary career of Edmund White as he moves away from the fussy, coded style of his first two novels toward writing clearly, directly, and erotically about gay sex. Despite plenty of dated terms and hot takes to laugh at, we argue that The Joy of Gay Sex is as relevant as ever and is a no-brainer inclusion in the modern gay canon. It’ll all be downhill from here.
Some of the things we talk about include:
- The cultural importance of therapy as a technology of the self
- How the Joy of Gay Sex offered an unprecedented affirming approach in the face of decades of homophobic psychoanalytic approaches
- The introduction as an underappreciated queer-theoretical text
- The book as a turning point in Edmund White’s writing toward the direct, sexually frank style of his most celebrated novels and memoirs
- The authors’ hilarious take on why life is so hard for hot guys
- The book’s tough-love approach that, unlike contemporary therapy-speak, refuses to blame other people for one’s unhappiness and misguided expectations
Sources
- Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (2008)
- Charles Silverstein and Edmund White, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977)
- Edmund White, Interview in Christopher Street, December 1977
- Edmund White, Forgetting Elena (1973)
- Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
- Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (1983)
- Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (2009)
- Wayne Hoffman, “On Its 40th Birthday, Revisiting the Powerful Communal Vision of The Joy of Gay Sex,” Slate, October 17, 2017.
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Edmund White
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