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In this crossover episode with Eminent Americans, we take a step back from our regular programming to talk to our friend Dan Oppenheimer about the state of gay male intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located? We talk about why the editors of Christopher Street thought it was important to use new media strategies to cultivate a distinctive gay male identity and a shared, if not homogenous, literary culture around it. Are today’s gay writers part of anything like a common identity or intellectual world? We talk about Gay Twitter, non-gay Substack, the “house gays” at straight magazines, the gay podcasts and the gay slop. We name all the names. Not because we think we have all the answers, but because we hope, in asking the questions, to provoke you to interest in the gay writing and thought we now have to inherit.
Also discussed in this episode:
- The political parallels between our political moment and the 1970s
- How the editors of Christopher Street took inspiration from feminism but thought gay male culture should be separate from women
- The “missing middle” between academic gay studies and the playful performativity of Gay Twitter
- Why it’s important that gay men write for a gay audience, not just for whoever will read them in straight magazines
- Why “not like other gays” writers like Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson are still part of gay culture
- Why Bros is the best gay movie ever made
David and Blake on Eminent Americans
- David: “The David Sessions Session” (July 2026)
- Blake: “Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a Soupçon of Porn)” (January 2026)
- David: “Left Behind” (May 2025)
- Blake: “The Fall of the White American Gay” (May 2023)
Sources
- Michael Denneny, “Why Gay Men Need a Literary Magazine,” Christopher Street Reader (1983).
- Ben Nichols, Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020).
- Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023).
- Michael Denneny, “A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer,” On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall (2023).
- Paul McAdory, “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” Gawker, September 9, 2021.
- Tom Crewe, “My Hands in My Face,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025.
- James Kirchik, “Transgendering Stonewall,” Tablet, July 11, 2019.
- James Kirchik, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Liberties, Spring 2023.
