Off Christopher Street

Gay Masculinity and Its Discontents

David Sessions and Blake Smith — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Gays being masc has been making people mad for half a century now, and in this episode, we read Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 Christopher Street essay, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?” to find out why. We discuss the rise of “gay macho” in the 1970s, exemplified by the clone, the leather bar, BDSM, and urban gay male promiscuity. We talk about different gay male stances toward feminism, the enduring belief that effeminacy is inherently radical, and the tendency of gays of all styles to declare that “all” gays are being gay in a way that excludes them. We talk about the origins of our erotic fascination with masculinity and the importance of being able to revel in what we find hot without overthinking it.

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Sources

Seymour Kleinberg, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?,” Christopher Street, March 1978.

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Society, Culture, and Politics (2002)

Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.

Edmund White, “Fantasia on the Seventies,” Christopher Street, September 1977.

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (2009)

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Seymour Kleinberg, Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America (1980)

Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1980.

Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (2005)

Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (1990)

Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” London Review of Books, March 22, 2018.

Anastasia Berg, “Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu Responds to Amia Srinivasan,” The Point, July 18, 2018.

Leo Bersani, Homos (1995)

Going Out and the Pleasures of Impersonal Intimacy

David Sessions and Blake Smith — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:51:02 GMT

We read Michael Musto’s 1978 Christopher Street cover story “Every Night Fever,” about the gays who go to the disco every night of the week, an example of a journalism genre that fascinates us—cultural trend stories that simultaneously report and constitute a social phenomenon. We discuss the pleasures of displaying oneself in the gay social world, the way gays moralize about and evaluate each other based on how much they go out, clubbing as bookish people, divorces during COVID, why incels should go out, why we hate Hinge, whether Gen Z is bad at going out, and more.

Sources

Michael Musto, “Every Night Fever,” Christopher Street, May 1978.

Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night,” New York, June 7, 1976.

Stephen Phillips-Horst, “Have We Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness?” New York, August 29, 2025.

Kyle Munzenrieder, “Michael Musto Shares His Life in Parties,” W, May 12, 2023.

Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (2008)

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978)

Gay Men and the Politics of Hotness

David Sessions and Blake Smith — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:01:07 GMT

We read George Stambolian's "Interview With a Hot Man" from the February 1983 issue of Christopher Street and talk about the central, yet perennially controversial, role that physical beauty plays in gay culture. We compare notes on our own experiences of feeling hot and wanting hot people, and about the competing – but perhaps not ultimately opposed – tendencies in gay life toward competitive elitism and democratic collectivity.

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Sources

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.