{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Off Christopher Street","title":"Where Have All the Gay Writers Gone? (w/ Dan Oppenheimer)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6456,"description":"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.\n\nWatch the video version of this episode on YouTube.\n\nDavid and Blake on Eminent Americans:\nDavid: “The David Sessions Session” (July 2026)\nBlake: “Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a Soupçon of Porn)” (January 2026)\nDavid: “Left Behind” (May 2025)\nBlake: “The Fall of the White American Gay” (May 2023)\n\nSources\nMichael Denneny, “Why Gay Men Need a Literary Magazine,” Christopher Street Reader (1983).\nBen Nichols, Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020).\n\"A Conversation with Michel Foucault,\" Christopher Street, May 1982.\nBen Miller and Huw Lemmey, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023).\nMichael Denneny, “A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer,” On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall (2023).\nPaul McAdory, “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” Gawker, September 9, 2021.\nTom Crewe, “My Hands in My Face,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025.\nJames Kirchik, “Transgendering Stonewall,” Tablet, July 11, 2019.\nJames Kirchik, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Liberties, Spring 2023.\nDavid Sessions, \"The Year of the Gay Sex Zeitgeist,\" December 22, 2025.","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/kMTu8x-q2t5X19Ac14M3vqefHQ2nejfDo6mHuLc-iok/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9hYmEw/MWQ5ODk4OGE1ODk3/NTU4ZDk5Y2NiMzU1/MjgyMy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}