What's So Casual About Casual Sex?

Show Notes

We read gay novelist Andrew Holleran’s 1979 column “Fast-Food Sex,” in which he performs a playful exhaustion with gay promiscuity. Now cheap and abundantly available, gay sex has supposedly lost its power to thrill or even to signify. Already at the peak of post-Stonewall gay life, we see the outlines of discourses that persist today in the perpetual rants against Grindr, “hookup culture,” and open relationships.

In this episode, we talk about how gays often make promiscuity into a questionable binary: casual sex vs. intimacy and coupling, for example, instead of seeing sex as something that means different things in different contexts, and is part of different modes we move between in different spaces and seasons of life.

Chapters

(00:00) Andrew Holleran and "fast-food sex"

(17:56) Fast-food sex vs. home-cooked sex

(27:00) Growing up with evangelical ideas about sex

(28:45) Romanticism is a threat to domesticity, too!

(31:58) Is democratic abundance less hot?

(37:58) The myth of hypersexual-but-lonely gays

(40:02) The uniqueness of gay intimacy

(43:04) Why straight romance ideas are bad for gays

(48:25) The manosphere and sex-negative feminists

(50:31) Sex is both amazing and boring

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Sources

Andrew Holleran, “Fast-Food Sex,” Christopher Street, April 1979.

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978).

Andrew Holleran, “Dark Disco: A Lament,” Christopher Street, December 1978.

Priya Krishna, “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery is Reshaping Mealtime,” New York Times, January 30, 2026.

Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009).

Tim Dean and Oliver Davis, Hatred of Sex (2022).

Creators and Guests

Host

Blake Smith

Blake Smith is a historian, writer, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, Tablet, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.

Host

David Sessions

David Sessions is a historian and journalist. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Dissent, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others.

What is Off Christopher Street?

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip through the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

Blake Smith: And somehow there's some psychological truth whenever people complain about how the culture of casual sex, which now has endured for at least half a century, is preventing them from finding a mate, preventing them from settling down, either because they themselves are addicted to casual sex or everyone else is, like they can't find a good man because they're- Right. We also hear now, this would not be the discourse of the 70s, although there were certainly open relationships then, but now you hear a lot like-

David Sessions: So yeah.

Blake Smith: "I can't find a man because everyone's in an open relationship." ⁓ And, you know, there's ⁓ to that and yet lots of people have made romantic connections through Grindr. Lots of people have seasons of intense casual sex and sluttiness and then capable of settling into monogamous relationships. That's a pretty typical pattern of gay life to move back and forth between them. ⁓ And guess, yeah, what ⁓ interest me is that we see that sex is able to serve these different functions. And I guess part of being a healthy postmodern subject is being able to move among these different ways that sex can be, that it can be romantic in a dangerous way, can be romantic in a cozy way, it can be not very meaningful, and that's fine. ⁓ But the unhappy... contemporary subject is locked out of moving among these modes and feels like stuck in one of them and feels unhappy about that and feels like, you know, the way that the gay world is, is preventing me from having the right kind of relationship.

David Sessions: This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast where we look into the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions and I am joined once again by my co-host and fellow historian Blake Smith. In this episode, we talk about casual sex, that defining dimension of modern gay life and apparently inexhaustible source of takes. going all the way back to a 1979 column by the novelist Andrew Holleran which he likened casual sex to fast food. In becoming as easy for gay men to get as a burger from the corner or an app, sex had lost its romantic charge and could no longer be truly erotic. What we find funny about this is how it prefigures things we see on social media today, both in jokes, "Grindr as door dash for dick," and in laments like "I can't find a boyfriend because everyone just wants hookups." We talk about how this kind of take sets up a questionable binary, casual sex as the imagined opposite of intimacy and coupling, for example, instead of seeing sex as something that signifies differently in different contexts, a part of different modes we move between in different spaces and seasons of life. One of the things that struck me as I was listening back to this episode, this was actually one of the first ones that we ever recorded, is how it's become a theme in the way that we approach some of these topics. So in common gay waves of speaking, we often find these simplistic framings. Things can only mean one thing, or it has to be either X or Y. And one of the things that I hope that Blake and I are able to do on the show is to suggest that there are richer, more sophisticated ways of thinking about some of these questions that are still of vital importance to our lives. Before we get started, a reminder to subscribe to our newsletter on Substack at christopherstreetmag.substack.com. It's free and you get instant notifications when new episodes come out, with mini essays and other bonus content about some of the things that we talk about on the show. And if you're listening right now on an app like Spotify or Apple Podcasts please a second to give us a rating, which really helps other people find us. ⁓ And importantly, further inflates our delusions of grandeur. We have also gotten some requests to add ourselves to other podcast platforms, which I have now done. I've added us to Amazon, to iHeartRadio, to ⁓ Pocket Casts, and you can find all of those at christopherstreetmag.substack.com. And if you listen on some hip underground app that none of the rest of us have even heard about yet, you can grab our RSS feed and stick it in there. So without out of the way, we hope you enjoy our conversation about casual sex from fast food to dorgan. Hello Blake. Hello. Welcome to this meeting of the Central Committee where we are convened to figure out the correct ideological line on such questions as casual sex. Is it like fast food a sign of capitalist decadence or Grindr like DoorDash? Is it just an indication of our baleful alienation and the commodification and atomization of our society?

Blake Smith: Okay guys, ending sex. Fast food is what mom gets when I've been good at the doctor. So I don't know how that parallels casual sex, but I like it. It's hot.

David Sessions: Or are these simply species of moralizing can't that have been with us since the dawn of modern gay culture itself? Are you ready to solve these weighty matters?

Blake Smith: I'm ready to crack this mystery with Ms. Andrew Holleran, née Eric Garber.

David Sessions: Yes. So as we do, as is our method, we are going to start this conversation from a piece of writing from Christopher Street. In this case, a column by Andrew Holleran titled "Fast Food Sex." It's from 1979. It is from the...

Blake Smith: Can you tell me it was the July issue, but I couldn't find it in July

David Sessions: Okay, yes, somewhere around, I'm not sure exactly which issue it is. I know it's from 1979 though. So, we both know that Andrew Holleran is certainly gay famous, certainly gay lit famous, but as we both have learned, that does not necessarily mean regular famous. So maybe we should introduce, talk a little bit about who Andrew Holleran is.

Blake Smith: Okay, Andrew Holleran, born 1943, real name Eric Garber. Confusingly, there's also an Eric Garber who writes about gay science fiction, but two different people. Grew up on the island of Aruba, had an interesting kind of tropical, neocolonial childhood. His father was a petroleum engineer. So he has some like interesting issues about like race, the tropics in the background of some of his fiction. Very privileged, went to Harvard, went to I don't know if he finished his law school. And then went to the Iowa Writers Program in the early 60s. Went to New York, spent several years caterwaiting, developing the experience out of which the magisterial and enduring gay novel Dancer from the Dance came out in 1978 when Holler was 35. What have we done with our lives? are both older than he was.

David Sessions: would just parasitically comment on Dancer for Now every episode as I imagine

Blake Smith: That's we can do. And then at about the same time he starts writing for Christopher Street, this series of lighter topical commentary, which is very much in the voice of characters from Dancer from the Dance, which hopefully all listeners have read, have reread. It is our most important novel.

David Sessions: it's, really, Holleran really is, you I would say of all any gay writer, the one that should probably, probably be known as like one of the best American novelists of the 20th century. It's unfortunate that he's just only known as a gay novelist, but probably rightfully should have the fame, just based on fiction quality, should have the fame of Edmund White. ⁓

Blake Smith: Yeah, I mean, you know, let's not speak ill of the dead, but I mean, White was more prolific, a great game player, very, very smart and networked. Holleran shortly after finishing Dancer from the Dance, to take care of his mother in rural North Florida, which was not the wisest career or personal move, I think.

David Sessions: Right, a part of his life that appears in every novel of his after Dancer. But here, I'm sure we'll eventually do an episode on Dancer from the Dance, and we will talk about Holler and many more times. this is an example of his kind of New York street life, know, everyday slices of gay life in New York. It's a column that he wrote for Christopher Street in the late 70s and probably most of it's run. And these are these are fun little

Blake Smith: Right, so ⁓

David Sessions: Just little commentaries on what's happening, what gay people are saying and thinking. You have some thoughts about this, you know.

Blake Smith: I was telling you before we started recording that this has long been a pet theory of mine. I cannot prove this or I have not put in any work to proving this. I'm sure it could be proven or disproven. But that the form of the Sex and the City essays within the episodes and the kind of investigations that begin the episodes, like can women in their 20s be friends with women in their 30s? Is everyone in New York looking for a new apartment? These sort of questions

David Sessions: Threesomes, is everyone having threesomes?

Blake Smith: Is everyone having a threesome? Is everyone doing anal now? That's like episode three or four of Sex and the City. They have very much the shape of Holleran's columns where he begins with some question or cliche, some kind of proposition. Like, ⁓ doesn't everyone like degrading sex now? Isn't everyone fucking too much? Isn't everyone sad about turning 40? And he pursues these, in fact, very personal.

David Sessions: Yes, right.

Blake Smith: questions by talking to friends of friends, talking, he runs into someone on the street and it just so happens that that person talks exactly like Andrew Holleran. So these are not real pieces of investigation, but they're not also quite fictional. And I love this. mean, it's, it's part of it is totally bullshit. I don't know what, where like, if this is something that other people had been doing, actually even this is, this is getting very historical, but If you go all the way back to like Addison and Steele at the beginning of the 18th century, often their essays in The Spectator and The Tatler begin with something like, everyone is saying X. So I went down to the club and I talked to Y and Z and they said about X that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you know, my...

David Sessions: Like I think I also like have not done any historical research on this. I think that this is a very old genre. is it's it's kind of the gossip column. It's kind of the society column in a way. When I was reading this Jamie Kirchick book about DC, like he was he talked a lot about the column, you know, DC columnists who would who were known for kind of leaking things or breaking news. They were super, you know, connected in the city and ⁓ you know, some of them were gay. That that it kind of had that same vibe like this is what everyone's doing at the moment like this is ⁓ Tina Brown wrote a DC like a Washington Post column at some and that's very much her style it's like this is what's in the water in the air this at the moment this is the right the Reagan era

Blake Smith: Not that I'm breaking the news to you, it's that I'm telling you how everyone is already talking about, in this case, the fact that everyone is having casual sex. So we established the sort of like social fact, everyone's having casual sex, and then this kind of like meta-discursive fact, and everyone's talking about it. But also, like as Holleran himself signaled several times in this short piece, he's being a bit winky and ironic about like, is it actually true that everyone is having casual sex? Is everyone talking about the fact that everyone is having casual sex? Who knows? But it kind of feels that way. You know how that's a topic du jour. And I mean, this still feels very familiar from the way that people on social media or gay Twitter are saying. We all know that the topic today is...

David Sessions: Right, yes. that's what I think is like. It's a form of, that we now have from social media, this kind of hive mind reflection of ourselves back to us. I think that's kind of what function this sort of writing or column served in the past. was like attempt to grasp kind of the ephemeral, what's in the air right now, what people are talking about, what's the mood. ⁓ And so it seems... Even though we can make fun of it, you know, New York Times bogus trend stories are like that are like this, you know, everybody's doing this now and just interviews for people on the same block in Brooklyn or we can make fun of that, but it's also like fun.

Blake Smith: One, we read them all, we all know about them, or at least we look at the headline and react to the headline. And Holleran's happen to be exquisitely crafted. I mean, there are these little literary artifacts that also, you know, they don't quite self deconstruct, but that, you know, he's playing with this form. But so it begins with the proposition, like there's a supposed dinner party that he's remembering. And at this dinner party, it is revealed that Everyone has been fucking in New York. Everyone is tired of casual sex, but Holleran had also heard recently that there was a guy who isn't putting out easily. He made someone go on 19 dates before having sex with them. And then he somehow runs into this legendary guy that he's been hearing about who makes people go on multiple dates before having sex with them. And then the rest of the essay is a supposed conversation with this guy who is resisting casual sex. So yeah, what do you make of this?

David Sessions: Let me read, I was gonna read a little bit of the, it's a pretty short piece, so we should read some of it to get the flavor of it. Weary of sex, so this is kind of after he's, at the beginning after he's told the anecdote about the dinner party, so at this dinner party, some guy says he's only had sex three times in the past year, and Haarang congratulates him. He's like, how civilized, how discreet, half ironic, half in earnest. And then he says, weary of sex even, yes, I'm not afraid to admit it. I was. congratulating that man for having sex only three times in the past year. The last time I had been intrigued by a sexual confession, such a staple of gay life, one would almost prefer a companion to discuss nuclear fission, was when a friend told me of a fellow he had had to date 19 times before he could kiss him. How marvelous that in 1979, someone would still refuse his person to another, for people aren't refusing their persons much anymore. In fact, grabbing a body is about as easy as going downstairs and buying a hamburger, which is why in San Francisco they call it fast food sex. So this sets up the title of the column, fast food sex, and the comparison between casual sex and cheap fast food that runs throughout the column. So what did you think, like you kind of lit up when I suggested this one, like what did you first think when you first read this whenever that was?

Blake Smith: Well, fast food sex is fun because one, I haven't done any research, did Holleran invent this term? mean, it feels as though the claim everyone is, in San Francisco, you know, they're calling it fast food sex. That feels made up.

David Sessions: in other side of the country where you

Blake Smith: I can't ask anyone to verify this. And it's not actually a term that really catches on. Like I see a few people in Christopher Street after this refer to, know, Andrew Holleran calls it fast food sex. Erica Jong had the more popular Zipless Fuck, which

David Sessions: Which is right, which is mentioned in this.

Blake Smith: And that's hot. Something about like zipl- like zipl- like fast food sex, I guess it's meant to sound just more gross and sad. sounds very judgmental. And yeah, so the term itself is very evocative and continues to be so. I mean, you brought to my attention this like fairly recent piece that compares Tinder and Uber Eats. I think there are a lot of such comparisons of, you know, I can order food, can order new garbage on Amazon, and I can order some dick, like all in the same way. I don't even have to leave the house now.

David Sessions: Although I think the more I think about it, I think that there's a little bit, it is sort of the same genre, but the app discourse, the modern app discourse, which we'll get to, it has a slightly different valence, or there's a different critique going on there. But that was kind of what I was thinking about is what's the essence of fast food? What's wrong with fast food? Or what's negative about fast food here?

Blake Smith: And I know that she did not hate fast food because in Felice Picano's 1979 journal, when he and Holleran, like having met at some function at Fire Island, they're back in New York and they're talking for the first time about the idea of meeting regularly that becomes the Violet Quill. Where do they meet? Burger King. Like midtown Burger King. Now, I don't know, I assume that like, you know, the revolution in coffee of the 90s had not yet happened. maybe, you Manhattan is not full of lovely places. You cannot get a latte, but surely they could have, like Burger King cannot be the most normal place to have such a literary meeting.

David Sessions: Yeah, so it's not like I was thinking. don't know that 1979. don't know if like fast food would have had its its modern reputation of being unhealthy, maybe. ⁓ But I would imagine not quite so much. I think it's more it would have been more like the speed and dispose of it. Also the availability, like the that it's so that it's everywhere, that it's easy to get. Like I think that's the main that's the main reason he reaches for the fast food is like it's easy to get.

Blake Smith: Yeah, I mean, think this is there was recently that viral New York Times essay that I talked about and had feelings about but didn't read about people who were addicted to Uber Eats, which included a gay couple, this like white gay couple with beautiful copper pans. Yeah, I think, you know, there's the health dimension, which is maybe somewhere in the background, but I think it's particularly like one knows that one ought to cook. You're like a grown person. You should make a lovely, slow meal at home. And yet you're either going out and getting a burger because it's 1979 or you're Uber eating some expensive whatever. And in both cases, this is because you're a lazy person unable to control your impulses. Shame, shame, shame.

David Sessions: Okay, so if casual sex is fast food sex, like, compared to what? Like, so you just laid out some of it, that it should be, I don't know, more scarce? It should take longer? So is fast food sex is in opposition to what? To home cooked sex or like leftover sex or like?

Blake Smith: That's right. That's the real, is the we have sex at home and then picture of the sex that we have at home. Right. Yeah. mean, once we start thinking through the metaphor, some interesting possibilities arise. Both Holleran as narrator and then this character who makes people wait even to kiss him have similar critiques. So ⁓ Holleran here in paragraph three is complaining. In those days you would be ejected from a bar for blowing someone, but history has come around. Now that bar sports closed circuit TVs on which pornographic films unfold, slides of cult models appear on another wall, and the live men at your side have sex right there. But then, Holleran complains this actually makes sex less hot, less interesting, and the guy who's withholding, not participating in casual sex, is trying to somehow restore the romance and the magic. You know, can get autobiographical here in a second, but I know that there is some historical truth to this because, and I'm working on this book on Michael Denneny, there's this interview with Denneny from some years before he dies where he's thinking about, it's maybe even 1979, it's like 1979, 1980, and at that time, Vito Russo was the cook at, maybe the Continental Bath, it was one of the big bath houses. And he was making hamburgers. There was a little kitchen stand where you get a hamburger at the baths. And Denneny has been hanging out at the baths all night. It's like four in the morning. getting a hamburger made by Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet. And he's complaining to Russo that he didn't get lucky all night long, that there was no sex. And Russo's like, Michael, what are you talking about? I watched you have sex with at least four different people over the course of this evening. And then he's like, really? And then he's like thinking back, it's like, yeah, I guess I did have sex at this point. Now that you mention it. But, you know, he goes on to reflect that sex was so abundant if you were a reasonably attractive, you you met, met, they were not such difficult criteria, but if you met the criteria, you could have been having so much sex that it didn't even mentally register as an event. And, you know, when, We don't have to be morally judgmental about it, but that does seem like bit defeating the point.

David Sessions: P plausible. Yeah, I mean plausible. Well, there's also I was wondering if there's this kind of exhaustion in this piece and it's witty and ironic and it's you know, it's not clear that he's like actually believes this or that he's he definitely sees it in multiple, you know, from multiple angles like he's you know, he likes the good part of it too. But there's this kind of exhaustion that I that I think is in several of his columns like this that it's like it's only nineteen seventy nine which is the golden age you know looking back to us but like this is already so tiring this new outpouring of gay culture in this this new world of the baths and the discos and which is at its peak is you know i'm i'm already tired of it or it's already like too much

Blake Smith: Right, don't know that we're experts enough on the music to discuss this essay, but there is, from maybe a year after...

David Sessions: I was thinking of the disco, the dark disco one.

Blake Smith: What we think of retrospectively is the peak of disco is for Holleran, it's nadir. Disco was already over 1979. And what was good were these artists who like no one has ever heard of like Zulema. I mean, I have gone back and listened to some of these. I was not impressed. But Holleran was like, it was the early 70s when things were good, before disco went mainstream. It's been gentrified. It's been ruined. New York over. ⁓ And I doubly some of this is like But Holleran had already been maybe for seven or eight years intensely in New York gay life by then. So, you know, one gets tired of it. He also was pushing 40, you know, he was, you know, maybe ready for the next thing. ⁓ And it's always unclear to me, like, so much of Dancer is a wish for romance, a wish for like stable love. And that's somehow in this piece as well, the thought that Holleran somewhat attributes to himself, but really attributes to this person who makes people wait to have sex. that casual sex interferes with the pursuit of a serious romantic relationship.

David Sessions: Yes, right. Yeah, and let's read a little bit more of what the guy says. So he runs into, he hears about this guy who apparently doesn't even kiss until after he's been on like many dates. And so he runs into this guy in the park later and this guy just kind of like goes on a rant about his philosophy. So he says, okay, I'll just read all of it and we can cut it if we want. Everything that attracted me five years ago now seems totally stupid. Getting blown is so easy now and so meaningless that it's about as significant an event as a sneeze. My friend says that men are like dogs, they should screw every day. But, he sighed, afraid I've lost that talent. Last week in the baths I was sitting in a corner waiting for Mr. Right when I saw two men go into even darker nook and run through the entire gamut of sexual act. And when they were finished, after all these kisses, he was suddenly agitated and moans and gasps. Things that caused scandals in the 19th century toppled families, drove Anna Karenina to suicide. He raised his eyebrows. After all that, they each went to a separate bedroom to wash up. Now you may view this as the glory of the zipless fuck, but I found it suddenly and it surprised me for I'd always adored this event before. The most reductive, barren version of sex a man could devise. Barbarella was more human pressing her fingertips against the angel.

Blake Smith: I have seen Barbarella.

David Sessions: Barbarella is a, ⁓ I have not seen it either, but it ⁓ is a movie from the 60s in which Jane Fonda plays some kind of space bimbo.

Blake Smith: But I have an image of her in like a metal brassiere, like proto princess Leia.

David Sessions: Yeah, yeah, very much. That's just exactly. Exactly.

Blake Smith: And it goes on. you know, in that era, you know, there were people like Edmund White who were very pro promiscuity. mean, there was a certain, this is even among straight people like Deleuze and Guattari were like, you know, praising promiscuity and the idea that we're going to have like total sexual liberation. But, you know, there is a line in this New York gay culture saying that like promiscuity is developing these new forms of relationality. I think people practicing monogamy or making people wait for it, do so maybe under the shadow of feeling like they're a bit retrograde, like they're not really with it, they're too hung up on the vestiges of straight culture. And this perhaps imaginary friend of a friend goes on to say, why did these assholes, like these random gay assholes, praise promiscuous sex, say there's nothing wrong with it, that because we're gay, we're leaders in a brave new world who will set new patterns of behavior and all that crap, when even sex on that basis ceases to be erotic? Do they really think that because we're gay, young, and urban, we don't have the same need for fidelity and intimacy that any other human beings do? When sex is as easy to get as a burger at McDonald's, it ain't too mysterious our marvelous belief.

David Sessions: Yeah, so there we have again this connection between fidelity and intimacy to like sex being harder to get, I guess, or this idea that they're somehow opposites, that too much casual sex is the opposite of intimacy or fidelity or is that like preventing it.

Blake Smith: Right, it's never quite fleshed out what's the causal mechanism, because it's like, if sex is available, you will for sure, you cannot help yourself. I mean, this guy is trying, this guy is trying to not participate in casual sex, but he still feels the pull of it, and you can see even how annoyed he is about casual sex that he feels about it. And then, what exactly is the causal mechanism if you participate in this hookup culture? you'll be unable to have fidelity and intimacy. It's not explained why, how that happens. And I guess maybe it makes enough of a kind of common sense that we say, ⁓ yeah, of course. But then when you start to think about it, mean, one, biographically, I think both of us grew up with, like, both of us grew up evangelical in the South. And so both of us have heard these arguments before. Like, sex is great, beautiful, sacred, mysterious. But if you're having it, then bad things will happen.

David Sessions: Well, right, it's this very, it's very circumscribed context in which it is able to have that power. So it's, it's beautiful and wonderful when you're married with your wife as, as, you know, one of my parents would have probably put it. But outside of that, is warping, deforming, addictive and dangerous.

Blake Smith: What's interesting is somehow you raise the point of, this is fast food sex, what all the gay guys in New York and San Francisco are having. What is the healthy, proper alternative, or what's the back of the fridge sex? And on the one hand, this friend of the friend sort of suggests the possibility that if we weren't having casual sex, we'd be having fidelity and intimacy. But he also, as you've already mentioned, says that before people had easy access to sex, sex... Romance was so intensely charged that it drove Anna Karenina to suicide. So that's not an example of a staple Intimate relationship that's like back in the day you couldn't get any and you went crazy And then he has this funny letter to Anna Karenina and it's like Queenie campy where you know He's telling her like girl as The Marvelettes said there are too many fish in the sea get out girl and remember you've got this so here it's like, yeah, is that more desirable that like, you know, we have this sort of Anna Karenina, you know, Young Werther thing.

David Sessions: Yeah, like now that you mention it, like everything he says, that whole list, it caused scandals in the 19th century, it toppled families, it drove Anna Karenina to suicide. So he's like all these things that it's not necessarily a, we do know from his other writing that Holleran kind of romanticizes domesticity or has this kind of yearning for it, even though he doesn't really want it, it seems. But here, another theme in his fiction is also just a kind of romanticism for its own sake, ⁓ just a reveling in the power of romanticism itself. that's what I think this is pointing to, something that's like so emotionally powerful and engaging and invigorating that it would cause scandals or, you know, drive someone to suicide. Like that's why he's interested.

Blake Smith: Yeah, yes, and there's this idea that the fact that casual sex is supposedly, I mean, probably empirically true, prevalent in urban gay culture like then and now, both the fact that it's like collectively out there and the fact that one might be individually participating in it, that somehow is a threat both to cozy domestic intimacy, monogamy, you know, forming a couple, but also to the transgressive life destroying power of eros. Which, and classically, those two things themselves are intention, right? Like, I think there's a very long tradition of thinking, like, the really intense sex and emotional stuff can't happen with your life partner. Yeah. That's a cozy, stable social.

David Sessions: Yeah, that is the traditional, you know, the traditional but European view is that like, you know, marriage is an economic relationship, romance is passion, and it's, you know, outside of that, for men at least.

Blake Smith: And the specter, I guess, of fast food sex is that we're going to move to this world where neither cozy domesticity nor self-shattering eroticism are possible because you're hooking up all the time, you know, and it's so easy and you just move on.

David Sessions: That's what I kind of, and this kind of gets us to the app conversations. There is, okay, let me read, before I say this, look, let me read this little, this bit here. So the guy who's not putting out, like in the middle of his ramp, Soharin interrupts and says, fast food sex, I said. And then the guy continues, fast food 20th century American sex, he says as his face excited in the soft light of the descending sun. Well, I holler and said, half ironic, half in earnest, that New York vice, we've destroyed many aspects of the previous century, know, luxury liners, formality, long lunches, handmade lace, leisure and court balls. I guess we'll destroy sex too. There's kind of this, this almost like reactionary romantic opposition to. democratic abundance. It's like a romanticization of things that are associated with the elite or like aristocratic with formality, with ⁓ style and with exclusivity. And now that like it's available to everybody and it's cheap and it's gotten like democratic, it's just not that interesting anymore. Like it's this is a thread that kind of I think runs through reactionary thought that like democracy is aesthetically leveling and deadening and like You just get the lowest common denominator, the masses, you know?

Blake Smith: Well, and there's a very interesting in Alexander Kojeve's Introduction to Hegel. He has a footnote on Japan from like the second or third edition. It's, you know, we're educated ladies. So Kajev has this worry, like he's very much committed to the belief that the world is moving to what he calls the model of America, which back in the day you could imagine is

David Sessions: This is a deep cut.

Blake Smith: democratic egalitarianism now.

David Sessions: And consumerism, ⁓ know.

Blake Smith: And so we'll be living in this world of abundance, everyone will be legally equal, everyone will have so much stuff that differences in material equality won't really matter, like we'll all be very comfortable. And he worries that this will actually mean the loss of what makes us specially human, which is founded on distinction, which is founded on specialness, some people being somehow better than others, about competition for esteem. And he worries particularly in this footnote on Japan about the erotic disappearing, erotic life disappearing, because erotic life supposedly is founded on us recognizing specific other people as unique, special, of inestimable worth, worth dying for, and he worries that we could just be having sex like animals.

David Sessions: That's in here too, like this guy who's when he's looking across the street and seeing this, guy who's a representative of the gay scene, he's wearing the uniform, he's out there trying to hook up and he says he's extinguishing his individuality, dressing like a human dildo.

Blake Smith: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, now we maybe don't feel the force of the word clone, but the fact that this comes to be the name of this macho style associated with cruising, with uninhibited libidinal flow, that it is imagined as de-individualizing the people who participate in

David Sessions: Yeah, which I like, I don't want to like jump off topic, but like I like the deal. think the de-individualizing part of it is like the appeal. It's what's like, you know, community forming and, and social about it.

Blake Smith: Sometimes you just wanna be a whole, yeah.

David Sessions: Yeah, I am against romantic individualism. I think that like everyone loves to be a sheeple, like everyone loves to be part of the herd. ⁓

Blake Smith: I'm an NPC and it's hot. One of the great things about sex, I think, is that it is so many things simultaneously, like that sex is the energy of forming couples. Sex also is transgressive, self-shattering, is like dangerous to couple-dom, also dangerous to like the coherence of the self. Also, sex can just be a fun activity and that sex can have this non-

David Sessions: Yes.

Blake Smith: dramatic self, like it can be the self shattering character, but also this just kind of suspense of the self. So Leo Bersani has, some great essays about the pleasure of what he calls impersonal intimacy, which we encounter in cruising and casual sex. But also he says, just like, think about the pleasure of small talk with like a neighbor or coworker where, you know, there's only a few topics that are going to be discussed. It's going to be the weather. You know, I'm be the meeting coming up and you know, there's only so many moves to make. It's very structured, but you can pass the conversational ball back and forth and there's something that's kind of fun about that. There's something that's fun about engaging with other people in ways that don't activate your whole self.

David Sessions: Yeah, and that's what I was referring to, is not sex per se, but like in that part where he's kind of criticizing the guy for like not being an individual, he's talking about the way he looks or his clothes. And like, that's what I was talking about. Like the fun of kind of all looking the same or like all doing the same thing or like following the same trends like that.

Blake Smith: David, are you in one of these, like, I have never had this phase of my life where you're like in a gay guy group where there is like, you know, 15 white guys at the pool and they all kind of look the same. Have you had that moment?

David Sessions: So I wouldn't say I've been in a group that endures over time and always goes on vacation together or something like that. I have certainly been in those photos. Let's say.

Blake Smith: Because people love to have strong reactions about these. This is maybe another topic, but it is somehow related where both casual sex and the similar looking gay friend group really activate among a

David Sessions: ⁓ people, yes, people hate it. Well, so, well, yeah, I'll, I'll save my defense of that for, for some other time. But yeah, so let's talk about one of the reasons, one of the things that connects this, this conversation that is from the past about casual sex and it's, it's supposed like dichotomy from domesticity or some kind of deeper relationality or vulnerability. That is an idea that's very much still around. And you hear this, know, hear gay people say this all the time. So I wanted to read this quote from, this is actually from Dancer from the Dance. So this is Paul Lorenz fiction. Another version of this idea that I think is a little bit more specific and gets us to the way that people talk about it now. So Malone, the main character of Dancer from the Dance is like, Somewhere in New York, watching someone walk his dog, I noticed this, like, a character in Holleran is lamenting the lack of domesticity in gay culture, watching someone walk a dog and like, remain-

Blake Smith: I like I like I had not thought about this. I like this. Yes. Yes. Okay

David Sessions: So, "Oh," Malone said, passing a hand over his face, "How easy it must be, how easy, to come out in the evening to call your dog, to walk home with your wife's arm in yours. Have you ever noticed, he said, stirred now by this vision of domestic bliss that was beyond his reach, and shocked earlier that evening to find himself crying in the subway on his way home from a client, he's a sex worker, by the way, quote, gay people secrete everything in each other's presence but tears. They cum on each other, they piss on each other or shit, but never tears. The only sign of tenderness they never secrete in each other's presence. They cum, piss and shit together, but they cry alone. God."

Blake Smith: ⁓ my god, I've forgotten that passage. I hope that I, the next time I'm taking this, that we do not run into some hooker crying. How she saw a dog. mean, she's missing out on domesticity. Blah. ⁓

David Sessions: So, okay, this, what I think is, you know, what I think this moves us toward the contemporary is that, so here we have a recognition of the fact that gay men have an unusual amount of sexual intimacy that they, so in the column, it's sort of treated fast food sex as kind of like this fact of gay life that like the, you know, some people are pushing back against. Here is a restatement of this idea in a different way, like it's, We have this extreme bodily intimacy where we are secreting fluids onto each other and we're all familiar with it. And yet, we don't have these other kinds of intimacy. So it's an idea that I think still comes out that maybe that Bersani notion is helpful here. Impersonal intimacy, that we are connected to each other in this way that was we all fuck each other, but we don't go any deeper than that.

Blake Smith: Although, know, ironically, Dancer is one of the great novels of gay friendship because the story of Malone, this character, is a tale within a tale where there are two correspondents at the beginning and end of the novel who have written the story of Malone. And so these two queens are exchanging these very campy, funny letters, which are based on Holleran's real-life correspondences with several friends. And they're this kind of celebration of... gay friendship. So on the one hand, like the novel really models, it models both the fantasy about like, my God, gay men are so lonely because they fuck all the time. But it also models like gay men are sisters who are kikiing together.

David Sessions: Yeah, well, I I think one way, you know, I'm increasingly thinking, coming to think of that novel as almost like a personification of a series of discourses, like a series of gay discourses about themselves. And this is one of them. And it's one that very, that Holleran seems to, you know, it seems to have some purchase, like it recurs throughout his entire career and all of his writing. ⁓ this idea of sexual intimacy but relational distance. You see this in in gays today, this sense that grinder and casual sex are somehow like, that everyone does them, that they're somehow like, either addictive or empty or lead to a lack of a kind of intimacy that people get tired of or that people like, they want something else or something more than that. And I think that it's both understandable and a little bit like, short-sighted. It's like not, it's not a fully, it's not an accurate and fully, this, just like this passage, it's, it's like, you know, Malone saying this in the middle of a novel where there is lots of deep relational intimacy is like, you know, it's very blinkered and it's not a full characterization of what gay life is like and neither is the like the anti-grinder, you know, discourse.

Blake Smith: And somehow there's some psychological truth whenever people complain about how the culture of casual sex, which now has endured for at least half a century, is preventing them from finding a mate, preventing them from settling down, either because they themselves are addicted to casual sex or everyone else is, like they can't find a good man because everyone... We also hear now, this would not be the discourse of the 70s, although there were certainly open relationships then, but now you hear a lot like...

David Sessions: So yeah.

Blake Smith: ⁓ I can't find a man because everyone's in an open relationship. ⁓ And you know, there's something to that and yet lots of people have made romantic connections through Grindr. Lots of people have seasons of intense casual sex and sluttiness and then are capable of settling into monogamous relationships. That's a pretty typical pattern of gay life to move back and forth between them. And I guess, yeah, what... interest me is that we see that sex is like able to serve these different functions and I guess like part of being a healthy post-modern subject is being able to move among these different ways that sex can be, that it can be you know romantic in a dangerous way, can be romantic in a cozy way, it can be not very meaningful and that's fine but the unhappy contemporary subject is locked out of moving among these modes and feels like stuck in one of them and feels unhappy about that and it feels like, you the way that the gay world is, is preventing me from having the right kind of relationship.

David Sessions: And I think there's a couple of things going on. This is one of the ways that I think that discourses are actually harmful. They're like a very partial description of reality and because it's all people here or it's, you know, people use these, whether they're getting it from social media or wherever, to interpret their own experience and to interpret it in a skewed, inaccurate way. which I think is exactly the same thing with like hetero pessimism as a discourse that you know, you know, is actively harmful to people's actual lives and relationships. So that's one thing. But I also think it's like it is a persistent and I don't know this is necessarily a personal or individual failure that you can blame an individual for but or as a lack of gay culture of the absence of a gay culture that inculcates this somehow that people are trying to inscribe their lives in a straight playbook. That they look at straight people and they try to pick up these ideas of which are obviously not new, of like you shouldn't fuck until date at number X. And like if you are, then you're just participating in hookup culture and you're giving it away too soon and that doesn't lead to lasting relationships. Or instead of accepting that We are, you you're a gay man, it's different for you. That is one of the cool and unique things about us is that the order of operations is often backwards from straight people. Like we, we fuck first and like, that's the way that we like, there's something perhaps about men having sex and relationships with each other that tends to go that direction. And that's the way that that often opens us up to intimacies that we, you know, maybe it's correct that that sex is a kind of impersonal intimacy. Like we think of it as the super intimate vulnerable thing and it is in a way, but it's not necessarily emotional vulnerability, but it can, in a lot of cases, it can open us up to it in a way that maybe sitting in a coffee shop asking each other interview questions doesn't.

Blake Smith: So points from, you gay literature in theory, the extreme insane celebration of the world making intimate power gay promiscuity is perhaps Tim Dean's "Unlimited Intimacy" about bare backing and specifically how about how getting HIV is actually kind of a serve because you could have the same strain of it. that like Foucault had and wouldn't that be a way of being connected to him in a kind of gay brotherhood? Since prep has appeared on the scene, these sort of discourses have really disappeared. don't know if Tim Dean has retracted that one. But, so in 78, at the same time that Dancer in the Dance came out, Larry Kramer's Faggots came out, basically, to the extent that novels have arguments, the novel is an argument that the main character, who is Larry Kramer, cannot get with his love interest because The love interest in everyone in gay New York is having too much

David Sessions: Yes, yes. don't know why this, I don't know why faggots didn't even come to mind when I was thinking about this episode, but that's a great.

Blake Smith: And just a few years later, Larry Kramer and that guy got together and were in a lifelong relationship. Now, how this worked out, ⁓ don't know. That seems insane to me, but it did actually work. So Dancer in the Dance did not get Andrew Holler and a boyfriend, but Faggots did get Larry Kramer a boyfriend. So some people are able to move out of the cycle of promiscuity.

David Sessions: And of course, there's a bunch of discourses out there. Some people think sex is too easy to get. that is, we have this kind of discourse right now, whether it's like sex-negative feminism, or it's the reactionary kind of anti-modern cultural declineist types, or even the not super political, but maybe somewhat right-coded young male. mindset fitness types who are like, you know, focus and lift and don't nut and like, you know, don't watch porn and a kind of backlash to sexual liberation of casual sex that that it's been this disappointment. It's just created alienation and chaos. So there's that. And then there's also the like, incels who are like people are having sex, but only a few, you know, the elites at the top and sex is too hard to get. So there's There's both of those things, but...

Blake Smith: Right? is poorly distributed. You know, I mean, this is another Bersani is the secret of sex is nobody likes it. Now, Leo Bersani never had sex with me and he was like 70 when he wrote that. So, I do think also a lot ⁓ of these different takes maybe just reflect stations of life that theater never happens to be.

David Sessions: Stations of life or, and I was thinking about that in Holleran, the way he's so dialectical almost, like he captures the most romanticized version of a thing and then also the most disenchanted version of it. This, M. Dean book, Hatred of Sex, which he defines as this kind of desire and repellence that we love and hate it at the same, that it's that. divide is constitutive of the thing. That like, we're drawn to this way that like sex unmakes us, but we also like are afraid of that. Like we want it to put us together or like give us some kind of security.

Blake Smith: And to be honest, you know, as someone who has spent most of my life in long-term monogamous relationships, most of the time, sex is, right, if the alternative to fast food sex is the home-cooked meal, a lot of time there's like the mom is tired, so here's some mac and cheese with frozen peas in it. Like a lot of intimate sex with your long-term partner is also like relatively quick and not like, like the idea that sex is like self-shattering. in this kind of American, Lacanian, queer theory thing. I think there are a lot of tenured bottoms out there who want to imagine that when they get it off, it is really destroying the psyche. Like you are rosebudding, you are blowing up the psychic structure, and let's face it, whether it's with a stranger or your lover, 99.9 % of the time, it's just not that big of a deal.

David Sessions: Yeah, well, I would say that it is true that and maybe this is my perspective as someone who's like came to, you know, came out and became gay and like encountered gay sex like as an adult, like as a, you know, not without the, you know, I've come to think that that's a distinctive experience to like come to it as an adult as opposed to like going through it when you're also like going through just the normal parts of growing up and being super young and like disoriented in the world. I do think it's revolutionary to my sense of self, a source of revelation and a certain shattering or overcoming of myself in not necessarily in discrete instances. It's not like that person or that particular time, but as a whole or as an arc or as a means of encountering myself or becoming more fully embodied in ways that I never was before. things like that. But I think also like stations of life that you mentioned is important because it's it doesn't do that forever. Like it has there's a period where it has that possibility but then and it always it can always surprise you and a new person can surprise you or you can be into something you didn't expect but you're not the power and like the transformative power I think of those revelations. It levels out because you know it's it's not gonna be, it's less likely to be new or surprising over time.

Blake Smith: One would hope. I the body can only do so many things. I mean, I look forward in my 40s, you know, maybe I'll become a fist pig and I'll learn some things about me. speaking of intimacy, I'm about to go have dinner with my partner

David Sessions: Okay. All right. Well, we will, we will wrap up there.

Blake Smith: Bye short