Going Out and the Pleasures of Impersonal Intimacy

Show Notes

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)

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.

David Sessions: But even just like going to the club or going to some space where there are a limited number of people, where you go even a few times and you become a regular and you are perceived in the way that you want to be perceived. Like, you you're known to be the person who inhabits the space, but people don't know your whole biography. They don't know the things about you that you don't want them to know. There's something very fun about that kind of limited intimacy. Welcome back to 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'm joined once again by my co-host and fellow historian, Blake Smith. In this episode, we talk about how going out became a subject of fascination and cultural punditry for gay novelists and journalists in New York in the late 1970s. We discuss how in their work we can already see taking shape some of the binaries that are still with us today in terms of how gays think about the quote unquote gay scene and their identities and personal lives. On the one hand, at least in practice, the fun of going out is widely understood and enjoyed. But on the other hand, there's a perpetual unease about it as if going out or going out too much, having every night fever as Christopher Street put it in a 1978 cover story, might be incompatible with some imagined fuller or more wholesome life. If you're listening to us on Spotify or Apple podcasts, don't forget to hit the subscribe button to make sure you get future episodes. And if you feel so moved, to leave us a rating or a review, which helps other people find out about us. You can also subscribe to our sub stack at christopherstreetmag.substack.com to get more of our commentary that accompanies the episode and explore more content from the magazine at christopherstreetmag.com. Thanks so much for listening and we hope you enjoy our conversation about Every Night Fever. David, what drew you to this essay, Every Night Fever, which ironically, or I don't know ironically, coincidentally, this is the cover story of the first issue of Christopher Street that I bought a couple years ago, which set me off on this whole journey of collecting them and then wanting to write a book about this scene. So yeah, what drew you to this? I saw the cover of this one before, you know, before I had it. It was not the first one I ever got, but it was, it was one I was kind of looking for. I guess because it was like in the period that I was interested in, by the way, this is the May 1978 cover story of Christopher Street called Every Night Fever. It's got a, how would you describe this guy on the cover? Is that a clone? Is it a clone? So right. One thing that I love is like, there's all of this very strong anti-clone discourse that remembers him as being super macho. To me, this guy is like a faggot, right? Right. Probably at the time. Like he's got, yeah, like the button down shirt. Does he have a mustache? He has a mustache. He's got a flannel shirt tucked into jeans. He's smoking a cigarette and holding a beer. Yeah, I think like the flannel shirt and jeans. I think that's the Listeners can't tell, but I'm wearing a flannel shirt. So flannel is really not doing anything for you masculinity wise. We should probably say define what a clone is for people who may not have heard that before. Do you want to define a clone? A clone was, I'm not sure the timing exactly. I think this would have been mid 70s, mid to late 70s. It was the mask, the uniform of the mask gays. Like when, you know, after Stonewall, there's kind of a turn toward like a gay masculinity. And I think it starts in the Castro in the gay neighborhood of San Francisco and spreads to the village in New York. And, and the. The kind of stereotype of the time is like all the guys are wearing like this identical outfit, these kind of ratty jeans and work boots and flannel shirts and they're, you know, cruising handkerchiefs in the back pocket, which is probably a little exaggerated. And then there comes to be lots of discourse in the late seventies about this masculine turn. And there are people who are not just like today who are not happy about it. Right. mean, if we were to count up all of the non-seen gays, even the gays who are not like other gays, we end up with like 99 % of the gay population. But yeah, so this guy is sort of cloney or clone adjacent and he's like a bit mask and he's like what, leaning against a wall. So he's like come to the bar club to, to cruise, you know, he's, there by himself. So we can't. We can't really see much context from the photo and clones are not exactly, they're not really mentioned in the story. They're not really the subject. well, I'm sure we'll, we'll find one to talk about, but this is about, so this is the cover stories, May, 1978. So this is less than six months after Saturday Night Fever comes out in December, 1977. It's a, a hit is like understatement. It is a full blown cultural phenomenon. It's. in theaters for months and months. Multiple songs from the soundtrack are like top of the charts. So that's the context. Of course, the article mentions, know, John Travolta in like the second paragraph. Although I guess Saturday Night Fever is kind of like the mainstream or like straight coming out of disco. Whereas this guys have been doing this for several years. I'm sure there's a literature on this, like the heterosexualization of disco in the movie Saturday Night Fever. Which you had sent me the link to is based on this New York article from like 77 or 76 where a journalist basically makes up the story of working class New Jersey or like outer boroughs kids who are coming to Manhattan to party in the discos to make themselves beautiful. Yeah. The article and then the movie invent this world of heterosexual disco. Not that there weren't dance clubs in New York in the seventies where heterosexual people could dance, but like the this scene as represented in the original Sarah Knight fevered New York article and movie is like pristinely non-gay in a way that has very little relationship to. exactly. Although the movie itself like, you know, I watched like the first half hour of it the other day. Like even compared to this guy on the cover of Christopher Street, John Travolta is so faggy. Like his, you know, his outfits, you know, he's wearing these. He's an Italian American man, you know, he's, yeah, he's a roost. It's extremely, ⁓ I saw like just in the first half hour. they harass some gay boys. The movie is astoundingly gritty. So yeah, one remembers like immaculate coiffure and the dancing, you know, there's a rape, there's violence. That's what I was going to say is like, it's so even the camera, like it's so homoerotic, the way that with a camera, just like in this opening set pieces that kind of establishing him and his like obsession with his appearance and going to disco like. He's just staring at himself in the mirror. He's like blow drying his hair and the camera just kind of like panning across his body. Like he's like getting up and adjusting his dick and it like shows all of that. You're making me feel like I need to rewatch this because that sounds hot. mean, John Travolta, whenever you're ready, you know, we know it's okay. We're waiting. Yeah, it might have been the only movie ever that John Travolta was hot in. He's hot in Greece. You know. Okay. It's been a while since I've Battlestar Galactica? Been a phenomenon. Okay. But so there's the original Sarah Neyfever essay movie and then Michael Musta who was all of 22 or 23. 23, yeah. This may be, this is surely one of his first published pieces if not his first. Yeah, and Michael Musto is, we're not, I'm not talking about him like he's some person you should know, like I had no idea who he was before, you know, before I read the story, but he was actually a fairly famous nightlife writer. He wrote for, he was very young when he wrote the story, but he went on to write for the Village Voice. You know, he published, he was at, you know, a fixture at Studio 54. He was like, kind of like one of these Saturday Night Fever characters where he's like an outer borough kid from New York and he's coming, he went to Columbia, so it's kind of creeping into the world of nightlife. He's still alive, he's still, she's still alive, she's still alive, still seems like a really cool person. I think I am aware of Michael Musto from like him being a talking head on VH1 shows, like I love the 80s back in the day. Oh wow. And I have more recently read him. I've been reading through like out magazine in the nineties, two thousands. And he always has like, you know, tongue garbage in that. I have never read, there's like the selected works. So it may be that there's a sort of corpus that really bears paying attention to. Yeah, there's, there are several books. ⁓ yeah, it seems kind of like kind of sex in the city ish, like I want to let. ⁓ yeah, looks like the gay friend from Sex and the City also. Like I don't know if he's actually a small person, but he seems like he has a big head and a small body. ⁓ But anyway, let's talk about what's in this article. It's not, I wouldn't say it's like, how we describe the genre. He's like, so I've actually been looking for a name of the thing because the genre is still with us. Like us, know, the world of media, but particularly homosexuals. where you like name slash constitute a social phenomenon that may be existing, maybe doesn't exist. And then you get a bunch of people who are like friends or acquaintances of yours to affirm and then give their opinions about this phenomenon. So like there was this thing last year, which like, you you had thoughts about, which was like the, we reached peak gay sluttiness? Like everyone is having sex. That's the thesis right now. Everyone is having sex right now. And that's different from the past. And so this Michael Misko 1978 essay, the thesis is everyone is going out now all the time. Like if straight people are going out on Saturday night, going to the disco, gay people are going out all the time. Did you watch the Nutty Professor, the Eddie Murphy version? No, no. It's a great film. So the original Nutty Professor with, ⁓ my God, Jerry Lewis. That's a wonderful film, beautiful technicolor. And the nineties Nutty Professor with Eddie Murphy. is a great, know, Eddie Murphy at one point plays in various disguises, all six or seven members of a family. It's wonderful. And there's a scene where they go to a comedy club and Dave Chappelle plays a hat comic whose routine is women be shopping, women be shopping, women be shopping. You cannot stop a woman from shopping. feel like a lot of this essay is very like people are going out like these faggots. We're going out all the time. Gays are fucking, gays are going out. These are perennial incitations to discourse. And once we have just like, we don't have to like get any numbers. We don't have to somehow prove empirically that this is the case, but it's the seventies. People are going out. can just slate that fact. And then how do people feel about that? There's some reaction. Right. So let me, I'm just going to read like the paragraph where he sets up the intro of the article. John Travolta had something like it in Saturday Night Fever. He had to go to the disco every Saturday night. It was a physical release, a chance to meet with friends and get attention, to feel real in a thoroughly unreal environment. It was a fun ego building escape from his workaday life as a nobody. Take all of that and multiply it by seven on the fanaticism scale. Or better yet, imagine a week in which every night is Saturday and you've got an idea of what every night fever is all about. So he doesn't actually say that it's a trend or everybody's doing it, just like some people are doing it. Some people, we don't know how many. He names a few places and he gives, I guess these are fictitious names because then I Googled them, but he speaks with a few people who are somehow socially located. Like there's a Columbia student, there's someone with some part-time psychotherapy job who are representative figures of this group of people who have to go out every now and Did that register who that? person is in the psychology part. One of the people who's quoted is working at the like, it's called the Institute for Human Sexuality or something. And then it goes on to quote, ⁓ Charles Silverstein, who is real. Yes, yeah. So he's the co-author with Edmund White of The Joy of Gay Sex and like a very famous gay therapist in that era. He thinks people are going out too much. understand, huh? Compared to the ⁓ New York article that cover story that inspired Saturday Night Fever. It's very in this very kind of flowery new journalism style. It's describing what the characters are thinking in their head minute by minute in a way that just can't possibly be real. So compared to that and compared to like the also New York PK sluttiness article from last year, it's not very, you know, those both have like very forceful kind of witty interpretive voices from the writer. This one doesn't so much like it's. It kind of sets it up, but it's more like letting the people themselves speak. So I think that's There's at least two commendable things. mean, the Stephen Phillips horse thing. ⁓ I say this also because my boyfriend loves Celebrity Book Club, so I feel sort of instinctive hostility toward the Stephen Phillips horse. But two commendable things, again, as you say, this essay, I think, gives more emphasis on the perspectives of other people who are like, somehow participating in or evaluating the phenomenon than on Musto himself. But in the quote you just read, actually I think Musto like hits pretty smartly and sympathetically on the pleasure of going out, right? That like, ⁓ you create some little context, some little scene in which you can appear to other people in this pleasurable way. And they see you as. you know, unique and valuable. I mean, this is like, yeah, this is like the fun of belonging to a group. This is the fun of going out with your friends. How to put it, like it seems clear even from that paragraph how Musto could be very well set up to be a chronicler of like the downtown club scene in the 80s. Be like well attuned to what is the pleasure of putting on like the weird boy George costume and having people look at you. Yeah. And he says ⁓ in his, he did this. W Magazine did a profile of him a couple of years ago and he says, I thought this quote, it's kind of like what he says here. He says like, I loved the idea that it was an alternate universe, like fake lighting, fake music, fake universe, and yet it was real. Something about it allowed you to tap into your inner celebrity. It was this idea of like this world in which you can. It's very narrow, you you just appear in a certain way that's different and you can kind of make it up and make an art out of it. Yeah, so I mean, it's a shame that like even so much queer theory is just specifically about sex. like Bressani, who like by the time you started writing about this was in his 60s, so I don't know how much he was actually cruising, but is, you know, really interested in like cruising as like the model of queer subjectivity. But even just like going to the club or going to some space, Like where there are a limited number of people where you go even a few times and you become a regular and you are perceived in the way that you want to be perceived. Like, you know, you're known to be the person who would have us the space, but people don't know your whole biography. They don't know the things about you that you don't want them to know. There's something very fun about that kind of limited intimacy or a Bressani has this great phrase from a late essay, impersonal intimacy. feel like I've heard that somewhere. He thinks of like specifically in the context of cruising, you know, where it's like what we're going to say to each other and what we're going to do to each other is so formulaic. But he has this great moment in that essay where he's like, you know, this is also the pleasure of small talk with your coworkers. And yeah, there's something really fun that like actually Musto gets in his, in his kind of commentary in the essay, maybe more than the people being interviewed by him or the people that he quotes from. A lot of them are talking about like the search for love. or kind of restlessness. But yeah, it feels like he's really interested in this pleasure and belonging to this group, which is like not a group that demands your total identification with it, right? I mean, you know, it's a group that you can like go to at night for a few hours and they like, you know, see you one certain way, but this is a mistake that gay people make when we talk about like our chosen family. Bad enough to have been born into one family, even worse to choose another. you know, what's fun about these sort of spaces is you can appear the way you want to, which you don't get to do with your family because you like were a baby and grew up and they were watching you the whole time. Yes, like it feels like. And you get to end, yeah, and you get to appear as much or little as you want to. I think that's. Yeah. That's important. So Mustard was kind of interested in like going out as this stage to be seen on, but then. Talking with people about this idea that some people are compelled to be going out all the time generates these really strong and interesting emotional reactions in a range of people. So, I mean, if you want to comment on that. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about what's actually in the article and what people say. have what I would say is the fairly classic anti-going-out position, which is that like it's meaningless, you're just trying to fill a hole in your life or run away from something. Chuck Silverstein, the psychologist that we mentioned before, ⁓ he says, anyone who has to get out of the house every night is probably someone who can't withstand the feeling of being alone. I wouldn't want to differentiate between, this is amazing, I wouldn't want to differentiate between going to discos or bars. and having dinner with friends. It's the same motivation, fear of being alone. So like even having dinner with friends is just as bad as like going clubbing, just as empty and evading your- I love, and at some point in the coming weeks, like Dan Oppenheimer and I will do like a podcast talking about the new Ava Illou's book and how much we love Ava Illou's. So she's like- Still need to read that. Still need to read her. She is so smart and wonderful. And she has some thoughtful appreciation of like why We need therapy in contemporary culture, like the functional work that it does, but she has a lot of sharp criticism of the ideal of therapy where people like Silverstein can always say, you're doing X because you're unable to be alone, because you're not at peace with yourself. There's some like implicit ideal of the totally, like the person who can meet all of their own emotional needs. Right. That's the total. Yeah, I think this is a huge part of contemporary therapy ideology, or especially, maybe not even actual therapists, although I'm sure they do too, but especially the social media discourse around therapy discourse. It's so, it's like this, you have to be completely autonomous and self-sufficient and meet all your own needs, be your own best friend and all this shit. whereas to the extent that therapy, couples therapy, which I have found helpful with my partner, if therapy helps us get along in the relationships that we have to have in the world. Like, okay, great. But if there's an unstated, because insane ideal of satisfying all of my emotional needs, Brad Gutch has that book from the nineties, Finding the Boyfriend Within, which is like, okay, ⁓ am I gonna find my job within? Am I gonna find my house within? Like some things I actually need from the world, right? I need from other, yeah. Yeah, externally. Right. are you just having dinner because you're hungry? and you're seeing friends because you're lonely. Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing my friends because I'm lonely. Okay. Right. I thought this was really interesting. This kind of, this idea of like people socializing or going out to like avoid themselves. And like that, the implicit idea here is that like there's something, there's something better or something deeper about being able to be alone or be, and you hear people say this now too, ⁓ but they're at the same time, we're also like. moralizing about everyone being alone too much and like no one leaves the house and you know we're all just on our couch you know streaming and ordering DoorDash and all of that. the frictionless, you know everyone's moralizing about the frictionless existence you know we should we should go out and be uncomfortable and be around people. So what do we think about this like which is better should we alone or should we be? There's doubly like, so within like the framework of the article, like the seventies, there's this competition between a kind of therapeutic ideal of the person who is able to be at home, alone, not feel compelled to go out versus like the pleasure of seeing and being seen. So like that's one way of imagining the pleasure of going out that like you're on this stage, like the fun of this kind of self-display. But there's also. a sense that you're going out in order to find a romantic partner and that maybe you're going out all the time on the one hand you're doing that in order to find a romantic, you know, sexual partner, but you're so addicted to the pleasure of going out that you're having trouble connecting with someone. like the people interview, they're saying like, what I would really like to do is to be at home in bed watching Saturday Night Live with my lover, but I haven't yet found that person or I'm addicted to going out. So. Yeah, on the one hand, there's this like, there's a couple of competing fantasies of like the autonomous person who was like fine being alone, the person who's like in bed watching SNL with their lover. And it's crazy that already in 78, like that could be the like, I've given up on having a hot gay life. So I'm just eating takeout in bed watching us now. And that's still, that's still what you do when you're ready to get fat with your boyfriend. Yeah. And then also there's this sense that like, now we, we have, I don't know since when, but a kind of fear like, ⁓ no one is going out anymore. And so wasn't, wasn't there something better when people felt compelled to go out either to like display themselves and get attention or maybe to look for a romantic partner? Cause now like, I mean, certainly thinking about my areas of singleness being like on the couch for several hours with like Grindr watching TV is surely worse than, at least for the bar you have to get dressed up. Yeah. So, so I think, I mean, one of the, as with a lot of gay discourses that might've appeared in Christopher Street and that we still see recurring today, is that almost all the perspec, the different perspectives people have, even though they're opposite, are, are true at different times. In your own experience, in your own journey, like depending on where you are at the moment, it's absolutely true that you can, done this myself, that you can go out all the time just because your life feels lonely and empty or because you don't have anything else to do like that. And that can be true and not be a bad thing or not. And then other times, there's nothing wrong with going out. You may not even think like, I'm trying to avoid it or it's bad for me, but you're in a period where you're trying to read or you're trying to get enough sleep and not be. hung over all the time and things like that where some of this, I kind of go through phases of like all of these things or I talk to other people who do as well and it's just like, ⁓ I'm enjoying my antisocial era and just being on the couch and cooking and you can kind of lean into any of those phases and like pretty soon you lose the desire to go out at all or like. I guess biographically, any of these activities are only fun on the condition. that I could do the opposite. like, you know, one of the big, like I am an extremely stay at home person. My life is basically sitting in rooms reading. So you would think that like, like during COVID, I would have been among the best equipped people to deal with like lockdown. was living in France at the time, but I absolutely collapsed. I couldn't handle it because me staying at home depends on something is happening outside and I'm not taking part in it. Right. ⁓ it's so sweet. Thank you for inviting me to your birthday. I cannot make it, sadly. But when there are no things. So did you develop every night fever during COVID? Is that what you're saying? Right. So I mean, well, I got a divorce during COVID. This is what happened. Well, yeah, we'll say I'm like, I thought the same thing. thought, you know, COVID starts happening. It hits, like, get canceled. You know, I'm writing my dissertation, like teaching. I'm just like, Yes, like that's exactly what I wanted to happen. I'm gonna get a free year of no teaching or just teaching online. And I was collapsed in a few months and within a few months after that, I came out. like it totally crashed. When he broke some girls, like Macron within a few weeks of COVID starting was like, now is a good time to brush up on your German and your piano. He was very like Asian tiger mom about it. And yeah, that was not my experience. But yeah, the pleasure, how to put it, going out, whether it's to be, you know, seeing like, people know that I'm hot or people know that I'm a regular here, or it's to like try to get some, that it's fun when you can tell yourself that you could not do it. Like you would also be happy staying at home and staying at home feels fine if you think that you could go out and be hot. If you're at home because you know, no one would want to fuck you if you left that house. Yes, or yeah, or if you're so if you're a reddit insult or you know You're a chud and you're just like I I would go out if I wasn't terrified of human Yeah, I mean I also wonder have we always had like a pretty high and constant level of people who are not going out and either having to like enchant it quirkily with like, know Millennials hate going out or who are like desperately unhappy, but we just haven't heard from them because you know prior to the reddit We didn't have access to the experience of lives of people who were staying at home. Whereas now, if you look on the gay forums on Reddit, you would think that gay people are at home, single, miserable. Yeah, miserable, ugly, have no self-confidence. Well, the thing that I find so ironic about that is that, and this is one of the sources of whether it's the, ⁓ let's just keep it focused on the Reddit people and the like, I would never go out because I don't belong there. I'm just going to be ignored and I'm invisible and blah, blah. The thing about going out is that like versus even Grindr or like meeting someone on a dating app, going out is, it's like the best odds for people who are kind of disadvantaged, whether it's in age or looks or whatever. Like that is where David Sessions says ugly people go out. That's actually the best place for you. Yeah, yeah, ugly people go out, ugly people like... You won't take good pics at home, ugly people. Ugly people like make out with hot people, ugly people get invited to after parties like that all happens. Hot people get tired and confused around two in the morning. They don't know. They don't know what's happening. Hot people are fucked up and they don't know what you look like. Are you currently, I don't know how autobiographical you want to get, but I have not been a goer outer in many years. like right after college, like living in Paris, I would go to the Moray, not every night of the week, but like a couple times a week. But that's been a long time. You are currently, question mark, a goer outer? are? So I don't like, I no longer have every night fever like I have. Well, first of all, let's just say like, As much as things are the same between this article and now, like, times are different. There are not anywhere, there's not anywhere to go out every night. You still hear that, you know, when you talk to people who have been, you know, older guys who have been around Boston for decades, they're just like talking about how many, how many bars and clubs there used to be and like there used to be something to do every So in this, in this, Michael, let's just think what's crazy is like, not that there were a bunch of bars and clubs in New York. Okay, well you could go out every now and But there's this one in Buffalo, which has this like stupid name. What is the? The Hibachi Room. The Hibachi Room, which as a rice queen, I'm very intrigued by it. Sounds like Benihana is a gay club. So it eventually, I found something online about it. It was shut down like recently, but it had long had another name. Okay. But anyway. But Buffalo had some hot. Yeah. Right. mean, Buffalo had a, there's a like map on my historic map online of like all the like queer spots in Buffalo, which is insane. Okay. But you could not go out now in Boston every night if you wanted to, saying? No, like there are gay bars open every night of the week, but they're not, you know, there's somewhere to go, but there's, you're not missing anything. It's not like a happening thing, but yeah, okay. So I, so you asked me like my experience. So, so obviously mine is experience of a little weird since I came out. in my 30s as a fully formed adult. And I took to going out very quickly and more effortlessly than I would have thought for someone who was much like you, was like an academic, like an inside books person and consider myself socially awkward. I don't know, there was just something that I really liked about it. Maybe it was the release from my old life, the contrast with it, the. the freedom and physicality of it versus- Were you already working out or were you like slumpy? Did you gain or lose weight during COVID? Because that's also an important, like people who had like the COVID, I'm going to get hot. And then people who, you know, sort of collapsed in a fatness during- I think I initially gained weight like the first few months and then 2021 is the downhill, like where I started. I started simultaneously like getting fitter and also coming out. But at first, I would say like the first, know, pretty quickly, like at first, you know, I was nowhere near, know, for a couple years I was like nowhere near what I look like now. it was already fun. Going out was already fun even when you didn't have that's the thing is like I expected, like I think I had this internal narrative of like I'm already too old, like I'm not, you know, I didn't know what to expect, but. I didn't expect much and I was surprised. was like, it doesn't matter what I look like, nobody cares. You're in great company because ⁓ I'm sure we have somehow talked about this, but Michael Denny didn't come out until 30, George Tambolian until his late 30s. Both of them in their diaries are like, ⁓ my God, I'm too old and I'm already not hot, I squandered my youth. And then, you know, they come to New York and it turns out they can have plenty of sex. right. Yeah. Like I love this, that thread in Stamboulian. And he talks, I think in one of the interviews, he talks about like, you know, having an apprehension about Fire Island and like going there and realizing that it's kind of, it doesn't matter. Like your like age doesn't matter. And that's all, you know, I had that same thing about, you know, Provincetown. Like even though I like, it was used to going out, I still kind of viewed like going to New York or going to P-Town as like, this next level of, I was afraid of, until I got there and I was like, who cares? Of course, of course also like I was doing everything I could to like be the equal of those people or to fit in. ⁓ But yeah. You're on preventative botox. I also had never really, I had also never really done drugs until that, well, I was never a big drinker. Well, cause you went to like Bible college, right? mean, yeah, like I didn't really drink in college or, you know, wasn't allowed to. I drank like in my adult life, but I just never had a like, I never had a going out phase or like getting wasted phase. I had been like blackout drunk maybe three times in my life before I was 30. But I think it was that. Like I think it was just kind of a mixture of things. the getting to be around people in a way that I could be close to them and be in a group or be in a social setting and not have to talk like that. was a, you know, I like there's a surprising thing about like when I nowadays when I go to, you know, I try to be more normal now, I'd like do more like normal social things and not only go to go out. But when I'm at like a house party too long or somebody's birthday, I'm just like having to talk. I'm just like, okay, it is time to go to the club. So so no one can hear. Well, so it's true. And this is like to the Brasani point of this impersonal animacy that like, guess in a way this is a gays are chosen family thing because I mean, family sucks, but I guess what's great in quotes about family is you don't have to like have anything to talk to them about. Like, you you're, you're connected to them regardless of whether or not you really have any interest in common. And there's something about like, it, you know, it's good that we have this through fucking, but if you're just like meeting people like section on the apps and like that's your connection to the people. There's something kind of, I don't know, limited about that, like dancing, like going to the club, like there are these ways for like people who actually have very little in common with you and you could not maybe sustain a conversation with. Right, yeah. This was my, I was unable to meet anyone through Hinge or Tinder. I don't know what your experience on like the dating apps has been, but I hate them. I've made multiple friends. through Grindr. ⁓ And then like I met my partner like in real life. But I feel like, you know, if you fuck someone or you're like in a same physical space with someone, like your conversation can come up like surprisingly, like in a kind of secondary way. But like, if the emphasis is on, we have to find out what's in common with us through talking. That's actually a terrible. The worst. Yeah, it's horrible. No, no, same. Like it's, it's kind of, I've even noted that like at times where I was like feeling like I should go out less or like I'm, it's ruining my sleep or I be doing drugs this much or like things like that where like there's good reasons not to do it. That also that like, that is when I like my social circle expands. It's like when I meet people and when I go to after parties and like that's when I like actually I am in the head space to like. relax and forget about everything and like actually focus on other people and kind of like, you know, I don't know how strongly I believe this, I kind of, I kind of feel somebody you meet in that context is like, if you're doing that and you meet someone in that context, you kind of already know that they're a person like you versus if they're just a rando from Hinge that, you know, has no connection to the gay world at all. And you haven't seen kind of them. people don't have to like, you know, do anything in particular. They don't have to love going out. But I consider it a red flag if somebody is like unknown and like no has no connection to the gay social world. Well, and there's something so pleasurable and fun about ⁓ a good friend and now like co-author of a few things, what five years ago, like sleeping with him. And then I see like his books on the bedside table. I'm like, ⁓ it's so interesting that like you're reading Barton Foucault and like, you know, we can talk about this. But if If I had met him on an app where the profile says I'm into Barton Foucault, I'm like, fuck you. That's disgusting. You should kill yourself. So you have felt what some people in the essay describe as a kind of ambivalence about going out or, I shouldn't be going out so much because this is preventing me from doing what? Not necessarily more like, I am generally not more or less sick about it. You I don't tell myself, no, if I wanted to, I would. It's more like, it's probably more that I just got tired of it and it's Boston. So it's, you know, it's eventually, you know, where even New York, like the last couple of years that I've gone more often, like often enough to, that even the New York stuff starts to feel familiar. And I don't, I don't know. It has real downsides. Like if you're, you know, you do feel, if you do drugs, you're not hung over at least, but like you, You sleep horribly and like feel terrible for days sometimes or like, you know, so it's, ⁓ it has a cost for sure. then- doing, David? What is your, what's your drug stat? Let's not put that on the record. I could, you know, my, my own, like, you know, I take collagen in the morning and then I'm on crotam and then a weed coming before bed. It's, ⁓ I'm a California mom. But yeah, but anyway, and like in that, that interferes with doing well at work or like working out regularly or- you know, if I want to write anything or like which I've been, you know, the last five years like trying to, I've to let myself not do it for a while, but I've been trying to, you know, get to the point where I can and. There is something a bit. You just got to focus sometimes. You know, to think of the great like novelistic expression of this, which comes out the same year, Dancer from the Dance, where, you know, real life Andrew Holleran, Eric Garber, is like. an Ivy Leaguer from a nice WASP family who is like working as a cater waiter for several years in New York, kind of gathering material for the novel while partying all the time. And then the main character of the novel, Malone, is like not writing. This is from the same kind of background, like a wealthy Ivy Leaguer, but like throws it all the way to just be a partier. And so in some way, the novel is like the fantasy of someone who's like, partying, but also trying to write and have these serious ambitions. But what if I could just be totally hedonistic? What would that be like? I think that tension between the author's own way of life and the wish, the expression of a desire is part of what makes the novel fun. It's the opposite of holler and loved, prused. Remembrance of Things Past is about the main character Marcel learning to become a writer. Whereas like Malone is just like, I'm gonna party and then I'm gonna get too old and I'm die. I'm gonna graduate. Well, he becomes unemployable or like, I had to read it several times over several years to stop identifying with it so much or to stop. Cause I think like I read it as. the setup was very similar to what I was going through. it's, you know, somebody who kind of comes to it. if you were Malone's age, she'd be dead by now. Yeah, somebody who comes to it kind of late, who kind of sets out to like make themselves understand this world, totally give themselves over to it. And then, so I had that, you know, I had that moment of really depression almost, it's like, am I Malone? Am I stuck in this world? And it was never because I didn't like it or I was jaded about it, it was more just because Or I worried that, it's really easy to, or it's possible to like actually get stuck in it or to like to atrophy so much or to kind of lose your connection with the rest, the outside world and the discipline that you have to have to like. So it's interesting that this is like a perennial thing, whether it's in the musto or hollering or like your experience today. And then like, I don't know what, if any. kind of like literary or cultural artifacts from like our moment speak to this, but I think it is, it's a perennial concern that a lot of gay guys have that like the world of going out at whatever age into it is so seductive, exciting, that you might enter it and not be able to leave. You might not be able to leave in time. It might prevent you from focusing on a career or a partner or whatever. And I guess maybe like I wasn't hot enough in like my early 20s for that to be a concern. Or I'm just like very like, I very much need a man. So I like, I've like never been single for any length of time. There was never like a question of like, ⁓ am gonna spend too much time going out and being hot that I don't have someone to take care of me because someone has to take care of me. This seems like a central concern maybe of gay writing in the late seventies. And it's still like an existential concern I feel like for a lot of gay guys, but it doesn't seem like, I don't know what media. Yeah, is it? Is it though, like is it a fear of missing something or is it like that it's empty and shallow? I think that's what I hear people say more is that like they're doing it because it's the easy thing to do or it's the default and it's as opposed to doing something harder, doing whether it's working on a career, accomplishing something or building, developing relationships with either a partner or. Like as if there's something fundamentally like shallow and like it atrophies your, it's a kind of like instant gratification or like it, you know, atrophies your ability to connect or to do something more that takes more effort. I feel like we do have, there's maybe nothing as good as Dancer from the Dance to illustrate like these current imagined trade-offs. But like, I think we still live within this fantasy that there are these opposing ways of life. Yeah, Dancer, there's this wonderful fantasia where for a few pages, Malone goes off with this Italian-American guy and they're living in an abandoned loft for a few months in this kind of urban idol. And then Malone gets bored and fucks someone who looks exactly like his boyfriend. Just to do it. And then throughout the novel, like, characters make fun of the idea of, going off to suburban New Jersey with your partner and, like, opening up a flower shop. And it's like, either you live in this world of, intense going out all the time where you're nominally searching for love, but actually you're more into just, the social pleasure of going out, or you disappear into the dyad. I feel like that's just, like, not, like... Yeah, it's not real. Like, and I don't think it was... This is what I wonder, like, Dancer for the Dance is like, was, I don't think that was real even then. Like, I don't think that was a binary, you know, choice. I think there was a lot of discourse about it. A lot of people, you know, talked about that. Like, you find a lover and you disappear. you, you know, whatever. And I'm sure that happens, like, people in that era of, like, all of that being new and it being, like, this kind of completely, you know, enclosed, you know, underworld the way it is in Dancer from the Dance. people kind of show up and fall into it for a few years and then they kind of get their life together and move on. I'm sure that happens. But I don't know that it was ever this binary thing, where you're either a person who goes out all the time or you're like coupled up in Westchester running a business or what. But somehow I feel like, yeah, I have not seen, I don't know, in the last generation some great gay novel or film or whatever. Maybe we just have some dumb tweets that illustrate this sense of a dichotomy though. Like if I'm living with my partner in the suburbs, I imagine and look down on like the scene gays who are living this like shallow narcissistic, you know, sex obsessed existence. if I'm like, like this, yeah, the Stephen Phillips horse thing about like peak gay sluttingness where it's imagining participation in that is being driven by like a fear of missing out. Yeah, like this seems to neglect like many normal people are in basically monogamous relationship, but sometimes like going out and fucking people and, you know, like enjoy spending time at home, but also go to the club sometimes. But there seems like a longstanding wish to imagine a very strong polarity and tension between like the compulsion to go out, to see and be seen. And then like, but couldn't I escape with my lover to Connecticut or New Jersey and never be seen again. Right, because it's going out as tight, like it's taxing, like it's tiring, it's tiring, it's expensive, you have to look good, which means you have to like have clothes and work out and, or, you know, you don't have to do those things, but you most people. There's that ugly guy in the Musto essay who is a regular, who was like made fun of by the waiter. And I thought good for her. What, did they say he's ugly? Did they say, yeah, he's somehow like nebbishy. Where does this, one regular barefoot boy says he knows going out may be bad for him in the long run. That's David, a waiter there, points to him with a slight sneer as he passes. He belongs to a certain type that always comes here. He never buys drinks. He looks like a total nunic and he usually goes home alone. He never even checks his coat. Well, this is like very, you know, this is something I've thought about too. Like there's always these characters like in there. Usually older men are everywhere. They're always out. Sometimes they're always super drunk or they're like, there's one that I've seen at a bar in Boston that's like, he's a really flamboyant dancer, super into dancing. And you think he's on Molly or something, but I don't think he is. I think that's just what he likes He just has that pre-dimension. That's just what he likes to do. So that's kind of how I interpreted this. I can't wait to be one of these. Yeah, I've, I think about- fixture. I think about that. But there's also, you know, I saw that kind of from working at a gay bar in Boston that has like a lot of overlapping gay community, you know, it's kind of, there's a lot of overlapping gay communities that go to it. It has like a lot of different stuff. It's kind of, you know, it's community center-ish in a way that, ⁓ that exposed me to like a whole world of, you know, guys who are like quite a bit older than me, but have just a very vibrant community, like whether they have partners or not, and like of socializing and having dinner and, you know, going to the cabaret or going to the, you know, going to the dance floor sometimes or, and that's, I don't know, some of that has made me like more, and then of course seeing guys my age that are married and that they are still together as a couple, like a part of the scene or they like host things or that there's just, there's all kinds of stances toward how much you participate in the gay public and that it's not this binary of either you do it or you don't, or that it means anything in particular if you do. Something about like being, I don't know, a young gay person, which like a number of people being, I mean, most of himself is, he's like 23, and then a number of, like he's interviewing a fellow Columbia student. The need to define yourself in opposition or through participation in some like gay scene that you maybe know like barely anything about. I mean, I wonder like, I have no sense of what it's like to be like a gay social media personality. Like I wonder like for us, I mean, there's both like actual going out and then I don't know, if I were like a 21 year old gay guy, would I think like, if you're not on gay Twitter, for no one, if you're not posting, like, yeah, would we have now the essay both about like, forget peak gay sluttyness, but like, too much gay posting. Like, is that, is that- Yeah, I mean, that would be the, that would be the discourse now. Like, are you, are you too, are you addicted to social media? Or like, do you have, yeah, I don't know. I think there's like a- Everyone can kind of be like this, but I think definitely like people in their mid-20s and down this thing where they are kind of all just creators by default. It's more likely than not that they, whether it's a hobby or it's being hot or whatever, that they try, like they post something, they feel like they're- sold whole kits. for feet pics. They bought a ring light for feet pics, even if it never worked now. Well, feet, is the ultimate grift because it's like, can sell your feet without, you can post feet on Instagram. it's a non-sexual thing. It's the only fetish that's like allowed to be shown. I conversely, I felt really bad in recent months. So I am an aficionado of LPSG and male general. And I also, I don't spend much time on, but I enjoy that it exists, WikiFeet, which. Yeah, yeah. So like any, any celebrity, however minor, if they have been at the beach or they've been shoeless, there's some, there's some photos that are on WikiFeet. So if you're interested in anyone, their feet were there. But now with AI, you can just generate. like last year there were these infamous Jacob Elordi foot pics where ⁓ He's doing kind of ⁓ Fendom adjacent stuff. He has his shoe off. He's got his foot in the air. He's getting the middle finger AI generated. So that means that the honest, hardworking people who have been putting in the hours to put together the feet pic archive with real foot pics. Or like the people that used to, those photos that used to be on the internet where you could find like celebrities' faces photoshopped onto porn bodies. And they were almost never good, but every now and then they Yeah, people worked really hard on those. Yeah. was a crap. It's a lost art, I'm sure. There were some people on Nifty, which I always thought was corny, but now I kind of miss, who when they would write an erotic story on nifty.org, would have celebrity photos to show you, like, these characters, here are some celebrities who look like them. Or if we were doing a movie version of my erotic story, yeah, this is who it would cast. And now it's just AI, you know, no thank you. I guess as that gets more, as that takes over the world, then the truly imaginary world of the written word will become, maybe the stories on Nifty will become even more important. Nifty will be even more important, going out will be even more important. know, my friend who was like the biggest, sort of going out all the time slut, claims that he can tell that like Zoomers have been under socialized since COVID, that they're very bad at going to gay bars, that they don't know how to flirt, that it's like become more difficult to cruise people. He may also, you know, he, he, he smokes cigarettes, so he may be just, you know, tapping out of that market. But I would love for some anthropologists to be telling us like have, have things really changed. Are people worse at going out? Are they going out really less? I don't know. Zoomers as a generation is different than... I don't know. I feel like gay boys are kind of, you know, always a little bit prodigious about it. Like they find it... Certainly the ones that one meets, the most hopeless cases. They are stuck at home. don't know. Well, I see no sign that they are bad at it or giving up on it. I don't think we've talked about this. I am not like a Zoomer lover, but my lover is Zoomer. What is your age range? How old has Ben been? He is 28 years Oh, okay. And I am 29. You're 29. Do you remember Streetcar Named Desire Blanche Dubois, I only recently learned is 36 in that play. Never seen it. You're a Southern woman, how can it be that you haven't? I saw that at age 12 with my mother. Yeah, I knew the title of it maybe, but that was about it. ⁓ My situation ship is 96, so he's turning 30 this year. Okay, so mean older than mine. And soon, look, I think there are some gen alphas who are already 18, and you could be old enough to be their dad. Yeah, well that's the thing too, is that they're very into the daddy thing, like even if they don't call you that. To them, I'm big and muscular and they're into that. it's, And you have a bed frame. Yeah, of course. So yeah, my college ex continues to date guys who are college age, although they often are not going to college. And I remember a few years ago he was telling me, the great thing about these kids is I live in a studio apartment. They think I have my together. Right, yeah, exactly. Because they're living with their parents. Yeah, they're living with their parents or they're in dorms. So like you have a normal house, you look like an adult who has a pit together. Yeah, 100%. Okay, yes. Now we have now exceeded the scope of the most difficult, but many important points for That was exactly what I was hoping for, that we could not talk about it, but spiral into other things.