Gay Men and the Politics of Hotness

Show Notes

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

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Christopher Street on Substack
Christopher Street website
Blake on Substack
David on Substack

Sources

• Joe Bernstein, “Handsome at Any Cost,” New York Times, February 13, 2026.
• Jordan Castro, “Getting the Pump,” Harper’s, February 2024.
• Blake's Substack posts about George Stambolian's interviews and his archival diary
• George Stambolian, “Interview With a Hot and Handsome Man,” Christopher Street, 1983.
• George Stambolian, Gay Fantasies / Male Realities (1984).
• David's Substack post about looksmaxxing and contemporary anti-beauty discourse.

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: David says get the hot guys while they're fucked up on drugs. They won't notice how ugly you are. It's dark, they're confused, they're dehydrated. That is my number one protest. Hello and welcome to Off Christopher Street, the podcast where we look into the archives of the gay magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I am David Sessions and I am joined for our very first episode by my co-host and fellow historian Blake Smith. Today we are discussing the politics of hotness, why hotness attractiveness Physical beauty have for so long been central to gay male culture and at the same time, a perpetual source of unease and controversy. We are super excited to be releasing our first episode and if you would like to get future episodes, you can find off Christopher Street on Spotify, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and give us a follow. You can subscribe to our sub stack at christopherstreetmag.substack. ⁓ where you will also get ⁓ additional texts and commentaries as we have time to produce them. ⁓ Or you can visit our beautiful website at christopherstreetmag.com and explore other articles in Christopher Street that we may be talking about in future episodes. And now here is our conversation about the politics of hotness. Since we don't know when this is gonna come out, it's perhaps worth noting that while we're recording this, ⁓ what we might call hotness discourse is at a fever pitch, seeming that never end of magazine stories about weight loss on GLP drugs, there's articles about how everyone is injecting themselves with off-label peptides, more and more think pieces about whether body positivity is dead, and most recently, the young influencer Clavicular broke containment from his world of incel-adjacent looks-maxers, aka young men who are pursuing hotness at any cost, and is widely, if a bit oddly, being treated as somehow embodying our cultural moment. So Clavicular has been on this the last couple of weeks. He's been on this media tour with his awkward autistic self being profiled by the New York Times appearing on the Adam Friedland show while explaining his cocktail of off-label drugs and plastic surgeries as well as his bleak social darwinist ideology in which nothing matters except one's conformity to a very precisely elaborated set of beauty standards. And if that weren't enough, we also apparently have still not resolved the question of whether we collectively are having enough sex or indeed whether we are having any at all. But we are not going to talk So the discourse wonders, is being hot okay and are people fucking? Is it? I mean, you would think that if the problem is that people are not fucking enough, that being hot might be okay. No, we need to lower our standards until everyone is fucking. That's the- that's- Okay. Is that- But what if- what if no one's fucking because everyone's too ugly? What if we need to look smacks? ⁓ you know, I still feel some- some few hot gay guys are doing their part to raise the average. You know, while doxy prep still works, know, before the antibiotic resistant STIs catch up with us. ⁓ But in 1983, one man dared to ask these questions well before our current age of discourse, and he is George Tambouliens. Do you want to introduce him? Sure, I will do it this time. So, George Tambouliens was a, he was a professor of French. and comparative literature at Wellesley College. He was a contributor to the gay magazine, Christopher Street, from which we take our name. And he's mostly, you know, stood out to us for his, I know he's important for a lot of reasons that we will hopefully have the occasion to talk about, including his kind of pioneering work, creating a canon of post-Stonewall gay literature. But one of the things that he did was a series of interviews in Christopher Street with different types of gay men. And they're just these like really wide ranging conversations with gay guys that he tried to present as archetypes. there's, give me some examples. what are the ones that's- So an interview with the bottom, whom he calls an analyst. There's with the drag queen. An analyst, okay so. It's called, it's an analyst, but when you, that's such an odd word that no one says. It sounds, you think- I should start identifying as an analyst. You think analyst when you read it, which is what reminded me of the Arrested Development analogous. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Sort of a Tobias Fungka. I mean, there's some kind of Tobias vibes in the bottom. Yeah, with a drag queen, a black guy. A black guy. There's an interview with a black guy. A fetishist and a masochist. These are different. There is the interview with a gay father or a patriarch. there's gonna be with a gay dad. And with a rich guy. With a who owns a prominent bath house. So it's the 10 kinds of gay guys. But these are very, they're sometimes very funny, sometimes weird. They're all little snapshots of gay culture. And the one we're gonna talk about relates to all of this because it is the interview with the A hot and handsome man as the line on the cover says it, which is points to whoever wrote that headline for distinguishing between hot and handsome, because those are not the same thing. Although some people incorrectly use them interchangeably. I think of handsome as being mostly in the face. Correct. Someone can be hot actually. precisely because they have a great body and an ugly face. we've talked about Ryan D. Peterson. Yes, yes. Peterson with all E's. He's created a Wikipedia for himself. So he's a prominent author. ⁓ I love anyone who wrote their own Wikipedia. Yeah, I've done that. hurt my feelings at the time. It was marked for speedy deletion. They clocked you and me. This is a not famous bitch. Right. haven't checked if Ryan's is still up. And Ryan, if you're listening, love you. Love your work. Good to see you. Where was this going? Interview with a hot and handsome man to answer the perennial question, what's it like to be hot? As it says in the table of contents, what is it really like to be gorgeous? George Timbaland finds out for us. And we don't know who the hot and handsome man is. There's enough details in here that we could Probably if we were in historian mode or looking in the archives, we could probably figure it out. His partner took some of the nude photos of him that appear in the article. So his partner is named, he is also on the cover of the magazine. like, why don't you like, like since people can't see it, why don't you describe what's on the cover? have, Muscle Daddy with beautiful pecs. So, and this is something like we could we could talk about, know, at some later moment, but this is a great age of the discovery of male pecs. So there's a line in Dancer from the Dance where I think Sutherland, who you might imagine is like a wispy post-twinkie queen, but is actually built, we learned from this line, says that he has bigger breasts than his mother. put a pin in that because I think he's talking about someone else. it's worth noting that that joke, Holleran often repeats himself. That joke appears in at least two Andrew Holleran novels, if not more. We love a queen who recycles. But yes, I have also read things about how... That was a change. You're like, wasn't always normal for guys to find like big pecs hot. And that was a change like in the 90s. yeah. And the big clearly defined. And the photo is us as if we're sucking his cock looking up at him. So we see the pert nipples, we see the big pecs, and we see this gorgeous golden sort of blonde russet pubic hair. It's so abundant. I don't know if you're a pubes guy. do, you know, I love Asians, but their pubic hair is a little weird. So I do, I miss this kind of pubic hair. It's like Jason and the Golden Fleece. Disclaimer, like is dating an Asian so he can say things like that. I can, you know, can say, anyone can say things. They're just, as Trump once said, they're just words. They're just words folks. They're just words. And then at the top of this here he has a beautiful golden curls. cut off like right about the line level of his dick. There's just this expansive pelt of golden pubes and then we look up to his chest and see the bottom of his chin and his golden curls like he has a of a mane and a very. And he's not looking down at us. We're looking at him. He's looking off into the distance thinking about what it's like to be hot. Because so they analyze this photo that's on the cover in the story. So we might have a have occasion to talk about that. Okay. So they talk a little bit about the setup of the interview. They're at they're at hot and handsome man's house. At one point, Stamble in remarks that there are mirrors everywhere. They're filming the interview. So they, you know, he talks about that kind of right off the bat that ⁓ that there's a camera rolling and Stambolian is very, you he is a, you he's a literary critic. He's also interested in visual art and the male nude and photography and art. He's like edited some work on that. He's always, he's always very attentive to perception and the way things look, the way things are staged. It's one of the things I like about his writing, because even when he's talking, he's having this kind of graphic sexual interview with someone. He's thinking about like. their interaction and how they're looking at each other. And he sort of brings that refined visual perspective to everything he thinks about them. Yeah. mean, Stambolian has a few really great articles like on Dwayne Mickels, on the art and politics of the male nude. He teaches a class on this to Wellesley, to the girls there. And I wonder what they make of it. Like I've seen the syllabuses, but I have no idea like what the student evaluations were. And Stambolian is really interested in how this guy thinks about being hot. So in the book version, so there's a 1984 book that gathers up all the interviews he did with men, Christopher Street from 80 to 83. And in the book version- And that should, we should say like, if people are interested in that, that is called what? Male Fantasies, Gay Realities. Male Fantasies, Gay Realities. That's pretty easy to find online. Like you can read it from the open library has it. There's places where you can flip through it. And we're also putting these interviews on the website. And I mean, it's- It's worth looking at David's website because you get the photos, which sadly the book version doesn't include all the fun photos. Right, yeah. The magazine version. A lot of these have good photos and they're not in the book. But in the book, Stambolian reveals that he'd been fantasizing for a while about interviewing a hot guy and friends kept setting him up with guys who they thought were hot for him to interview. And he's like, no, no, this isn't right, this isn't right. And he finally finds this guy. at like an AIDS testing thing. Stain Bullion I think is drawn to this guy because this hot guy has so much to say about his own feelings of being hot and the way that he gets off on looking at himself and other people looking at him. So I'm sure there are many hot guys walking around who are just like enjoying being hot but not thinking about it so much. But this guy has a really strong relationship to his hotness. has really thought about it. Right, he's one of the people who have thought about it a lot, is, it's kind of a rare thing. know, people, hotness doesn't generally correlate with thoughtfulness or even intelligence. So yeah, it's interesting that Sibillion doesn't bring this up at all, but I think we have, like we had then and we have now a really strong cultural fantasy of the blonde beast, you know, or the Chad. Like Chad is... happy because he does not have self-consciousness. And part of being a beautiful person, we might imagine, is not having reflexivity. Reflexivity makes us miserable. I think this is like a terrible, pernicious, like really, really bad lame. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it is- or even if you are, if you're like a bookish or intellectual or artist type, you can flatter yourself that you're inner depth. than your perceptiveness and what makes you smart and good is your alienation from your body, from the world, or like you have a kind of beautiful suffering because you don't get to be hot and like live in the world in a normal way. Yeah, yeah. then we see people flip that. don't know if you read Jordan Castro's stupid essay about how he started working out, like ugly straight guy starts working out. And then imagines he's tapped into something that no one has ever discovered before. He's no longer a bookish loser. Now he's an ugly guy who lifts and he converts to Christianity and quits heroin and then, you know, is in Harper's and has so many thoughts about this. And gay guys have been knowing that you can get hot, right? And you can get hot at any number of ages. And so, yeah, this guy, the hot man interviewed by Stambolian has a kind of reflexivity about it because he'd spent his 20s married to a woman in a relationship with another woman. And it was only a few years before the interview at the age of like 29 that he comes to New York and he'd been working out for a few years. So his body was ready and he's hitting the clubs and bars and is getting attention and it's all new. He's taking it in and yeah, there's something like there's something very special about that. That, mean, I think still is a possibility in gay life. Yeah, that, that you, and I think people still, ⁓ people still think this sometimes that, ⁓ can have a kind of have a fatalistic, you know, even gays, a fatalistic ⁓ perception of like, you know, getting old means looking a certain way. You're kind of imagining like attractiveness as if you're either born with it or you're not, which, you know, we are to an extent, but being around gay guys for any length of time, you realize that like people quite, people can get attractive like at almost any age and like at surprisingly, you know, old age. old ages and like can suddenly like look better than they ever had. You yourself are a gay guy who had a glow up in his thirties. So, you know, you can relate to the interviewee. Yeah. So I wonder if, ⁓ you know, I do relate to the interview, the guy in that way. And I wonder if that is the source of his reflectiveness about it because, because I, like, I was not, so I've, I've probably said this before, but just in case I haven't, I'll read. Recap, I came out of my thirties. had not, you know, I didn't, I was fine with my appearance. wasn't necessarily insecure about it. I was, you know, I have kind of a vain family and like was, you know, liked fashion and liked thinking about how I looked, but I never, I never had an experience of like thinking I was hot or like really being, you know, I was married pretty young, so I wasn't like on, I didn't really date or wasn't. I mean, it wasn't in a setting where I was used to, where I was even thinking about how people reacted to me or whether people were attracted to me or not. So all of that was new in my 30s. I had, because I had this mindset that I was coming out late and that I was already too old to be gay. The surprise of glowing up, kind of fitting in really well into that world. people finding me attractive was very exciting and very kind of like this sort of, I don't know, like a second youth, a second puberty. People often talk about that when you have a sort of midlife crisis or a divorce or anything like that. And it creates a sense of, or at least for me, and I think that may be why this guy in the story is thoughtful about it, of I'm kind of looking back at... my life in a different way or there's all these things that I have to learn because I was rather blind to them before and now they're suddenly like available. Right. So mean, one of the things that comes out really strongly in the interview is the pleasure that this guy has been taking in the last few years. mean, it's really only like three years or so, cause he comes to New York in 78, but it takes him a year or so to be comfortable with being gay. And then the interview is in February of 83. So he's just like been a hot gay guy for a few years and he's now like 34, new consciousness of being hot. And then the way that changes even his own relationship to his body. So he's talking about admiring his own butt. He's talking about enjoying looking at himself in the mirror, which he hadn't done in his twenties, taking photos of himself, having his partner take photos of him and really getting off on the scenarios that he can have with other people, either staring at him, worshiping him or Like there's a very funny thing of like him thinking a lot about going to a bar and people trying not to look at him and kind of getting off on, ⁓ yeah, I'm so hot that you don't even want to look at me. You want to acknowledge that you're, yeah, he talks about that where like, know they saw me and I can tell by the way they're acting, they're trying not to look. Yeah, I mean, this would be like if the really hot guys on Grindr had known that I blocked them because they were too hot. I'm glad they don't get a notification that says, loser has blocked you because they can't bear to look at you. They don't need that. They don't need it. We should talk about that, people being too hot. That's subject I want to touch on. But this sort of, the way we're talking so far, sort of makes him sound very conceited. And I don't think he actually is. he's a very interesting person. One of the things that... He wasn't always this way. He kind of tells us that he only gradually embraced the idea of other people's feedback, like other people telling him that he was attractive. he said, I'll read a couple of quotes. So he said, I had been brought up to believe in hierarchies of value for almost everything except physical beauty. So I was discouraged from feeding off my looks. It was considered a dangerous vanity, an attachment to the self that was not ⁓ to the self that was not supposed to be indulged in. So I thought that ⁓ was interesting as ⁓ someone who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity where there was lot of talk about you're not supposed to be trying to be looked at or trying to, it was worldly. My parents would say when I wanted to wear trendy clothes or have trendy hairstyles, you're just trying to look like the world. draw other people's attention to you. there's a kind of discouragement of that. I don't know if that was true for you. I was not an attractive child, so that really wasn't an issue. Well, I'm not saying I was attractive. No one had to discourage me from... People had to tell me not to be a know-it-all and an asshole, but they didn't have to tell me to be less invested in my physical appearance. I had to get on Accutane as a teenager. I had pretty bad acne too. yeah, basically until the Accutane had done its course, the acne was already giving me all the humility that I could need. I did like, the life story he tells is interesting because it's a kind of reverse of, we might imagine that like you're supposed to mature into looking past the physical. But his life story is like, no, I grew up in this kind of Puritan. family where like, you you're not supposed to pay attention to things like the body. That's not serious how hot people are. And he says, yeah, like for most of his twenties, when people would say that he was attractive or even when he started dating as a gay guy, he would say, yeah, okay, but then let's move on past that. Like, I don't want to luxuriate in your attraction to me. I want you to get to know the real me. And the real me is someone different than my body, which as he says, like, he didn't think of that as something that he had any control over. He didn't think of how he looked as representative of anything about who he really was. then, yeah, but, but, but then they talk about how, how this has, this has changed. So Georgetown Bullion says, looking at you now, it seems obvious that all that has changed. And ⁓ he says, and now, now I do feed on it because not everyone has it. And because I have to make it, I have to make it with what I have. Maybe something of the Puritan is still there because I feel that I shouldn't waste what I have, that I should enjoy it and benefit from it and should try to arrange for other people to enjoy it and benefit from it too. I have to use my sexual capital. Yeah, yeah. And maybe that is, you I think, I think part of that was for me, maybe for him, a fact of feeling behind or coming to it late and like being pleasantly surprised. Like I'm I'm thrilled and happy that I'm, I still get to be attractive, but it's also like, I'm also already old and it's not going to last forever. So I need to get, I need to make the most of it. It, mean, it's a funny injunction, like I must overcome puritanism. I must make the use of what I have. I must get as much like enjoyment as I can. Although like what, what exactly does that look like? And there's always a tension between the like, I must enjoy as a kind of project. I mean, I had this very strongly like in college where like, You know, my version of this is like a twink was like, you know, I think I had thought in high school, like no one's going to love someone as thin and mean as me. And turns out men love that. You know, like there's a, there's a still powerful kind of narrative where like, ⁓ you know, like kind of opposite number, like some, some mask guy who's like on the lacrosse team and a sort of butch and basic wouldn't want to be with like bookish nerdy, somewhat irascible me. And that's simply not true, girls. Don't give up hope. They love it. And where was this going? But then it also felt like, maybe 18, 19, like I need to have as much sex as possible in order to dismantle systems of something or other. Like there's some kind of, like I couldn't just enjoy it. There's like an imperative to do something with it, which is, as this guy points out, yeah, somehow still being actually puritano. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, I never had, I was coming to it when I was already disillusioned with politicizing everything. I never had any illusion that it was dismantling patriarchy You've never been a freedom fighter in the sexual revolution? Oppressive systems. I did have a, and I still do see it as a little bit of a fuck you to my life, my previous life. What it stole from me, even though I'm fine with it, I'm- That is, I think that's the biggest nut of all when you can be like, fuck you, dad. You know, that's the, which I can't really, I can't, that's not really now part of my, it doesn't feel transgressive in that way. No, no. Yeah. Believe it or not. Like I have never had, I've probably never held it against, never held it against religion or my family. I just kind of, you know, I don't blame anyone except myself kind of for not, you know, for my failures. ⁓ so it's, fuck you, David. That's a real, yeah. Yeah, it's a, or it's just like more like a celebration of like a triumph over myself. that's. Well, so, ⁓ yeah, one, one thing that I'm, I'm interested in, like the scene of him being worshiped in an elevator. So there's this guy who he kept running into on the street who, ⁓ how does he describe him? A little middle-aged man who liked to hang out on my block in the afternoons. He was always well-dressed in a suit and tie and looked quite jolly really. So he sounds a bit fat. I guess he thought I was a hustler because at least twice a month he would solicit me in a very respectful and earnest way. Well, one summer afternoon, I went out wearing black shorts, sneakers, and a tank top. And there he was dressed in a nice cream colored suit with his hat pushed back off his forehead like a little ace reporter. Hot on my story. story. So one, this is just sort of a delicious framing. And he lets this middle-aged guy in the suit not come up to his apartment, but come into his apartment building, ride up the elevator, which is like 30 stories. And during the time of the elevator's ascent, the guy can jack off while he pulls his tank top up to his neck. And the guy nuts sometime before the 30th floor. I don't know how fast elevators were in those days. The elevator descends, the guy says, thank you. He's so grateful. And the hot guy feels like, you know, I did, I did a real misfit, you know, I'm like, ⁓ I'm a great guy. I don't. I don't know how I missed all the details in this story. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So he basically, yeah, they go up and down 30 floors. The guy jerks off. Okay. Pulls up a shirt, pulls it up, pulls his shorts down a little bit. The guy comes and that's it. And one, before we think about worshiping, which is something I think Stambolian has also, Stambolian has some great diary entries from 79, 80 about worshiping, being worshiped that I posted on Substack. Simile himself was pretty hot, by the way. was like a, he was a dad by that point. It was a DILF. So he's hot in that way. He obviously was because this guy, like when he met, when he describes how he met him, this guy like obviously wanted to, it was like agreeing to fuck him before they decided to do the interview. So he's a good body. He's got a mustache. He's Armenian. He's like a little bit swervy, but this, this, the interviewee is a bit of a queen. So when they meet. he's reading a Bette Davis biography and that he picks up on this detail of the cream colored suit that he finds that delicious that like a sort of Tom Wolf figure, maybe real Tom Wolf, I don't know. That, well, I did not make that association, but yes, a reporter in a cream colored suit. But he's got an eye for fashion. He loves the great ladies of cinema. And when Stambolian asks him like what he likes about himself physically and what he doesn't like about himself, what he doesn't like is his high voice. So he is a queen. ⁓ Worshipping. mean, the magazine cover invites us to worship. So let's talk about, so he tells a story about the guy in the elevator that's partly in the context of like the ways that you can play with the hierarchy of being hot, of like being hotter than other people and the way that they react to you. the ways that people are intimidated by you, but you sometimes are turned on by like that or letting them have it or, you Cause the classic, you know, not thinking about it model is I find you attractive, you find me attractive, so we're going to have sex. But that's, that's elementary school stuff. You know, that's 101. Like, forget it. That's boring. You know, what can be really hot is I think you're a disgust. Or like, I, I feel disgusting. I think you're so hot that if you just let me smell your pubes, please, for the 30 seconds this elevator ride is going to take, that's all I need. Yeah, like I have got, like, can't think of a specific instance at the moment, but I have gotten that like in publics, like, can I just do X or like, I just, ⁓ can I just touch this or can I just like lick you here? And I'm always like, yes, yes, I find it hot. Like even if I'm not attracted to the person. Is there an especially, cause you have some semi-professional experience of this kind of attention. that's expected like you are, you know, that is, that's explicitly I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas the guy coming at you like out of the blue, can I please sniff your pubes? That's more intriguing. Yeah. Right. In that setting, you are, you are by definition, you are kind of elevated over people. You're put in that, in a position of, you know, you're supposed to be hot. But I'm talking more just like ⁓ a random person coming up to you or, yeah. And this guy is able to frame it, at least to himself, as also sort of charitable act. Like he has a social obligation to spread his hotness, you know, not just to hold onto it for himself, but to let other people enjoy it. There's a great scene in this French movie with Catherine Deneuve-Potiche where she plays the wife of a factory owner and she has to go negotiate with the striking workers and she puts on all of her jewels and her children are like, no mama, like don't wear. It's been so long I barely remember it's for the workers that I wear them. They can see. I love that like, I don't know if you were able to convince yourself that well, so you know, sometimes people be like overly intimidated by someone they find attractive or they'll, they'll be overly apologetic for like bumping into you or like staring at you or whatever. And my, my reaction to that is always like, you know, I did all this work to like, look like this. Right. That's why I did it. It be awful. It would be awful. Yeah. Thank you for noticing. It would be awful of me to like, you know, be mean to you for noticing. I guess this is a shame. know, one category of the 10 interviews, 10 billion did not one was with a twink. find twinks in general, not well represented in the pages of Christopher Street. Yeah. I feel like that was a thing that kind of came later. You think they were trying to like dissociate from the image of Petter Asti or something? just also be that Twink's don't have so much to say. know, Denny, Denny does this great book Lovers where they're both pretty young. They're in their mid to late twenties. Right, they're not. They're in follow-up interview book Decent Passions where the gay couple is like two 22 year olds and they're both morons. They are like so Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like you read that interview and you're like, this is actually not helpful. Like you can't actually learn anything from this. The same way that I skipped the, um, the, post on, on AGB, uh, which is Reddit, uh, Ask Gay Bros. When it's like, you know, crisis dilemma, you know, and then I'm like, uh, male 19, I'm just like, oh, nevermind. Skip, skip. Like that's the hard thing, you know, neither of us are chicken hawks, I guess, but like, I don't know how they do it. I guess they just. They just dissociate while the kids are talking. But for me, like when I was in college years, like my mid-twenties, when I would go to the gay beach in Chicago and lay out in my shorts in the summer and older guys would hit on me, part of it's like, okay, delicious attention, but it's also like, hmm, if I go back to your apartment to enjoy the view or see your etchings, will I be murdered? It is something closer to the experience of being the woman where Like, the fun of being hot has a little bit of a, you know, what's going to happen to me. Whereas like, you know, if you're like a 30 something, ⁓ like built gay guy, attention to your hotness, like has no element of like, maybe like learn your address or something like that. I don't know if you've ever worried about like people following you home. No, like I, I've liked more, ⁓ I'm honestly more worried about, I've had that happen, like people post things about you on social media or like, you know, a crazy person that you didn't realize was crazy. you know, just posting a text from you or stuff like that. I would say I'm more worried about that, like about just people being crazy and like. It's true that hot guys now, even not hot, but like I love LPSG, Mail General, Data Lounge. And they will find like, if you are a Barry's instructor and you have done sex work, this is known on Mail General. They have found your rent men. They know the rates. They found your old nudes from, know, whatever cam horse site you were using. They have the X tube account and is your only fans worth it? They know. You know, you can't, you can't overcharge. They are, they have the receipts. Yeah. Honestly, I'm like. worried about like, know, even though I've never, I don't have any of that stuff out there. I've thankfully was smart enough not to do that. I'm more, I'm honestly more worried about, yeah, people being, you know, some, some digital thing happening. But, but in general, I think people are too worried about that. Well, right now one can say, you know, it's all, it's all a-hot. It's all fake. Right. ⁓ true. Well, I'm always like, people's like, What if someone records me and they have a video of me having sex and I'm like, okay, what are they going to do with it? Who cares? Well, hopefully I look good. would be, that would be my, you know, I hope it's not one of the ones where I shit the bed. It's not going to be breaking news in the New York Times. promise. You know, if Peter Seale has kept any stories about him being a mess, I'm sure he has, ⁓ you know, blown, I'm sure he's had a blowout and a befouled some sheets. but he's keeping that out of the tabloids. okay, worshiping is also connected to these issues of hierarchy and inequality in the gay community. Mm-hmm. Okay, so before we move on to the question of hierarchy and how that connects to politics and the way that persists as a troubled issue in gay culture, what about, they talk about this kind of fun element where are there, I think Stemple and ask the guy, you're a hot guy, everyone agrees you're hot. Are there people that are intimidating to you? So I was going to ask you, like, have you ever experienced that? Has there ever been someone who like either you avoided because you thought they were too hot for you or you were like in the act of having sex with them and you were just like terrified or feeling intimidated because of that? yes. So for the latter, no, never. I've never like gotten into a sexual situation with someone. Cause yeah, this comes up in the interview that someone is is actively having sex with him, but is kind of hung up on hot He's like unable to get out of the voyeuristic mode. Cause there is something maybe about hot people where we want to just like look and look at them and actually maybe not even move into the sex act. like, know, part of the worshiping the hot guy is there's an element even of control over that. We're like, I want to have like the pure pleasure of looking ⁓ and not get caught up in having to perform. No, I've never experienced that with someone. The one time that I ever threw someone a pity fuck, ⁓ he ended up having ⁓ literally a two inch penis and then I missed the last train home and had to stay over and he snored really loud. And then I found out later from a mutual friend that he, so he had gotten me into bed by using kind of sad sack routine like. He was having trouble with his boyfriend and his mom was coming to town and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was Christmas. So, but apparently he does this all the time and he cleans up. ⁓ Like the Sad Sack routine is very successful. Yeah. And like, yeah, people aren't as, people fall for that. People fall for, for scams or for, you know, bits like that. And it makes you realize that like, you know, gays are not as horrible as people say, like, you know. But you should, yeah, you should. do feel sorry for you. Since then, I closed my heart. This was like age 22. I was like, you know, I will never be generous again. I will only sleep with guys I'm actually attracted to. felt like, my I think the thing that was blackpilling for me was not that, but like the people who would like, you know, supposedly be outside your door, like, and then just block you, or they would leave and block you immediately. I just could not comprehend that at first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, I guess like, I think of these people as, and I mean, I myself, you know, in my days of singleness would be like, ⁓ I'm totally gonna have sex with you. And it's like, I'm already masturbating. So am I gonna go somewhere or am I gonna? Yeah, you're gonna actually stop and get out, get dressed. No, if you're a pro, you can tell like, this person's already jerking off. Like there's no way. Wait, asking too many questions, wanting to more pics. I did have a grinder, Catfish for a while, who I think was the same person, but would just make fake accounts and try to, and because I, and always use, I eventually caught on and started just looking up pics every time and there were always, OnlyFans are like from Twitter. So he kind of like knew what I was into and he would just use that to like chat with me and then like block me as soon as like we were supposed to meet up. That's such a compliment. mean, it's, it's a compliment to have one's photos used for a fake account that catfishes others. It's, it's a compliment to be catfished oneself. This is really, yeah, there's, mean, the, version of this today would have a lot more of. these kinds of stories, right? wouldn't be going to the gay bar, sadly. It wouldn't be cruising on the streets. It would be being catfished to get more nudes. Right. And that's really like the only, I kind of make fun of people when they're like, ⁓ everyone's fake on Grindr. Or like everybody's a catfish. I don't think that's true. But this is like the one experience I had like that. Well, and I suppose part of ⁓ being hot is people think that you're a rare commodity, which they should try to exploit as quickly and schemingly as possible. He has, he has this whole thing about like going to the bar and people giving him attitude either by being kind of cringing and servile and wanting, or being cold and distant. And certainly there was a beautiful blonde twunk guy at my tiny college, like a thousand people, central Arkansas. There may be 40 gay guys. So one. where you were in the hierarchy of attractiveness and dateability was pretty clear. Like, who would be into you? Who would you be into? And I haven't had like many experiences of painful, you know, I've had maybe three or four painful, unrequited longings for people that are based on like really knowing them. This guy, Zach Person, if you're listening, you're fat now. No, I you're thriving, hope you're thriving. But he was like, So happy and carefree and you know, as the kids say now, golden retriever energy had like beautiful sculpted but not too sculpted body, you know, so he had that right, like I'm hot, but I'm not like worried about how I look seemingly. Yeah. I could not be normal around him. Like interacting with him was like always this painful. I'm like looking for the thing to dislike. This is also a theme of this comes up in dancer from the dance, like wanting to. find out there's something wrong with the hot guy. A hot person so that you do not feel bad about Yeah, some kind of spoiled him. But it's hard and he had a boyfriend who was no more attractive than me. So that was the real... I don't know that I would have known what to do with him. I'm sure he was like, know, versed or something. So it would never have worked. But... Well, anyway, you brought up the subject of we talked to... I mentioned a couple of times, hierarchy and hotness sort of raises the question of some people Some people having it and other people not, like that creates a situation of inequality. And that is something that has been, very hotness is both undeniably central to modern gay identity and culture. Like no one would deny that. And at the same time, it's been this perpetually kind of troubled or controversial aspect of gay life, even among and gays and like it's something that people perennially criticize and politicize in different ways. So I want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, and this is one of the big sources of think gay men's friction with lesbians, with feminists. You know, there's like friction around porn, there's friction around promiscuity. But I saw you had a recent post, you know, thinking about hotness and thinking about the discourse on hotness today. And I didn't read all there was some very long winded upset comments, but And which several paragraphs, I couldn't read all of it, but this woman may be trans saying, you know, the problem with your approach, David, is that we have to realize we're all hot. ⁓ know, that from, from my experience, that is just not, you know, would that that were true. ⁓ but well, let's explain like what, why does, why does hotness, you know, from your perspective, like just for people who might not know what that means, why would hotness and like gay men's kind of fascination with it. Why would that cause conflict with, say, feminists? Well, so, you know, for very valid reasons, know, feminists throughout the many waves of feminism have wanted to critique, resist, undo the way that women are valued chiefly as physical commodities. Women are valued for their looks, for their sexual availability. And truly like in the seventies, The concept of looksism was like big and second way feminism. And professionally, like for women in the workplace, you it's not just that like sexually and romantically men treat you as a visual object and that in the media, you know, women are not presented as full human beings, but that, you know, even in the workplace, hot girls are getting ahead, you know, more than... And explicitly like that, you know, if you're being hired to be, you know, an airline stewardess or something like that, it's not even, know, secret. It's just it's explicitly like this is what you're supposed to look like. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there were were attempts to enshrine like anti-looksism, you know, into the law or to organize women, you know, that was never quite successful. But right, this is a real site of discrimination for women in their lives. And so it makes sense that feminism, you know, in the 70s and sands has been concerned about this. Although since then, I mean, what the feminist line on women being hot is, you know, has has moved around. But at the time of Christopher Street, this is maybe a high point of women feeling like they have to challenge and reject beauty standards. And I think there's also a broader leftist wish, which is in many ways right and humane and understandable, to give esteem and recognition to everyone on the basis of our common humanity. Like we all... We're all instances of human being. We're all children of God. We're all bearers of human rights. You know, we all deserve to be treated well. Which a contemporary version, you know, which body positivity is probably like a contemporary version of that. that, you know, that health does not, you know, health and thinness don't necessarily go together. You can, you know, be unhealthy and thin and like all these equations of things that are good. Like it's both. healthy and attractive to be thin, but you can be healthy and not be thin. And it's things like that. You know, I think there's been a lot in the past. And also that's the we are all hot. We are all hot. Like everyone should just be love their body the way it is. And we shouldn't have, you know, we shouldn't have beauty standards because they are like, they're a kind of imposition of capitalism or marketing. things like that. And truly, I mean, we know that the ability to have a romantic partner, the ability to have friends, the ability to advance in your workplace, the ability to tell yourself a satisfying story about yourself. All of these are like important to what we would consider to the good life. And all of them are related to physical attractiveness, which is unevenly distributed and also to some extent is about changeable social norms. And so a campaign to change those norms in a radical way where everyone would have access to like the good feelings of attractiveness. and to like the social goods of attractiveness. So there's this great vice or Buzzfeed thing from several years ago. Why can't my fabulous non-binary friends get laid about a low-carbidin and non and some like some really ugly non-binary people. And one, I don't even know if they weren't getting laid. So it seemed very mean-spirited of the woman who wrote it. Everyone should be able to feel good about themselves. Everyone should be able to get laid if they want to. Everyone should be able to have a romantic relationship. And. You know, that's in friction both with certain enduring biological realities. I mean, you're not amenable to change. And it's also in tension with maybe the aesthetic dimension of gay culture. yeah. And so, so let's say, like, say more about that. what is, is this, is there something about this that is particularly, they talk about this, yeah, maybe let's just read that, ⁓ that bit of the interview where they. talk about this. the hot guy being interviewed has been married to a woman before. ⁓ He's sort of recently come out and become like plunged into gay life. And so George Stemboyan is asking him about the difference between having sex with men and women and if there's differences in the way that men and women think about like male attractiveness or beauty. So he says, the straight women I've talked to about male beauty seem to like slender men who are not overly developed and or have anything in excess, ⁓ which corresponds to this modern social media discourse about like women like the guy that's like a little bit chubby and not the one that has abs. ⁓ They also pay more attention to things like hair and teeth. When I came into the gay community, I found that they liked something a little more exaggerated, more muscles, a tighter fit. They were more specific and demanding and seemed to want more artistic beauty. Women don't get off on the statue of David the way that men do. So there's this idea that like maybe this is a version of the mythical but still somewhat obviously true like men or visual thing or this idea that like gay men are uniquely aesthetic as a culture. What do you think about that? I mean I think there's both in the sexual domain. So there's a long kind of story about homosexual men as a kind of spiritual and cultural elite from at least the 19th century. I you see this in Germany around Der Aigener. You see this in Britain in the late 19th century in like the aesthetic circle of Walter Pater and people like Oscar Wilde. And it doesn't have to be sexual, right? Some of it can be like routed through celibacy and sublimation that gay men are like these wonderful let me just say as an example, this Russian novel Wings, by Mikhail Kuzmin, which is, well known among literature people, but not as well known as among gay readers as something like a picture of Dorian Gray is. But it's very similar. It's, know, influenced by Wilde's kind of decadent, this idea of like gay, the gay men in the book are this sort of, you know, they come together and they talk about ideas and beauty and the Greeks and ⁓ stuff like that. And they very much see themselves as this kind of elite who is, are outside of society and they're and they're better than everyone else. And unlike Wilde and Dorian Gray, in this book, it's explicit about this being a homosexual thing. And part of the main character, the teen boy's journey is going from this idealized kind of platonic, non-sexual version of a homosexual elite to embracing his sexual desire and his body. And even in the interview, you see there's both like the sculpting of the body, which is somehow informed by like the artistic ideal of the David. And also this guy is taking photos of himself. His partner is taking photos. So there's, there's this connection between art as this enterprise, like pursuing beauty and making yourself into the beautiful thing, this self objectification. this is in an interesting tension or relationship with like another dimension of. homosexuality in gay life, which is like, at least since Whitman, there's been another kind of powerful fantasy. And I think to some extent, a reality of, you can go have sex with a hobo in the street, right? If you're in a ⁓ railway car with someone, you can get off with them. You can get off, you know, with someone at the docks right now. Like Whitman talks about this, like, you know, throughout Leaves of Grass and other poems through like a fantasy of adhesion. He has all these sort of cruising fantasies where he can like, you know, have sex with anyone anywhere. And it's this great democratic, egalitarian way of being connected to all these people, sexual energies flowing around. And, you know, I had this realization, not even about gay people, but, you when I realized that like the gross people in like the Dungeons and Dragons Club in college were fucking, that they were having at least as much sex as the hot people, right? That actually there's all of this sex that's coming around and that, if you go to the bath house, if you get on the apps, like. Yeah, right. You can experience it doubly in a strange way as this really intense hierarchical system where some people have made themselves super beautiful and are unobtainable and you'd pay any amount of money to get a whiff of their undies. But also all of these guys are hooking up right now. Yeah. Yeah. Like you could be a ⁓ late career Andrew Halloran who has these like very wistful, yearning sad descriptions of bathhouses and like being an old man at a bathhouse. being invisible, or you can go to an actual bathhouse where a whole cabal of those old men are chasing around like everyone, you know, who's under 50. And I'll just say like, yes, any setting like that, you know, a bathhouse, an after party, any group sex environment, it can be a place of discomfort and painful rejection, but it can also be a place where the very environment of collectiveness, of like the fact that it's so many people. It's not this case where you both chose each other off Grindr and like, it's just you two. It's like, it's a kind of, it's a different environment where like the collective nature of it somewhat takes over and like it sometimes overrules, you know, your, whether you find a specific person attractive or not. Are you an origin guy, David? Is this how we talked? I, it's been a while, but yeah, like, I mean, I can be. I had some group sex in college and I came away strongly with the feeling that there's too many balls in the air, one, and that maybe if you're at the Peter Thiel pool party and it's like rigorously, you know, like he has like the assistant screening everyone. I mean, I wouldn't make it. I wouldn't make the cut, but yeah, there were too many people I didn't want to see. ⁓ So, I mean, yeah, it was too democratic. was too democratic. it's kind of, you my experience is like, you never know like when, so I've been to like organized ones in New York, like where you buy tickets and stuff. And just for whatever reason, like didn't have a good time, like just was off that night, the drugs were not right or something. And then other times where it just like, you know, was unexpected and like people just, you know, ended up happening and that, it was really fun and surprising, like, you know, so it really, it really depends. mean, there's, there's a kind of not quite a debate. Rival positions taken up, Samuel Delaney has a sort of fantasia in Times Square, Red Times Square, Blue about the democratic power of the bath house, the porno theater in like grimy old New York where, you know, people are jacking each other off in the dark and. You might be having sex with a lawyer even though you're a bum. Bersani in Homo's or one of his later books quotes this passage and he's like, nothing is less democratic than a bath house. Now at that time Bersani was like an old man in his 60s. So maybe he wasn't getting with the people he wanted to be with, I don't know. But there is like, yeah, this is enduringly a dichotomy we can imagine about gay sex, right? That like everyone has access to all of the sex. It's so easy to get laid. Even with people who you might think of as out of your league. On the other hand, people can be very conscious of, am more beautiful than this person. I am intimidated by this person. Or even as, as like sex is like unusually available to gay men. think we can safely say that. And if you are out there looking for it, if you're putting yourself, you're putting yourself out there, quote unquote, in the, in the contemporary phrase, you're going to find it at the same time. there's all of this, you know, this temptation to the discourse about like how exclusive everything is and how like, I'm too ugly to do this. And so it's like both of these things are coexisting. And I think, you know, people really enjoy, we don't need to talk about the Daniel Leffert story necessarily, but this recent Daniel Leffert story and Yale review, the failing Yale review, as Trump would say. The failing Yale review. Which is like, A real, I think not very well written little like dystopian vision of like cruel hierarchy and exclusivity among like A-list gays in New York. And I think people really like, I don't know if you've seen this meme that lives in my head. It's famous to me of like the queer iceberg. So there's this iceberg where like the party I remember you writing a post about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the hot gate. So what it is. So. Okay, so on the floaty above water part of the iceberg. There's like the buff guys in harnesses who are mostly white and are like partying. This is the Atlantis cruise. And then clean to the iceberg under the water trying to ⁓ claw their way up before they drown is like the disabled person, the fat person, the woman in the hijab, all of the wretched of the LGBTQ plus category. I think something like that, it lives in my head because I think it's funny, but I think that is a real affective engine for a lot of people. Like someone is having a better time than me, some awful gays at the top of the iceberg. And if only that were me. Yeah. And it's a weird thing because like I've been around those people. I've heard the things that they say. Like I know how mean they can be and how the exclusive language that can, you know, can come out. But at the same time, I've also seen those people be like, you know, very high on molly and very friendly and like kind of open to whoever talks to them. so it David says, the hot guys while they're fucked up on drugs. They won't notice how ugly you are. It's dark. They're confused. They're dehydrated. That is my, that is my number one pro tip. But anyway, so let's, let's just say like, so we have these, these perennial discourses of, know, that I reflect, you know, reflectively, find very annoying about, you know, looks ism. was called at one point body fascism, which, you know, That makes it hot. I'm sorry. it's just one of the most vapid concepts I've ever heard. Let's just say... I liked Jack Parlatt's book about Fire Island, but he got a chapter about body fascism at Fire Island. it's like, yeah, you had a bad time if you were ugly. That's true of literally anywhere. Is there any... Let's steel man these ideas. Is there anything to it? Is there anything... that is worth criticizing about ⁓ gay male hierarchicalism or obsession with aesthetics and beauty. Is there any way that that's toxic that we should Sure, surely it can be self-destructive. One way to think of it though is like, do these people feel that way about being smart? Do they feel that way about like... I love Paris is Burning. I mean, I've seen it so many times. And I love the scene where the girls are talking about how like, I want to get out there and make the other girls feel like shit. That is what being beautiful is about. And other moments in the documentary, they're like, you know, this is for all of us to create a safe space and have fun with our identities and dismantle structures. There are other moments, like, and then there are other moments where the girls are like, I am hot and you're disgusting. When, ⁓ my God, who's like the really fishy one who gets murdered? I can't believe I am blanking on her name. When she's like, touch this skin, touch all this skin. She went back to be a man. ⁓ you went back to being a man. Touch this skin, darling. Touch this skin, honey. Touch all of this skin, okay? You just can't take it. You're just an overgrown orangutan. It's such a new gay that I've only seen the derivative pose. have not seen ⁓ actual parrots. You must be rewatching endlessly. That's the way to get assimilated. But where was this going? Even within drag, right? There's both the narrative of we're all in it together. All the drag is valid. This is us together against the heterosexist structures that we're trying to dismantle. And then also it's a competition. then there's plain Jane. There's Plain Jane from Boston. don't know if you saw her season where she, where she famously says one of these bad drag queens says protect queer art. does this very sappy protect queer art and Plain Jane is like, the question is, you know, is, is it really worth protecting? Poor McGonagall. Should we be protecting queer? Chunky Brooklyn queen. I still watch Drag Race. That's how busted I am. Well, I watched that season cause, cause of Plain Jane, but Boston girls. One we need to wrap up in a minute. Yeah, so... Yeah, so we have these two things that seem kind of opposite, but somehow they go together. Like this sort of meanness and hierarchicalism and like, you know, we're the hot people and you're not. It can be competitive, but at the same time, like from another angle or even at the same time, there's a sort of collectiveness about it. And so the interview even ends... with Stambolian looking at a photo of the guy saying, here we have an image of you as a god. And the guy responds, here I am a god. We're all gods at some time. And Stambolian is like, yeah, but okay, not all of us so often. And Ian's like, well, okay, I'm one of the fortunate ones. And then that's the conclusion. I mean, you know, this is maybe beyond the scope of this conversation, but I do think, you know, as two people who think of ourselves as like, smart, literate, cultured, whatever, you I certainly have my ego trip and like my sense of superiority in the ways that I deliciously enjoy humiliating other people. Society gives you more of a pass around those non-physical ones, right? There's something about like physical hotness that like the unfairness of it like seems to especially light people up. Right, yeah. And people especially want to They especially want to make you a villain or to buy tickets to your downfall. like that phrase. Yes. I mean, I could, it's a, it is a, what's his name? Machine Gun Kelly album title. Wow. That was some, cause you, you did the rounds of straight culture. I was not expecting that reference. Venus extravaganza. That was, that was her name. So, okay. Now it's come back to me and. Can we wrap up with that? Can that be a conclusion? David's surprising machine gun Kelly. Yeah, okay. Let's do a, I feel like we should wrap up with kind of a takeaway. like, what is your best, what's your best stab at? can we reconcile these things? Like, is it, can we lean into our like love of hotness and aesthetic beauty or like, is there a way that that's not fascist? can we still be democratic and like? Interesting to me is like somehow almost all of our apparently insufferable intellectual dilemmas that like at the level of theory should be Impossible to resolve. Actually in real life, mean I think you know in any one good relationship you both feel like my god I'm so lucky to be with this person like I find them really hot wonderful admirable I mean this guy's we haven't talked about how we talked about his partner, but he finds his partner like incredibly hot maybe hotter than him. He really admires him and feels like he needed to like step up his whole life to be with this person. And I think like that's what, you know, a good romantic relationship, but also like, you know, feeling lucky to have the friends that we do. That's a wonderful aspect of gay life. But yeah, like in any functioning relationship, we both have that like admiration, ⁓ but also like this person would probably fucking any hole. So. I would hope that we can. ⁓ that we can hold two things together, that we can enjoy the quest of reshaping our body, holding ourselves to an ideal and enjoying the process and the discipline and self-mastery that that takes to become something. And even enjoy the sense of superiority that that might give us or the distinction while also realizing that it's just a body, it's just physical flesh. We could get sick or ill tomorrow. It could be taken away from us. We will all get old and die someday. that, you know, our distinction and that distinction that we achieve in that like fleshly realm is it's not unimportant. It's not necessarily shallow or vain, but it's also ⁓ should not be a reason to treat other people badly or to, you know, we should still, we should recognize that we're still- they're paying for it. Right. unless they're paying for it, unless they're asking for, unless they want to be. Just a they say, on me, I'm a disgusting worm. Step on my face, I'm gross. I'm just a whole. And you know, as Ocean Vuong once said, on earth, we're briefly gorgeous. Okay, yes. And that gives us a perfect ability to go out on this quote from another one from Mark Mirilis, who I find is secretly a ⁓ philosopher of ⁓ She's the best. the gay novelist Mark Murielus from one of the ones I think Blake may not have read called Man About Town. I have not read. I'm an ignorant So the story is this guy has, he saw a photo when he was a teenager of an underwear model in a men's magazine. so this part, one of the subplots of the novel is he's trying to track down who this boy was in this underwear ad. And it's a little bit, it's kind of ridiculous and creepy. He even like feels that way himself, but as the novel goes on, he kind of leans into it and he's like, you know what, I want to do this. My life's falling apart. This is what I want to do. So he ends up locating this guy and having a conversation with him about why he did this and what it meant to both, what this guy who was not famous, was not even a model, he just happened to take this one underwear ad. then, so now they're both kind of older men. And this is what the guy says. Petrus had radiated beauty one day in 1963, and in 1964 Joel had caught a glimpse of it, like a man watching from light years away the flash of a star that had died eons ago. By the time Joel saw it, it was already gone. But that's what people were here for, the only reason we were put on the planet at all, so that a star that flared and died a billion years before we were born would not pass away unobserved. And I love that because it reminds us of our fleeting time on earth that we are here to be beautiful and that we never know who's gonna see it and who is meant to see it and be inspired by it. You know, to quote you quoting the Bible, we aim not to be served, but to serve.