Off Christopher Street

In this crossover episode with Eminent Americans, we take a step back from our regular programming to talk to our friend Dan Oppenheimer about the state of gay male intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located? We talk about why the editors of Christopher Street thought it was important to use new media strategies to cultivate a distinctive gay male identity and a shared, if not homogenous, literary culture around it. Are today’s gay writers part of anything like a common identity or intellectual world? We talk about Gay Twitter, non-gay Substack, the “house gays” at straight magazines, the gay podcasts and the gay slop. We name all the names. Not because we think we have all the answers, but because we hope, in asking the questions, to provoke you to interest in the gay writing and thought we now have to inherit.

Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube.

David and Blake on Eminent Americans:

Sources

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 about the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

Blake Smith:

I think part of what's different between now and the seventies is that we have something to inherit. Right? So I think, you know, part of wanting to do a series of episodes around articles from the magazine is both to explore, like, what's similar, what's different from fifty years ago. Yep. Yep.

Blake Smith:

But also to say, like, those guys could imagine themselves in the seventies, like Ed White writes a lot about this at the time, as inventing a culture. And in some ways that was wrong, and they put themselves in a kind of needless division where they're, like, they're putting themselves against Tennessee Williams, Gordon Vidal, Edward Albee, like, the previous generation of guys homosexual, or who didn't identify with a publicly with a homosexual culture, and not seeing them as their ancestors. But I think we're in a different position of receiving something that, you know, is coming to us and thinking about, like, what do we wanna take on from that, what seems you know productive, what's worth holding onto, and and how can we use that to think about contemporary stuff.

David Sessions:

This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast about the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions, and I'm joined as always by my cohost and fellow historian, Smith. This episode is something a little different than usual because this is a joint episode with our friend, Dan Oppenheimer, who is the host of Eminent Americans, a podcast about the contemporary American intellectual scene on which Dan interviews all kinds of interesting writers and thinkers. Blake and I have both been guests on Dan's show separately, and in this episode, Dan interviews us together about our podcast. So we talk a little more explicitly than we have about what we're trying to do.

David Sessions:

We go into some of the ideas and politics behind our show that we have referred to in passing and in our discussion of articles from Christopher Street. Among other things, we talk about the parallels we see between our current political moment and that of the nineteen seventies when modern gay culture was first taking shape, and some of the constants in gay concerns and discourses over the past half century. And most of all, we talk about the state of gay intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located?

David Sessions:

Where have all the gay writers gone, and can they be said to be part of a coherent community or intellectual world? We talk about gay Twitter. We talk about Substack. We talk about the house fags at mainstream straight magazines. We talk about the gay podcasts and the slop, everything we like and don't like, not because we think we have all the answers, but because we hope in asking the questions to provoke people, people like you, to be interested in and to love the gay culture that we have to inherit and elaborate.

David Sessions:

Before we get started, as always, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter at christopherstreetmag.com. There's a big black button right on the homepage. You can click on that and sign up. You can also give us money. Please give us money.

David Sessions:

All writers need money. We need money to make this podcast. We really appreciate those of you who are paid subscribers. Thank you so much. And if you have something to say, you wanna sound off about something we said, we would love to hear from you.

David Sessions:

We also love to hear where you're from, how you found us, etcetera, etcetera. Send us an email at christopherstreetmag@gmail.com. And so with all of that out of the way, I hope you enjoy our conversation with Dan Oppenheimer of eminent Americans about where all the gay writers have gone.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

David, Blake, welcome back for however many the nth time to eminent Americans. I hereby reanoint you. Eminent Americans, hyper eminent Americans by by the power vested in me by

Blake Smith:

Yourself. By your

Daniel Oppenheimer:

own husband. Self. I mean, I am the source of anointment.

David Sessions:

I I love being called imminent.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Title do you guys do a title on my sex tape? Title of your memoir? Do you guys do that? You know that?

David Sessions:

Whatever. Whenever somebody says something to do memoir titles.

Blake Smith:

I do not know this, but this this is like a drinking If somebody just

Daniel Oppenheimer:

accidentally says something that could be interpreted sexually or whatever, you just say, like, you know, title of your sex tape or title of your title of your memoir or something like that.

Blake Smith:

Did Title of your sex tape is also a good title. Like, that's a great title. So,

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I mean, maybe I'll introduce it. I'll I'll kind of acculturate you guys that that's big in my family.

Blake Smith:

See, this is great. We're already getting into some gay straight cultural exchange.

David Sessions:

I do have a yeah. I I don't maybe not now, but I did have, like, a working title for my memoir that, like, changed every few months, and sometimes an outline, which I I realized, like, that ultimately that that was the project more than actually writing the book, was just envisioning it and outlining it.

Blake Smith:

Okay. But that's also, like, a great kind of Lydia Davis micro short story, is just, like, the changing titles of your memoir over the years.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh, yes. Yeah. This is a special episode of Eminent Americans because it's a crossover episode. I think it's my first crossover episode, maybe. No, I've had some others, but anyway, with Off Christopher Street, which is is y'all's relatively new podcast, which I think of, and I and I realize this is sort of arrogant on my part, but I think of it as a kind of child of eminent Americans.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I feel I think of it as an offshoot.

Blake Smith:

Sure. I mean, we're we're getting really into like the family romance, we're getting into straight culture, this sounds like real heterosexualization. This is great.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I will say in a very concrete factual way, I think it is the first podcast, you know, for which the hosts are two guests of mine, two previous guests of mine. So in that sense Yeah.

David Sessions:

That's That's absolutely fair. Yeah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

But, yeah, I I I guess I wanna start I mean, we're gonna go all over the place, but but this is in in a sense, this is about your project. This is about Off Christopher Street, and then we'll branch off into all sorts of other things. But I guess maybe the place to start for me is what is Off Christopher Street, you know, what's its backstory, what's its purpose, what's the project?

Blake Smith:

David, can you explain? So you you you are currently in Provincetown, and you were just explaining to, like, normal, basic, like, you know, whatever kind of, you know, hot gay guys what the podcast is. So I wonder if you could explain it You'd explain it to Dan, but also how you would explain it

Daniel Oppenheimer:

to Yes.

David Sessions:

Oh, that's a good idea.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

To basic to basic gays.

David Sessions:

Yeah. I say, you know, depending on the depending on the moment, I may or may not say the name Christopher Street. I'm like, there's an old gay magazine, and we read articles from that. And we but it's not really history podcast. We don't just talk about it like, as history, we kinda read, so article about clubbing from the nineteen seventies.

David Sessions:

How is that similar and different to today? So it's kind of a historical source material, but more about us, us and gay culture and gay discourse today. So that's that's how I say it.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Gay male discourse, right? I mean, I think that that

David Sessions:

Yes. Yes.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I mean, not to the exclusion, it's not like the mention of any other type of gay person or atypical

Blake Smith:

We men aren't allowed to visit, they just can't live there. We did we had an episode with TB Mouths Bovie, who we love.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And straights were allowed to visit. Right? I mean, I

Blake Smith:

Straights were allowed to visit. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

You know, I shouldn't I shouldn't feel free enough to make a Sundown Town joke, but I'll just say

Daniel Oppenheimer:

A what joke?

Blake Smith:

Yeah. How do you live in Texas and you don't know about the any anyway, you can

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh, Sundown Town is that's when you black people needed to be out by Yeah. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

You can be there during like the nine to five thing. Okay.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh, I see. I see. Yeah.

David Sessions:

Well, and I the origin was the origin was kind of, I'll be there really quick about this, the origin was kind of, I think we talked about doing a one about novels first, and then I was looking back recently at my like journal, and I realized like how long before that we talked about it, before we actually did it, when I had forgotten that. But, yeah, and then and then it just oh, oh, and then I started kind of making the website, putting some of the stuff online, digitizing it, and actually reading some of it, and I was like, hey, what if we just, like, talked about this instead? That might be easier and less kind of, you

Blake Smith:

know Wait. So you're you're a real self documenter, by the way, David. I hadn't realized.

David Sessions:

Yeah, like, I have I've kind of fallen off a bit, but but yeah, it's it's more of like, it's because I have a terrible memory. It's like, oh, I need to just write a list of everything I did this week so that I remember when this happened. Yeah, so so at one point, it was like a dramatic emotional therapy journal, and now it's more of a log of events.

Blake Smith:

Now you have the receipts, so you can factor

David Sessions:

your Yeah, I like having receipts.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Well, and then I think the back backstory of this, I assume, but Blake you can tell me or David you can tell me if this is wrong, I mean at some point in your intellectual peregrinations Blake, you locked into this magazine Christopher Street that was kind of whose aspirations were to be gay New Yorker, and then its founder, Michael Denneny, who I think is who you're now writing a book about, right? That I want to assume you hadn't heard of it David, but I'm assuming Blake is the one who really locked into it as a kind of resource, an archive, a sort of source

David Sessions:

Yeah, who left

Daniel Oppenheimer:

inspiration first, and then you came to

David Sessions:

it a little

Daniel Oppenheimer:

bit later in that sense.

David Sessions:

I had heard of Christopher Street, I might have even heard of Denneny, but I didn't like start really paying attention until Blake started writing about it, and I kind of realized, oh, this has a bunch of stuff I've been thinking about in it. So so yes, I think it was definitely kind of in tandem with, you know, following him.

Blake Smith:

I don't know if like this is this is too much of a projection, like, a David on my end, but I think, you know, both of us, for different reasons, we're wanting to, like, you know, think about the state of gay culture now, to, like, you know, reconnect with it to move past a kind of, like, there's a sort of general pessimistic discourse about how it's doing. And I think part of that is, like, in response to our political conjuncture. So, like, part of what appeals to me about thinking about this moment in the seventies is that in some ways, like, the the birth of modern American gay culture and identity is taking place in a moment that feels similar to our own, where there's like a collapse of any hope for the left, for liberalism, there's like a somehow resurgent retarded right, even though they've already like fucked things up, still they're they're resurging. And, you know, maybe the seventies was a mistake. This is like, you know, one possibility that we might discover, but somehow, like, a return to thinking about identity.

Blake Smith:

Like, that was something that appealed to a lot of people in the mid to late seventies as they're thinking like, well, if these frameworks, you know, that we've inherited from, the left and liberal traditions aren't working anymore, what what possibilities are there? And and I think that's also conjoined with, like, wanting to think particularly about, like, a gay magazine. Like, both are wanting to think about it. And in the seventies, like, Denneny sense that gay identity has to pass through, like, new media strategies, like, new media forums. I think that that coincides with, like, both our own kind of contemporary sense and a sense in the seventies of, like, the the traditional media is, you know, untrustworthy, stupid, you know, like the even though people like Denneny's adviser, Orin, were like writing for The New Yorker, they have a a deep kind of pessimism and cynicism about what speaking in public through media channels can be doing right now.

Blake Smith:

And all of that feels very, you know, I don't know if it's just it's been continuous maybe for decades, but it it feels, like, newly fresh. So both, like, contours of gay life, like, described in the seventies where there's, like, promiscuity and debates about, you know, monogamy and, you know, critiques of assimilation. Like, these are all going on fifty years ago. And, also, the left has failed, the right is scary, you catch up the New York Times. So, you know, these these seem like, if not perennial themes, at least, like, themes.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Recurring themes. You know, I was gonna say, and and another parallel, and you guys talk about this a lot on the podcast, is it's not just the relationship to the left is not just the left has failed in sort of conspicuous ways, and so it's sort of picking up the pieces in the aftermath, it's also a kind of orthogonal relationship to the left. So in some sense broadly speaking, Denneny's project was a left project, and I think your project is in some respects a left project, but it has a very complicated, fraught relationship to other aspects of the left. You guys can nuance this, but I I think you know, when you're talking about Christopher Street in the seventies and the early eighties, there is a very clear sense in which Denneny, you know, and others felt we have to sort of differentiate ourselves and not subordinate ourselves to these other you know freedom struggles, whether it's feminism, black civil rights, I'm not sure what the or Marxism, just sort of classic kind of left wing Marxism, not hostility to those, but that the concerns, the interests of gay men are distinct, and not always perfectly overlapping with those of these other groups, there's a similar parallel here in terms of what you guys are doing and thinking, and I think one of the questions I have for you is like, I think that there's a lot of gay men out there, and Blake and I have done a podcast about this before, there's a lot of gay men out there right now in America who are feeling this.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I'm not sure how much it's articulated other than some very you know, kind of lone wolves like Andrew Sullivan or Jamie Kirchick or something like that. I'm not sure there's much institutional articulation of it, but gay men are I would say, I would guess it's not just that your interests are distinct, but actually in a lot of cases feeling somewhat alienated from, or attacked by some of these other left wing groups or factions like that. So there's that kind of echo of the seventies as well. Is that is that fair?

David Sessions:

Yeah. Well, would say that yeah. Think your summary of Christopher Street is right, although, you know, they they didn't ever publish any kind of like Marxist agit prop, but they did they did publish some quite left, various left thinkers, activist types, you know, feminist stuff. It was a wide range of opinions.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Subordinate themselves to the demands of the feminists of the Marxist.

David Sessions:

Exactly. Although they published they did publish people like Dennis Altman or to some extent, Seymour Kleinberg, who we've talked about, who did, you know, maybe see see things that way. But they were just one voice among that was what you know, Denneny was really important to Denneny. What he articulates in that, like, essay that we read is that, know, very much that that's not a party line. It's, like, plurivocal.

David Sessions:

And and so yeah. Yeah. I I think you're right that there is I think you're right that there's a there is a political kind of valence to that in this moment. I don't think it's as obvious what a gay male political project is today in the same way that it might have been then because, like, as Denneny is talking about in this essay here, like, a lot of what a lot of the original Christopher Street is like just convincing people to come out and imagining themselves as a gay community or a gay world for the first time, and that is, you know, maybe we are doing that same move fifty years later, but for different reasons, like not because it's never existed before, but because it is sort of, you know, it kinda had a lot of success, and it maybe sort of won and isn't sure like what its raison d'etre is anymore. So I think it's more like that, and and I don't think, you know, I'd be interested to hear what Blake will say about this, but I have not found something that I think of like, oh, this is what gay male politics would look like, or this is a gay male political issue.

David Sessions:

It's more like doing this at all, thinking about gay culture this way at all, creating these kind of spaces or dialogues that is a certain kind of politics or create or trying to to institute or thinking about, you know, community and institutions and inheritance of our tradition. All of that is political in a way that is not hostile necessarily to some things that the left is doing, but it's just a different, you know, it's a different approach than this kind of hectoring social justice politics that we've, you know, have defined our gay culture and all culture in the last, you know, decade or so.

Blake Smith:

And in Denneny, in this introduction to the Christopher Street reader, that's like the, you know, in in principle the kind of nugget around which we're doing the

Daniel Oppenheimer:

This is our text. Right? I I did mention, know, I think you said

Blake Smith:

our text.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I think I think you said this, David, but but your episodes are structured around they're not structured around this, but there's always an article from Christopher Street that then you sort of use to reflect on then and and now. Right? So we have a text, it's it's Denneny's, I forget what the title it is, but it's his introduction to a to an anthology of of pieces from the first five years of the magazine that was published, I don't know when it was, around

Blake Smith:

A published in '83, I think he wrote it in late eighty two. Oh, yeah. And in that, like in any number of other of his writings, you see, like, you know, certain antagonistic relationship to, like, the Marxist left, but also, like, liberal universalism. I mean, both of these because they're, like, ideological universalisms that don't seem to leave space for, like, articulating a rich group identity. And these are like, I mean, classic critiques of both.

Blake Smith:

But and but also a complicated relationship with the feminist movement, like second wave feminism Yeah. Where, in fact, Denneny agrees with much of the content of feminism, right, which is that like women need their own spaces to figure out, like, there there's this great problem in the seventies that feminists set for themselves of getting over being a male identified woman, right, that like, you as a woman have inherited all these concepts that were not meant for you at best or meant for your subordination at worst. And so getting in a consciousness raising circle or having a feminist publication and exchanging points of view in in in new kinds of rhetorical strategies that, like, get around masculinist concepts will somehow be productive. Right? Like, we don't know in advance what what that's gonna look like, but that's a big concern both of American feminism and French feminism, like, that there is this newly born woman, you know, that there's like, there's a new women's culture to create.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. And, you know, there are gay men in the seventies who are excited about that project in a way that makes them see themselves as, like, part of the feminist movement, that we must also overcome masculinism, patriarchy, identification with, like, capital n men. There are also men like Denneny who are like, oh, yeah. That's the right strategy. Applying it for ourselves means not having magazines and organizations with women.

Blake Smith:

Right? Like, we we have to, like, set we have to do the same thing that they're doing, which means not doing it with them. And that doesn't have to be antagonistic, but, you know, it can feel I mean,

Daniel Oppenheimer:

you could tell in the piece that he was there was fire coming at him from some perspective because there's a there's a he kinda ends it, right, in this little bit defensive mode where he's, like, explaining, are there no women whose pieces are in the anthology or relatively new? I don't remember because I haven't seen any

David Sessions:

There are

Blake Smith:

no women. There are no

Daniel Oppenheimer:

there are no women, and so he has this sort of you can sense the kind of defensiveness in him, in which he explains why there are no women in Right. And that

David Sessions:

is I don't know if he gives like a list, but that is despite like the early issues having people like Kate Millett, and Andrea Dorkin, and you know, quite a few big names.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I would be interested, know, I'd be interested in both of you, I think we should get into this later, but not now, but Denneny talks about, you know, what would it look like, what are the ways in which, I guess it would be like a straight male identified gay male, that would be the version of it, right? And so he's talking about you know are there structures or sort of rhetoric or sort of conceptual forms that we have just inherited from this straight culture that aren't suited to us, and the one example he gives, it's not that it doesn't resonate, it just doesn't, I'm not sure how generalizable it is, he says you know there's this phrase the ex lover or something like that, right? And so and he feels like you know that's inherited from this kind of straight culture where basically once you break up with somebody, I think this is how I understood, once you break up with somebody they're just like they're in your past, and he's saying and I was using that term to refer to people I'd had relationships with prior, and then I looked around and realized I was still friends with these people, and they were part of my world, and I was connected to them, and so the word, that's a word that for our culture, for our gay culture, doesn't apply in the same way.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And that made sense, and I'm sure like there's all sorts of things like that that make sense. I don't know that that it doesn't seem to extrapolate to the form of the magazine itself, right? I mean he was very explicit that Christopher Street, he wanted to be the gay New Yorker. My sense is from listening to you guys, I haven't delved into the archives, is that there was nothing predict particularly innovative in that sense or radical in the structure of the magazine or Denneny's professional life that was not, didn't look exactly like what he inherited from

David Sessions:

the I rest of think they did some things that were cool and kind of original, but you know, for the most part, no, it wasn't like a super innovative publication.

Blake Smith:

So, I mean, you know, there there's this there's this book from a few years ago by this guy, Nichols, called Same Old, which is about the affordances of repetition and and form in queer theory and gay life. And one of his, like, implicit arguments is actually, like, doing the same thing or persisting in a now traditional category can be in itself really generative of new things. Like, we shouldn't have we shouldn't assume a strict relationship between, like, formal innovation and creating new kind of ethical and political possibilities. So, like, one Mhmm. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

There's there's there's a funny, maybe implicit tension between, like, Denneny and these guys wish to they sometimes talk because they're doing something really radical and almost like avant garde, but also structurally, the magazine looks like the New Yorker and has Ross Chass cartoons. She was doing cartoons for both Christopher Street and the New Yorker, which I love. And they're exactly as unfunny in the late seventies as they are today. Like, love her. She figured out her thing.

Blake Smith:

But doing those for two bi gay men so for instance, Foucault has an interview in the magazine in '82 where he's thinking like, you know, feminists and the left like criticize or make fun of gay men's interest in like recreating the locker room and having like the barrack army fantasy and, like, the Boy Scout thing. But he's like, historically, these all male institutions are linked to social control, subordinating women, excluding women in order to dominate them. And so one, they might seem like bad and scary or, you know, objectionable. But what if now for the first time, all male institutions don't even refer to women, are not about some, like, global patriarchal strategy? So something could be, like, formally the same, but suddenly, like, what it's what it's doing or what it might mean could be really different.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. I I think I think, you know, Christopher Street is like, I think situated in a kind of post avant garde moment. Right? Yeah.

David Sessions:

Right. I was that's what I was picked up on is like, you know, I think what you were saying there is like this idea that something has to be formally avant garde to be like, I don't know, politically or intellectually radical or be introducing new things, and that's something I've like always disagreed with.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

You know, let me see if I can articulate this well, like something I was thinking about when you guys were just talking was there is this idea of a gay male world society that I think Denneny posits, and I'm getting this kind of by way of you Blake, and your kind of readings of him, not him directly, posits as a kind of, maybe not radically, a new way of being in the world, right? That a kind of out gay male culture relationships, there's something kind of fundamentally new and distinctive about it. Whether it's radical or not, it's something worth understanding and pursuing and cultivating, and this is something that frankly, honestly I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what that means, because I think for a long time basically what I thought about gay men was like in a sense they're like straight men but who like to fuck each other. Right? That that I mean that was the key and almost the only distinction was, you know, and then there's things that follow from that that are kind of interesting, right?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

So like if you take women in the ways that they're maybe not as like interested in just casual sex out of the picture, and you just take a bunch of horny guys and put them together, there's gonna be a lot more fucking, right? There's gonna be a lot more casual sex, right? You're gonna have institutions like certain gay bars where you just walk in and the kind of the dance of seduction has been radically simplified, right, from what it is with straight men and women or something like that. So there's things that follow from that, but I don't think that is really capturing what I'm sensing Denneny and maybe others meant by that, but I have not fully wrapped my mind around what that is.

Blake Smith:

Well, so this is a tension even within, like, second wave feminism. Right? Where, like, feminist theorists who are excited about the possibility of a new woman's culture, a new woman's world, like a new woman. There's a tension between like ones who want to sort of say in advance, like, what that's going to bring forward. Like, oh, we know that women are Yeah.

Blake Smith:

Less conflictual, more generous, you know, goddesses, you know, whatever. Yeah. Or, like, well, actually, maybe a new woman's culture will, like, mean women can have new access to aggression, or, you know, women can begin like, there's a whole, you know, kind of French notion of, like, women's writing. Like, there will be new kinds of writing practices. I think Denneny too, like, Denneny is really not an essentialist in the sense that he's not saying very much about what the

Daniel Oppenheimer:

What it will be or what it what it should But

Blake Smith:

but I think even like your example about the ex lover thing. So like, I don't know when straight men and women became friends, like when when in, let's say, late twentieth century Right. It became possible. Right. I guess wasn't yet the case that a straight guy is friends with his ex, probably.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Right. That was not okay. That was just recognized as like your new partner will not want you to have a warm sort of ongoing relationship with an ex.

Blake Smith:

Right. But straight people have been changing. Straight men have been changing. Yep. And so, you know, what what the difference between straight and gay men is, I mean, that's also, like, that's not something I'm particularly hung up on because one, like, yeah, men continue to evolve.

Blake Smith:

And like, I I don't think we know very well what it means to be a straight man. I mean, we have endless sloppy discourse. I have not listened to your your latest interview on the the theme of the man and where has the man gone. Yeah. But we have endless theorizing about it, but I don't know.

Blake Smith:

I I don't have a sense of, like, what what it is to be a straight man now such that being a gay man should be different from it. Right.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Well, and then I think and then gay men, and I think this is a lot of what, or it's what I imagine is running through both of your minds as you're sort of doing the podcast, or thinking about it, which is then at the same time the idea of the gay man has been subsumed into the kind of miasma of queer, right, and the alphabet soup of LGBTQ plus IA, you know, etcetera, so that this, you know, even the distinctiveness of gay men as a thing has been, if not discredited, been kind of eroded conceptually, right?

Blake Smith:

Well so yeah, mean, one I think David has located a passage, so Oh, yeah.

David Sessions:

Yeah. So I it was bringing to mind this thing that Denneny says in one of the essays that we considered, you know, talking about, but actually this, we can just read this, and it will it kind of sum it up. He says, the question what does it mean to be gay cannot be answered with any definite content, just as the question what does it mean to be a woman cannot be answered. Whenever an answer is given, a little poking around will always reveal an underlying attempt at the social control and domination of women. To answer the question, what is a real man, is to attempt to organize and dominate all men for some ulterior purpose.

David Sessions:

The task and the opportunity before us is not to establish what is really gay, not to set up a new social orthodoxy, which would inevitably classify all divergence as perversion. It would be disastrous if the gay culture that is emerging took on the same moralistic unitary shape and dominating function as the straight culture that we are fighting against. And so it's like, something like, the only thing you can say about gay culture is that it will be pluralistic and and cosmopolitan.

Blake Smith:

But one of the things that, like, I think we're doing with the podcast that, like, sort of has intrigued both of us in in reading the content of Christopher Street from, like, the the era just before AIDS, and, I mean, we need to explore more, you know, the the AIDS era. But this pre AIDS era feels a lot like our own moment in terms of, for instance, promiscuity. And, you know, maybe an an enduring, for the time being, difference between, like, gay men and straight men or something that's characteristic of of gay gay culture, culture. Is like, you you were saying this access to easy sex. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

So, like, one thing that becomes possible out of that, we did an episode on Andrew Holleran having, like, a 1978, 1979 essay on, like, being over casual sex. Right. Now I don't know if straight men can be over casual, so I don't know if they have enough access to Yeah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Because we haven't had enough of it. Right? I wish. I wish I could get to the other side, but, know, I miss, you know

David Sessions:

But, yeah, and I think that that is there's a deeper thing there, and then, like, we shouldn't just understand it as, like, oh, there's more fucking, or we have more casual sex, but, like, an entire set of social relations kind of emerges around that, a different order of operations, a different way that you relate to, you know, friends, other, you know, friends, lovers, ex lovers, like, all of that kind of it's not necessarily about sex, but it emerges from a totally scrambled and different relationship to sex that than what straight men have.

Blake Smith:

And so that right. Being the guy who's not fucking, you know, takes on a different valence. So Right. So the I mean, the mistake would be to be like, oh, gay guys are all fucking. Right.

Blake Smith:

But then like, given that there is more access to casual sex, like, well then what what do different people's practices mean? You know, Fanon has a line in Black Skin, White Masks where he's like, thinking about black guys who don't have big dicks. And he's like, know, that's that's different than Right. Right.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Because no. Because right. Your monogamy, Blake, is different than my monogamy or something like that. Because I can't walk out the door and you know drive downtown and just you know snap my fingers and be non monogamous. This

David Sessions:

is one thing that we recently realized, we haven't really talked about it on the podcast, we had like slightly different approaches to or opinions about. And just talking to each other, you know, for example, just made me realize, like, oh, I actually don't really have considered opinions about this. I just have, like, kind of prejudices or Yeah. Impulses, which is exactly what, you know, we would want our podcast or any imaginary gay project to do, is to bring different perspectives into contact with each other and be like, oh, actually, that person kind of has an interesting perspective about it. And yeah, haven't thought much about this.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I think that I'm worried that the structure you guys have right now is going to end up being an albatross or a drag on the larger project, which is always tethering it to something from, and maybe you guys have thought about this, like always tethering it to something from the magazine. I mean I think it's the magazine is powerful, it's kind of Wellspring of Inspiration for you guys and a kind of historical reference point, but there's part of me that wants you to be kind of liberated to just go out into the world of the gay male world of today and be exploring these things without having to sort of reference it back to some article from, you know, 1981 or something like that.

David Sessions:

Blake, you wanna take that?

Blake Smith:

Sure. So I mean, I think the initial thought was like, we should do, I don't know, ten, twelve, 15. We should do a certain number of episodes to test or to to demonstrate that, you know, what we already believe, which is that there are important commonalities between this era and our own, such that it's like worth revisiting, like, what Christopher Street was doing, and it's it's worth trying to reactivate that project of wanting to think about gay life in a way that's like somehow historically grounded, but, you know, free of certain conceptual frameworks that, you know, we don't like in the present. And then having done that, like, should season two be? Where should we move on from there?

Blake Smith:

You know, we're talking about some more contemporary text. We I I I have come across, and David was very intrigued by, Avital Renell, who I'm I'm working on now, has a talk from like fifteen years ago where she is really into Dennis Cooper on rimming. And I don't know who else has theorized rimming. Don't know if Avatar Ronnel has ever rimmed or been rimmed. I don't know.

Blake Smith:

Women do that now, apparently. This is what

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I heard

David Sessions:

it used to be,

Daniel Oppenheimer:

but yeah. Sorry.

Blake Smith:

I would not would not go near a straight man's butt. But you know, women are women are crazy. Where was this?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Why is a straight man's butt different from a gay man's butt? I'm what what's the distinction? We don't have we don't have that.

Blake Smith:

How I don't know how clean you think you

Daniel Oppenheimer:

We don't have the hygienic habits? Is that what you're saying?

David Sessions:

Rumors, that they don't wash their asses. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, like, I know just from this weekend how great that episode would do, because there was so much. I I listened, I watched a guy in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night, give a dramatic speech about everyone should eat more ass, and like, no one depreciates eating ass enough, and

Daniel Oppenheimer:

This was just out in the street in in Provincetown, in In

David Sessions:

Provincetown, like, it's

Daniel Oppenheimer:

a guy

David Sessions:

in the big crowd after all the clubs close, and everyone's in the street in front of the pizza place. So I I didn't even I laughed and talked to him, but I didn't get his name, so I was calling him blonde ass eater all week.

Blake Smith:

Well, I I look forward to the episode because I truly I don't get the practice. I don't get it for straight people.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Playing the

David Sessions:

rim the rimming episode.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Yeah. But for

David Sessions:

And it's my thing. It's my thing, so I will explain.

Blake Smith:

But see, there's diversity in the community, you know, and that's an enduring You

Daniel Oppenheimer:

know, and I I don't wanna project this onto you guys, though I think maybe some version of this is is is not a projection of mine. Like, there's part of me that's like I want this sort of field guide to gay male life 2026, right? Like I don't know about I mean I've just you know I mean you learn something new every day, like I didn't know there was a whole discourse about like ass hygiene in the gay male space and how straight men you know, don't know what they're doing, that's fascinating. Obviously, you know, I'm not telling you guys what you need to do is produce the gay podcast that the straight guy would want, you know, but I would think the truest expression of the kind of Denneny political project as I understand it through you guys, which is like using kind of this identity, this sort of this identity as gay men as the sort of anchor of a community within which all these sort of pluralistic voices can have a conversation. The truest expression of it would be a really contemporary one, you know historically grounded because you guys are historically grounded, but just sort of like what is this world that we are a part of?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I guess the other piece of it is like my sense is like is anybody doing that? I mean I think I said to one of you when you guys announced your podcast or when I listened to an episode or two, like there's something absurd about the fact that if I want to go listen to some like intellectual but fun gay men talk about gay male life, you know, via podcast or something like that. I think it's Off Christopher Street, and then that's the end of the list. I mean, can you can correct me if I'm wrong.

Blake Smith:

There's intimately many things we versions we don't like. I mean Yes exactly. Talk about some of those.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Well right, but I'm saying yes, mean so so what I mean we can talk about those, right? What are the ones we don't like? What am I I suspect the what what I would go listen and I'd be like, this is just what whatever kind of slop we wanna call it, like, I would be underwhelmed by it.

David Sessions:

It would either be slop in the sense of it would be beneath you intellectually, it would be about pop culture or, you know, therapy, and and maybe not all of that is bad necessarily, but it would be very much like, you know, you're valid, and your journey is valid, and all the all this kind of stuff. Or or it would be something like bad gays, which is also kind of has a historical focus. It's like about, you know, evil homosexuals from the past, and it's all just about like how terrible gay men are from this sort of posturing leftist perspective.

Blake Smith:

And and I don't know that the hosts really believe this, but in the book version of their podcast, they're very explicit in the framing that the male homosexual project has failed. Mhmm. Because it is too close to capitalism, to the couple form, to monogamy, and to whiteness. As if there weren't, you know, broke people of color who are sluts, who are, you know, in the gay male identity.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

So I'm curious, who are the hosts of the who are the bad who are the bad gay hosts? What's their profile?

Blake Smith:

I mean, Ben Ben Miller is like a, you know, like all of us failed PhD, have her moved to content creation, and Hugh Lemmy, who was like a failed novelist. Okay. But he's he's less public, less public facing. So I mean, there's there's this, and then there's various, like, I mean, there's some kind of edgy gay content out there.

David Sessions:

You know,

Blake Smith:

a lot of like

David Sessions:

Like kind of like Red Scare adjacent or like this kind of like new right vibe shift type thing.

Blake Smith:

But they're they're surprisingly little like if you were to go on Spotify and see like who's talking about like who's done an episode on like Andrew Holleran, our dancer from the dance or who's so Ed White is like well talked about the things like the Time Literacy supplement or, you know, he he had better, like, prestige literary media connections. But although there's a great deal of either pithily or very like woke left critical discourse on gay history and contemporary gay identity. I think stuff that comes from a desire to, like, promote, curate, see, flourish, that like that identifies with, like, gay male culture rather than somehow

David Sessions:

Terrorizing it. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Yeah. Like, antagonistically toward it. There's there's really there's not so much. I mean, I should say, like, I think part of what's different between now and the seventies is that we have something to inherit.

Blake Smith:

Right? So I think, you know, part of wanting to do a series of episodes around articles from the magazine is both to explore, like, what's similar, what's different from fifty years ago. Yep. But also to say, like, those guys could imagine themselves in the seventies, like Ed White writes a lot about this at the time, as inventing a culture. And in some ways, that was wrong, and they put themselves in a kind of needless division where they're like, they're putting themselves against Tennessee Williams, Gordon Vidal, Edward Albee, like, the previous generation of guys who didn't identify as homosexual, or who didn't identify with publicly with the homosexual culture, and not seeing them as their ancestors.

Blake Smith:

But I think we're in a different position of receiving something that, you know, is coming to us and thinking about, like, what do we want to take on from that? What seems, you know, productive? What's worth holding on to? And and how can we use that to think about contemporary stuff?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Yeah, and I'm not criticizing what you've done, I think it's great. I'm saying I like I'm glad to hear I think that you thought about. I feel like at some point you would exhaust the utility of that structure, and then you would kind of you know, so that's good to hear, okay. That's reassuring.

David Sessions:

Yeah I I would say we agree with that.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Do you feel like you guys have gotten, I'm curious about the feedback you know whether that's in terms of listeners or likes or just private emails or something like that, what if anything has been the reception, I remember when I started my podcast I was very clear to myself, was like okay, I'm not going to commit to sort of an analyst, like I need some positive reinforcement, right? And I didn't define it specifically, I was like I'll know it when I see it, and you know after having done, you know I said I'll give myself a year, I'll commit to doing it a year and then I'll see where I am, and I was by that time I was clear that it wasn't like it had blown up and gone viral, but I was getting enough positive feedback, enough growth from others that I felt good about it. Mean what's been the how many episodes have you done, and what's been the response so far?

David Sessions:

We have recorded through episode 10. Okay. Yeah, I would say that we've had steady growth, but not a breakout or viral moment, And so the the most feedback I've gotten is kind of from people I know in Boston, people that I know of, or like acquaintances, and that are listening, and like, that are, you know, smart people I would expect, and also some people that I, you know, wouldn't have expected. And then, you know, people will have a strong reaction to a particular episode, or they like like the whole thing. So so that, yeah, like that is, I think figuring out exactly, we want the audience to be kind of anyone, you know, any any gay who wants to think about this stuff.

David Sessions:

But we've also kind of heard from that, especially in, like, among academic gays, it's kind of gotten around.

Blake Smith:

We have not yet reached the illiterates, but that's that's the dream. That's the

David Sessions:

Nor will you.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

As I've discovered. Yeah. Yeah. I've not had a viral moment either, you know, like, it's a steady growth. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

You know, in in part, like, selfishly, like, on my end, you know, it it'll it'll be like I'm finishing the draft of this book for UChicago Press, and then who knows when it will actually come out. So I would love if between now and then, we have a huge subscriber base, and many people feel like they should buy the book whether or not they will read it, whether or not they can read. You know? Because yeah,

David Sessions:

they are

Daniel Oppenheimer:

with the team.

Blake Smith:

That's where the real money is. Like, I, you know, I was at someone's house a few months ago, and they had Jamie Kerchick's, like, book on the history of gay Washington DC, and they didn't know who I was like, oh, she's controversial. And they had no idea who, like, Jamie Kerchick was. They had no idea, like, what his politics were, they just and I don't think they were ever going to read this book, but it was just out. And I was like, that's where I want to be.

Blake Smith:

That's the kind of book that I want. Because like, if you get the tiny people who would read, But anyway, I don't yeah, we have not yet gotten them. That's part of the wish with more video content, think.

David Sessions:

Yes. But I have seen, if I can say, Dan, just for my, like, you know, I think it kind of dovetails with Blake's writing the book a little bit, and for me, it's it's a kind of intellectual practice that I've realized that I need. It's like, I need to commit to I need to be obligated to something. I need to have a regular thing that I have to do with someone else, and I have, you know, struggled to finish essays or get things off the ground, and and it has having to do these little chunks of research has made that more possible, and I'm kind of, like, starting to get, you know, asked to write about things, or pitches accepted, and then I've already done a little bit of work that, you know, I wanna explore in an essay. And also, yeah, and I think just, like, talking through some of this stuff with Blake has kind of given me, like, oh, yeah.

David Sessions:

Okay. I am ready finally after five years to start talking about this stuff. So so, yeah, even if even if no one listens, like, it has been, you know, it's been useful for me in that way.

Blake Smith:

And and I think for both of us in the background of wanting to think about a gay magazine from the past when I think about, like, contemporary gay culture and identity is a frustration with so there's much bad, dumb gay discourse. There's much terrible gay media being produced or media about gay men or, you know, but I think there's a real feeling that like if one wanted to write or say something to a gay male audience, in fact, there isn't a venue for doing that. Mhmm. Right? There are many gay male critics, you know, writing to people like, you know, Travis Jefferson, Harry Tafoyo, you know, whatever.

Blake Smith:

Is there a place that gay men can actually talk to each other rather than talk to an audience of whatever straight people might happen to be sympathetic to their perspective? Like, there's many venues where you can be, like, the house faggot, but for like multiple gay guys that have different points of view talking to each other, in fact, there isn't such a thing. So I think, you know, we're not that the podcast fills exactly that gap, but like that's sort of the Yeah.

David Sessions:

But it is something that we think that is really important about kind of where the gay writer and gay thinker is right now, where they are positioned, either as one of these, you know, house gays doing the Baffler's thing, or First Things thing, or the Atlantic thing, or as kind of the solo entrepreneur, the, like, the totally kind of isolated Substack entrepreneur, and we have learned that there is no real gay content or thought on Substack. There is no interest in gay stuff on Substack.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I'm trying to think my way. This is a really interesting question, I'm trying to kind of process this in the moment, I was like, well who has that, what does that mean precisely, right? I'm like, as Jew, let's say as a Jew, do I have a space where we can talk to each other, and I realized I started out with like the tablet and the foreword, and then I realized, well the answer is like, it's called the media, right?

David Sessions:

Right. Right. Well, we talked about this when we were trying to map it out, and I was like, well, I don't know if this is exactly analogous, but at least we have like, there's multiple Jewish publications of, like, different politics

Daniel Oppenheimer:

But I think it's those publications, I think it's called the media, and I think that,

David Sessions:

you know Yeah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And I think black people have, at this point, the media. Right? Like, think you can be, if you if you have Ta Nehisi Coates and Jelani Cobb and Nicole Hannah Jones

David Sessions:

I think there was right. I that's how I put it. I think there was a moment where black intellectuals were talking to each other through the New Yorker and the New York Times, but I don't think that's quite I think that was you know, they they were talking past each other. I don't think it was really, you know, a durable I

Blake Smith:

I am I am the last person to be able to, you know, talk intelligently at the history of black media, but I for comparison with Christopher Street a while ago, I looked at some issues of Freedomways from the seventies, which was like a big black intellectual journal. And, you know, it had a particular kind of soft nationalist maybe line, but it it had a good diversity of perspectives. So there were like Marxist and nationalist, and, you know, people who were more, you know, liberal, like, within the Democratic Party talking to each other about, like, what black politics should look like. And Yeah. You know, you you're more sympathetic to Thomas C.

Blake Smith:

Coates than I am. For me, he was, like, peddling Afro pessimism light to white people so he could cash in. And so a very different kind of person than his father, for instance, who was, like, really concerned about like black politics.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Right.

Blake Smith:

And I don't think it's good. Like, I don't know if all communities are in like this kind of position now, but I think it's I think it's it is a generalizable and bad. But there was, what, fifteen, twenty years ago, there was this weird bubble of new Jewish media where, like, tablet was kind of revitalized. There was what was was it? Shmata?

Blake Smith:

You know, there were these, like, New York Jewish magazines.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Yeah. Juicy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Sessions:

I vaguely remember that.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I'm trying to think of how realistic it is, because part of the something that's happened, and this has happened not just in the kind of media space, but in the political space and in the institutional space, is when we got rid of, you know, at least, you know legal discrimination and segregation in all these respects, and we got at least formal equality for all of these groups, you know all of these kind of high powered kind of meritocratic institutions started sucking up high powered people within these communities, right? So you could no longer have a kind of coherent boundary black newspaper or journal that had the best of the best, nor Jewish, nor gay, or something like that, right? You couldn't, like you can't start a Christopher Street right now because at the end of the day, if you, if David Sessions and Blake Smith are killing it in the new Christopher Street, sooner or later the New Yorker is gonna come along and say, oh, hey, Blake, David, why don't you write something for us?

Blake Smith:

Is never maybe for David. It will never that will

David Sessions:

never happen. You know?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

But, like, well, you know, mean, right, because because Blake has burned too many bridges gratuitously, but humorously. But you know, it's worth asking, mean I don't want to be overly pessimistic about this, it's worth asking what would it look like for you to be speaking to each other, and I mean let me propose one model which is just the sort of like there has been, and this is the one that I participate in, is this like Substack ecosystem, right? So there is a sense in which there's some constellation of you know political cultural writers on Substack who are speaking to each other, and there's some sense of a conversation, and both of you guys are part of that. It's not a gay conversation. But probably a very high percentage of my listeners, my small niche audience, know who you guys are already, right?

David Sessions:

I think we hoped that there would maybe be more of that than there has been, because that's true, we are both, you know, part of that more broadly, or kind of have our own niches, and my audience loves when I write about politics or tech, and they're they do not like when I write about gay stuff. And that may just be like the audience I have and the people who followed me based on what I wrote, you know, the way discovery works now. Yeah. And as I write about other things, it will find a new audience that's more interested in that. That's a possibility.

David Sessions:

But it seems to to me, like, so far, like, in this in Substack and elsewhere, like, when you when we publish something from Christopher Street, one of our episodes, one of the things that we'll often get is a, like, oh, I remember that article from the original Christopher Street, or like, oh, I read that back in the day, so it's like an original reader of Christopher Street being nostalgic, it's not like someone participating in a dialogue.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

What want is somebody, whether they're yay or nay, you want somebody to listen to your episode and then offer their own perspective in conversation with that or in reaction to that. I mean is that part of what what would it look like for this for that part of your project to start to feel successful?

Blake Smith:

Right. So, you know, I I I'm gonna sound very very elitist and and I guess maybe in in contradiction with myself, which is like, I I think the thing is going well if it sparks someone else's like thinking and, like, inflects their practice. So, yeah, for me, like, the wish when I write anything is, like, I get an email from someone which is, like, agreeing or disagreeing, but, it somehow Yeah. Motivates them to do something differently. Like, so

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I don't want to I mean that's huge, I think that's huge, I don't want to dismiss that at all. That is not a community in the Dennenian sense. Right? That is not a community of that's not a conversation, it's not a people kind of in in sort of some sort of circulatory system. Right?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

That's you as the kind of center broadcasting out affecting people.

David Sessions:

I know what

Blake Smith:

it worked me as the center, I don't know. I mean, I'm I'm working right now on a section of the book on Denneny's defense of Larry Kramer, and Kramer is like hectoring, shouting, yelling, do you wanna die? At his gay audiences and calling, you know, Fauci and and Mayor Koch, like murderers and Nazis. And Denneny's argument is that, like, the point of this discourse is not to establish consensus or agreement or to get you enrolled on Kramer's side, it's to get you to do something. Right?

Blake Smith:

And if if you doing something is is the effect of this hyperbolic speech, then great. Like, that also that that the antagonism, the disagreement can also be a kind of world building practice. Like, world building doesn't have to mean consensus, doesn't mean like enrollment in the same political project.

David Sessions:

I think Blake and I ourselves are an example of that. Like, there that's an example of like, it starts with him just, you know, writing and broadcasting, you know, alone, and then I find, you know, oh, here's someone who's thinking about similar things that I'm I'm thinking about. I reach out to him. We end up doing something together, and like having his writing out there gave me both kind of cover and freedom, political cover and freedom to think the things that I thought anyway out loud in public, but also kind of an admonition to think about them in more broad, generous ways and not accept the kind of binaries offered by the current discourse. And so, like, you know, just if if you think of it as a kind of, like, chain reaction or something that's evolving over time, like, you know, our partnership came out of that, and and everything that we're doing comes out of that.

David Sessions:

And I hope that, you know, I I kind of think of it as, like, we can't even launch a magazine. We don't have a readership for it, but we are kind of just even if we're just, like, connecting two or 300 academic gays who are thinking about some of this stuff, and they whether they are in touch with us or not, it kind of shapes the work that they're doing. You know, I think that's a version of this.

Blake Smith:

And it it's been, you know, I don't I don't wanna, you know, be playing like the the heel or the crazy person my whole life, but I you know, speaking of Kramer, you know, he develops this

Daniel Oppenheimer:

You're the Ric Flair of the contemporary That's system.

Blake Smith:

He develops this two front strategy or two track strategy with ACT UP, which is like, you go outside Fauci's office, you scream murder at him all day, and then in the evening you call him and you go out to dinner and you say, look, you know, I hate that I had to do that, but really you should put more funding into this. And I know I'm not as good or, you know, conscious about that as as Kramer, but, like, whether it's, you know, collaborating with David on this, or in the past years, I've I've co written with some friends and colleagues like a number of things on queer theory, on gay history, people who are more calm and professional and more like, you know, classic left gay guys than me. You know, I think like that's that's great. Like, would love to build a huge audience Yeah. Sure, but I think what's what's really exciting is like, even if someone might find like some of my positions or style like distasteful, they're like, okay, but there's something there that we can work with, like let's let's see what this can do.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

No, mean I would take it, and I assume you would too, I would take it, you know, I mean I think my sense is you have been successful so far, in in the way that what, you know, in an optimistic version of what the scenario would be, it sounds like it has been successful. I would say, wouldn't it be awesome then like, you know, it's like it starts with just Blake, and then David joins with Blake, and then you're reaching all these other people, you know, it would be great if some woke left gay men, or whatever it was, a blog, there's no blogs, a Substack or something like that, you put out an episode, and they just acknowledged its existence by shitting on it, essentially.

Blake Smith:

Yes. Right?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Right? And then you can have

David Sessions:

a Yeah. Consider We that. Success and exciting, not because we get to have a, you know, a beef, but, like, I would genuinely like to respond to Ben Miller about some of this stuff. But as long as we're just talking past each other from different publications, the temptation is gonna be to do it in this kind of sniping mean way, and I'd rather do it in a like No. Yeah.

David Sessions:

Where I take him seriously.

Blake Smith:

Well, and and I posted about this recently. I like, I came to Denneny in the first place having been thinking about Arendt, his PhD adviser for a few years, and thinking about, like, some of her ambivalence and my own ambivalence about against Heidegger, who she sees as, you know, anti technology, anti democracy, anti opinion, anti, you know, publicity. She wants to find it like, she thinks it's it's politically and ethically necessary that we find some way of within the modern sphere of public opinion, of media, the exchange of perspectives, to be doing thinking. Thinking has to be something that's like shared, that's collective, but it's constantly menaced, shadowed, parasited by what Heidegger calls idle talk, know, like yapping Right. Slop.

Blake Smith:

Discourse. And I mean, for me, like, you you may be more optimistic about Substack. I have very little engagement with other people in Substack, in part because like Substack disgusts me. And I really I hate the like clubby, you know, I reference this thing that you reference and we sort of pick a random topic of discussion for the week, so now we're all gonna talk about, you know, this one author that opinion is not the author.

David Sessions:

I actually said someone, yeah, it's like the other day I was like, yeah, Substack is trash, like I'm done with it.

Blake Smith:

And in part it doesn't feel grounded in like, I think this is maybe part of the wish about a return to a right kind of identity politics. It doesn't feel motivated by anything existential or real, there don't seem Yeah, to be

David Sessions:

it's kind of like this vague abstracted desire to have some kind of literary culture with no reason, you know, nothing for that literary culture to be about or for. I don't

Daniel Oppenheimer:

know, I'm trying, geez, I'm trying to wrap my mind around it. What would be, what would it be for?

David Sessions:

Well, I think that's why the main topic is often this kind of meta discourse about publishing, or like a meta discourse about publishing, meta discourse about magazines, and who gets into what, and who's leaving who out. It's kind of like, yeah, it's kind of if it has a re its whole reason of coming into being with a kind of identitarian, outsider identitarianism, we're gonna, you know, storm the gates of of institute publishing institutions. So if it has any coherent, you know, reason to exist, it's that, and I find that, like, uninteresting, and those people generally idiotic and uninformed about how those institutions work and how important they are.

Blake Smith:

So, you know, this this kind of stuff and then the like, should you be reading Bolano? Like, I don't give a fuck. How's that gonna change? Like, I guess if you like it, not if you don't. But like, for me, like, oh, I need a great gay novel so that like I can better imagine my own life and the life of people I care about so that I can be thinking about like so so that I can have access to things within myself that I didn't know.

Blake Smith:

I mean, is what like, I guess any good literature does for us. But like, for me the stakes of establishing a contemporary gay canon, of figuring out like who's good and what they offer us and what remains to be done, like what we're what we're missing, that feels like much closer to, like, real political and ethical stakes.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Yeah. And I have no I have no argument with that. I think what I'm struggling with is like, what what is it we are imagining that the scene or the structure or the institutions or the ecosystem would look like? Because I realize like I can't argue with the fact that there's a lot of dumb stuff on Substack, like kind of self referential stuff of the type you're describing, I mostly live in a kind of substack of my own mind where I'm reading the stuff I want to read, and I hopefully most of the time in the you know in the kind of emotional or intellectual relationship to it that you're describing, what is this for me, what does this do for me? And so in my mind, it's like I can concede all of your points about how much of it is kind of that, whatever you want to call that version of slop, and at the same time I'm like, well okay, but at the same, you know, I just read this piece that Naomi Kanakia wrote on N plus one, and that felt, that did not feel like slop to me, that felt like somebody kind of wrestling with, you know, somebody who has a distinctive perspective, you know, wrestling with characterizing this thing that I'm interested in that is meaningful to me in some way.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Mhmm.

David Sessions:

Yeah, I think you have a subject though, like you have a kind of, you're kind of doing an informal, you know, iterative sociology of intellectuals, and that enables you to kind of reach into these some of these discourses that may, you know, that interest you, but you're not pronouncing on every political is issue out there, every publishing discourse. So I think that's, like, the difference between the, like, the ones that I, like, like reading versus the ones that you know.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Well right, but you're knocking, I mean Blake is knocking the sub, you're both knocking the subtext scene, and I'm like what is the scene you want? Like wasn't it ever thus, right? Like if we could go back to like the partisan review parties or something like that, and whomever's apartment on the Upper West Side, wouldn't they have all been super annoying?

David Sessions:

It would not be one scene, it would be like a bunch of small ones. It would be like, you know, a good one to me would be like if there were other gay people like us responding to our episodes and writing critiques of them, and, like, we got to respond in the comments or, you know, things like that, that would be a successful version of Substack.

Blake Smith:

Well, I I think part of the wish to, like, both on on my end, like, the past few years to explore the kind of Christopher Street archive, and then with David to see like, well, how does it connect to the present? I don't want to hold that up as like the model of what we should do today, and there were many were many things that I criticize about it or make fun of about it, many ways it was like limited and stupid and, you know, promoted some dumb authors and had its own versions of slop discourse. But there there were, I think, constructive useful things that it was putting forward, and we've tried to highlight like the things that we think were the best. What that would look like in, you know, we're we're probably in a post magazine moment. Right?

Blake Smith:

I mean, I'm I'm sure I've mentioned like a few years ago when the Soros people like offered me money, and I was like, give me money for a gay magazine, and they're like, you know, no. Absolutely not.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

What if they wanna give you you're not telling me what they wanted to give you money for. What did they wanna give you money?

Blake Smith:

It was very un it's like it's like you're being recruited by the CIA or the KGB. It's like really unclear. It was like the the conversation began with, what would you do if we gave you money? And it's not it's not clear how much. It's not clear like how I mean, clearly fumbled the bag.

Blake Smith:

I I realized that, but it wasn't clear how I could fumble the bag or not fumble the bag. But they they they are not funding identity politics anymore, they said. Where was this going?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh, just like I'm I'm struggling to see what I guess it doesn't surprise me that you guys knock Substat cause I know you guys, and yet at the same time I'm struggling to like you know because there's a way in which I mean this is true more for you David I think than Blake, but like didn't Substack kind of surface you? I mean aren't you a product of aren't you a success story in some small way David of of Substack? I mean you must have come to my attention because you were commenting on something. I mean I know you'd published stuff before then.

David Sessions:

I think maybe maybe it's given me a small profile on Substack, but I was quite well known before that. Like I was you know, before 2020, I wrote for the New Republic all the time. Like, I was, you know, I had 10,000 Twitter followers. Like, it was not yeah. I I was much bigger in 2017 to 2020 than I am now.

Blake Smith:

I also used to be I think I, you know, I was bigger when I was doing unwoke shit for a tablet. Yeah. Right. And I don't know. I I think having it's not it's not terrible or an unlivable contradiction to feel ambivalent about a medium that you use and rely

Daniel Oppenheimer:

on. Sure. No, it's not.

Blake Smith:

No, no.

David Sessions:

It's not a misinterpret. And

Blake Smith:

this is something that like, you know, in the background of my book is like me struggling with Arendt really wanting to valorize, like, exchange of perspectives, to promote that as a kind of democratic alternative to, like, you know, Heidegger's vision, to be writing stuff for the New Yorker, like that's where she does the Eichmann reportage, but also feeling like it I mean, she is really depressed by the fallout of this. Right? She feels like no one is understanding what she's trying to do. Mhmm. And she never explicitly theorizes, like, okay, is this not working?

Blake Smith:

Like, is there a problem with me trying to publish stuff in The New Yorker where like, my thoughts about evil are interrupted with a Ross Chass cartoon? Like, can can I really express myself to a giant audience of anonymous people? Can thinking take place in that context? And like, I don't know, I mean even I don't know how you think about your podcast conversations, but you know, there is something very strange about having like I mean, I know both of you in some way IRL, and like, you know, think of you as friends and like, you know, intellectual interlocutors, but also I'm being overheard in trying to speak kind of honestly and intimately with you by, I mean, not a very large audience, but by some audience of people I don't know who may include morons and enemies. And that's weird.

Blake Smith:

It's weird to think about it. It's also weird to try not to think about it while while talking with you. Like

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I wonder, and maybe David, you should consult your sort of checklist of things we wanted to cover today. Wanted to I realized one of the things I was really interested in hearing from you guys is and I and I think this follows from what we were just talking about, which is like, to the extent there is a gay male scene, not not scene like intellectual landscape, that's a better way of putting it, to the extent there is a contemporary gay male intellectual landscape, what is it? What are its nodes? Who are its players? Because I don't think that I'm or is it a bunch of, you know, house gays who are parked at, you know, different straight institutions or something like that, and in fact, other than you and bad gays or something like that, and Billy Eichner, it's it's just it's just a, you know, it's just a lot of individuals with different kind of degrees of audience.

David Sessions:

Well, me give a semi serious answer first before we like, you know, a somewhat joking one. I think the gay public sphere is still Twitter, is still gay Twitter. Even though it is mostly slop, it's possible, it's most, it's almost all engagement bait. It has a cycle of people that, you know, it surfaces clusters of topics that really get people going, really, you know, really activate gay men, really bring out a bunch of different contrasting experiences and perspectives, And it's very it's very performative and ritualistic, and it's, you know, it's easily, you know, we can easily call it SOP. However, but I I think it, like, surfaces subjects.

David Sessions:

For example, the, like, the this is a recurring all their topics are recurring, you know, a new engagement bait tweet restarts it all the time. The one this week this week was about muscle gaze, and, you know, how horrible muscle gaze are, and how they only hang out with each other, and, you know, they only have friend groups with each other. And and and then, of course, a bunch of people making fun of those people, you know, you're just not you just want them to fuck you, you know, and blah blah blah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And

David Sessions:

so this is happening, like, I I happened to open Twitter while I'm in Provincetown at, you know, the global epicenter of Muscle Gaze, you know, Fire Island and Provincetown Circus Circuit Week. And and I have like two, a couple different essays in the works, like, you know, that I have done from the podcast and done from reading, kind of trying to give a different, you know, framing to the whole, you know, what are muscle gaze? Like, why, you know, what is this kind of pursuit of aesthetic perfection? What does it lead to sociologically that just completely rejects all the terms of these, you know, discussions? So, like, that's a kind of thing where I think, you know, there's an infrastructure there, but it would be taking those kind of things that bubble up and being like, okay, let's actually think about it.

David Sessions:

Let's not do a a shitty out essay or a shitty advocate essay or or even

Blake Smith:

Complications which still technically exist. Are there

Daniel Oppenheimer:

so are there are there in that landscape, are there the the gay Twitter landscape, are there voices, are there people who are notable and and at least serious to a degree or legitimate? And, like, who is the Jamelle Bouie of the of gay Twitter or something like that?

David Sessions:

Tweet yeah. They're they're all, like, they're quite big and well known, and they have positions and stuff, but they're all anonymous, so like they're Oh, interesting. Pseudonymous.

Blake Smith:

We should do an episode, you know, when we transition to season two, and we're, you know, we're doing the more purely contemporary talking about gay Twitter, you know, I haven't been on Twitter when did it become X? Was that two summers ago?

David Sessions:

2023, I believe.

Blake Smith:

Okay. So I haven't been on for three years. And, you know, what I what's what's positive about Twitter is it represents or accesses this fundamental dimension of sociability, which is like our wish to shine, our wish to to get attention. Mhmm. And that's like, that's good.

Blake Smith:

Like, you should wanna you should wanna go get attention. And and in the best of cases, like, you have to be excellent in some way for that to happen. Unfortunately, yeah, I think Twitter doesn't necessarily fulfill, like, the

Daniel Oppenheimer:

lack So there is no you're saying there is no Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist, whatever the kind of establishment.

Blake Smith:

You like Jamelle Bouie? What what do

Daniel Oppenheimer:

you mean No. I don't like Jamelle Bouie, but he is a kind of he's a he's a sort of I don't even know what he's The

David Sessions:

course organizers around him. Yeah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

He kind of organizes a kind of he's good at sort of stoking kind of that engagement and allies and enemies and yeah. So he is a kind of if you to map back in the day, you were to map kind of the liberal journalistic media Twittersphere, I think there would have been, you know, the heat map would have showed, you know, a sort of of a heat focus around somebody like Chima. There's other people like

Blake Smith:

Okay.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

But I'm saying there's not a sort of a sort of out, a non anonymous gay writer or figure or something like that around whom these things kind of constellate on Twitter.

David Sessions:

No, but I am noticing that like as I, because I got on later than Blake, and he's not anymore, so as I send him stuff, he's like, oh, know who he's known who these people are for years, and so apparently, there's been relative consistency

Daniel Oppenheimer:

But they're pseudonymous. I mean, they're pseud Yeah. Yeah. Even despite that. Yeah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And what about the magazines? What are the big like out and, like, do those matter at all? I mean, do people No. Do they organize mean, you

Blake Smith:

do get so the Jamelle Bouie thing is is interesting, makes me think because now I I mean, I remember from, yeah, grad school, like, something I wrote, like, you know, when I was doing a phase of, like, sort of public facing history and I'd written something on the slave trade, someone was, like, very excitedly, Jamelle Bouie retweeted. And I was like, what the fuck? Who gives a shit? But, you know, thinking of him as, like, the the institutional link or, like, the center around which, like, Twitter discourse can be activated, but also passed into the official channel. And I think what you get on, like, out an advocate, which, like, technically are in paper, but basically online, or QueerTea or these other, you know, and barely

David Sessions:

have staffs. They've they've laid off all their staffs. Like, they're they're basically shells, or, yeah, media shells that are just brands and no staff.

Blake Smith:

And their version of this is just, like, scraping Twitter, or Reddit, or whatever, or, like, either telling as a story a controversial Instagram post and the discourse around it, but in no way connecting it to, you know, more thinking or Mhmm.

David Sessions:

Well, one one example one counter example would be this last week before I left, which I'm gonna write about The this essay this op ed in the in the New York Times on the last day of Pride Month by Matthew Vines, a kind of conservative Christian guy about kind of against queer, like, again, you know, I'm gay, not queer. And all gay, you know, universe, you know, erupted over that, and now the advocate and everybody ran a kind of response to it. So there there was like, you know, as the first time I noticed, like, okay, there is an actual writer who writes for the advocate, he has an opinion about this, it's not very good or historically informed, but at least somebody tried, you know.

Blake Smith:

Right. I guess, you know, one of one of our, you know, shared frustrations is like, you know, the sort of people who do get into a position of writing for like The Times, or, you know, love Jamie Kerchick, but, like, the thing he wrote against queer theory and liberties, which, like, just has no grounding in any of the text or, like, awareness of queer theory. There's there's a a really strong division, maybe more on this subject than in other areas of, like, our our public discourse between, like, academic awareness of Yeah. Like, gay history, of the lineages of queer theory, and of, like, you know, gay male thinking over the last half century, and the public discourse. So, like, there's there's a certain interesting vitality to gay Twitter and, like, social media.

Blake Smith:

And I think there's a real there are valuable things in the intellectual traditions of, like, academic gay male queer theory, and there is not there is not, like, a good meeting ground for Mhmm.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And gay gay Twitter can be kind of like the YouTube philosophy autodidact where they're like, like, have these, like, pot Yeah. Potted histories of different thinkers, and postmodernism is bad, and anti foundationalism foundationalism bad, and reactionary, or things like that.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I mean, I think one of things that was interesting about Twitter when it was kind of peak, pre Elon, Twitter was, I mean it was terrible in all sorts of ways, but at least this was interesting, which is there were real intellectuals who were there were real writers, real intellectuals whose ideas were sort of via the medium of Twitter were affecting the real world, changing the discourse, evolving the discourse in real time. It may have been they may have been doing that in immature ways, it may have been that other people were sort of vulgarizing their ideas, but I just don't think there's a question that that was happening, and I guess part of what I'm hearing from you is like there's not a ton of, at least there's not a person that may be happening kind of in a sort of communal way or collective way, like who are people who are influencing the discourse around gay issues? Like who are the top 10, you know, gay, queer intellectuals in the public sphere right now?

David Sessions:

I mean, so I could give you a list of people that I think are serious writers, but it's they're not influential. Like, I think it's I think what's influential is, like, Instagram accounts who post, like, these slop, you know, carousels about, you know, your trauma when you were in high school, and how you didn't get to have sex until you went to college, and and that's, you know, some of the some of which are obviously AI generated, you know, that's what has influence. That's what shapes the discourse.

Blake Smith:

But part of what organized my wish, you know, about the time that I got off Twitter, like, you know, three or three and a half years ago, for a gay magazine is the feeling that like, on the one hand I had some interaction with some somewhat prominent, like anonymous Twitter personalities who were like, you know, every day had like the funny new tweet about ripe Jockel, or know, commenting on whatever the latest, like, controversy within, like, gay twitter discourse is. And then, you know, finding out from exchanging with them that they're like, you know, an Ivy League PhD who is currently underemployed, who like, wrote their dissertation on Sedgwick and, you know, the southern gothic, and thinking like, well, girl, why don't you like write something serious? Like, why don't you combine like, if you have you have the intellectual and you have, like, the the fun, the pseudonymous, like, there's this missing middle ground. And in fact, like, I I think both even even though there are no academic jobs, the the life of academia or post academia, like, constrains people where, like, if only I act good, maybe I still can get a job, like, maybe I can protect myself from precarity.

Blake Smith:

And it's also, I'm sure that, like, being a pseudonymous, like, Twitter person I mean, you saw this even with the, you know, dissident right, but like, you know, pre Trump to kind of right where like these people like Lomas or Bap when they were pseudonymous seemed like exciting and funny and clever. And then when they're revealed and people read their like straightforward work under their own face and name, it's like, oh, you're not that smart or interesting or scary, there's no frisson. And and on the other hand, I won't I won't name names unless you want me to.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

The I you both to name for good and ill are the people who who actually are writing or or talking under their own name who are somehow, even if they're less influential than gay Twitter or gay Instagram, are at least best we can do right now. I mean other than Andrew Sullivan, right? Andrew Sullivan, know you don't like him Blake, but you can grant that if you had to do a top 10 list of, like, influential gay intellectuals, gay writers, he would be on it. Right? He would be near the top.

David Sessions:

Possibly. Except that he just doesn't really you know, I don't think I'm gonna pass someone who has anything to say about gay stuff. And he's influential in general, as a general intellectual. This is one of the things we were actually talking about preparing for you, is like the return of the general intellectual who has to write about everything and distinguish themselves as and the people that, you know, I'll just throw out a few off the top of my head, like, I, you know, in spite of some ambivalence, I always read Garth Greenwell, I, you know, like his criticism and essays certainly more than his fiction, but I think he's I think he's an important, he's powerful, he's a person who has placed him positioned himself as the inheritor of this tradition the same way that we have, and that's something I respect, actually, that he's doing that, you know, whatever the the execution. There's, you know, people I don't enjoy but read, like Ben Miller, if he has something in the Baffler.

David Sessions:

There's

Blake Smith:

I mean, in art criticism, there's someone like Jarrett Ernest.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Jarrett Ernest. Brandon Taylor is another novelist, right, on Substack? Brandon Taylor is another one on Substack.

Blake Smith:

Oh, sure.

David Sessions:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, another person I read, but as like I don't think he has any interest

Blake Smith:

in Loves the Mooji pins.

David Sessions:

He loves yeah. Likes he's interested in the nineteenth century bourgeois European novel, but not in gay stuff, in gay culture in any way.

Blake Smith:

But no one would ever call up Andrew Sullivan to find out, like, know, as as the David Halperin book has it, how to be gay, right? Like, he is he is not informing anyone's sense of what gay culture is, who the important artists and writers are, what are like core gay values. He's he's a prominent intellectual who happens to be gay, but he's not, like, speaking essentially to a gay audience or trying to inflect our sense

Daniel Oppenheimer:

of I keep giving me names. I just think this is interesting, because I think, like, yeah, okay, so let's move on.

David Sessions:

Okay. And I would also say, actually, Jamie Kerchick, who's someone, you know, that's in all of our universes, he's I he's he's also like a general political reporter and kind of, you know, right center, right leaning type, but he has a couple of he has some book excerpts. He has a great essay and tablet about Stonewall, and, like, the revisionist history of Stonewall in the kind of trans era. You know, I think that is really important work that I could have seen myself writing. And he wrote a book, you know, he he has his book as Like, I I consider him a gay writer who I care that

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I mean, gay Washington book was very good. I mean, that was I just mean,

Blake Smith:

there there are not people at the level of imminence of, like, you know, an Ed White from back in the day, but, like, you know, for people like, you know, David in his age, you know, I like I like with an asterisk maybe Paul McHattery, like, you know, think, like, he he had this I

Daniel Oppenheimer:

don't know.

Blake Smith:

He he had a critique of Ocean Vuong before anyone, and no one gave him any flowers. He was he was the first before that English loser who I don't care for. I'm forgetting his name.

David Sessions:

I think Tom Tom Cruise. I you know, I disagree about that. I think the Tom Cruise essay was just absolute banger. I laughed all the way through it. Loved it.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

That was the one that just I I didn't remember the name, but that was the one that just, like, set off a kind of Yeah. You know, cascade of just like, now

Blake Smith:

stop Asian hate is over, so it's okay

Daniel Oppenheimer:

It's okay.

Blake Smith:

To hate Ocean Vuong. But when Paul McCattery did it in 2022, 2023, it was like, don't come for, you know, Tinder queer person of color.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Any spirits? Are there any spirits or academics?

David Sessions:

I heard that that did actually hurt his career.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh, yeah. Are there any theorists or academics who are working who you guys think I guess, you know, ideally are like influencing things, but if not, are at least good. I think most people we've described so far are journalists or or or basically fiction writers, right? They may have an academic post, but they're, you know, Greenwell's a

David Sessions:

Actually, I think I think over time we are going to at least hopefully bring some of those names to the public. Like, next episode is with, my friend Ben Bernard, like a recent Princeton, French historian. He's really interested in circumcision, and, like, it's kind of his passion project, and and so we talked to him about that. Like, that's that's another thing that's rooted in Christopher Street. And he's just such a, you know, he's he's like super informed in kind of queer theory and his history of sexuality, and it was, you know, it ended up being a really kind of high level conversation of the sort, you know, we haven't quite even had yet.

David Sessions:

And and and I think those are the people that are our most natural interlocutors.

Blake Smith:

I mean, tellingly, hasn't published anything on it yet. I think there's also, like, I was gonna say, I I won't necessarily name names, but back when I was on, like, my my unwoke shtick, you

David Sessions:

know,

Blake Smith:

I had a number of exchanges with gay guys in media Mhmm. Or in academia who do not necessarily write about like gay male culture and identity, in part because they have a kind of seething relationship to like, queer left stuff and like don't want to think about it, don't want to engage with it, but also need to keep up, like they are like proper left people in other respects. Right. And they don't want to like don't want to danger that, they don't want to endanger their careers, you know, they don't they would not want to be Blake Smith, but might privately say, like, oh, I'm really sympathetic to, you know, you making fun of Sedgwick, you making fun of Yasbir Puar.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Who's the Sith, white gay guy? Who's isn't that the name of the book? What's his name?

Blake Smith:

He's moron, though. Yeah. Tragically, are many idiots taking up this space.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And are there is there no one I mean, this is this is always hard for me to kind of like, is there no one whose politics you dislike kind of who who are sort of organizers of kind of gay left intellectual energy? You know. Like I can think of a lot of people, and I actually have mixed feelings about them, but you know if I think about somebody just on the left left like somebody like Corey Robin or something like that, like I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but I could point to him and say okay that is somebody, there's somebody who's kind of an organizer, who's smart, who's an organizer of kind of a certain form of

David Sessions:

Yeah, so actually I might put Ben Miller in that category, even though like, overall his project is something I find, you know, awful. This, you know, faggots are women and this, you know, alliance of queer communist and and trans people or whatever he wants. But within the essays, that guy had a kind of second level, he agrees with some of our critiques, or he articulates them, and then he and then he proceeds to, like, you know, not live up to that in his own writing.

Blake Smith:

And if fundamentally he's interested in, like, gay male life, even though his even though his intellectual framework is, like, doesn't actually allow for, like, embracing that specificity. Right? We have to, like, you know, oppose it in the name of some universalism. But what he's actually interested in, like, studying, talking about, building an audience around is the gay male culture and history, so, like, work. And that and that has, like, I mean, made him a fair amount of money, and there, you know, there is an audience for that.

Blake Smith:

It it's funny that, like, yeah, I mean, Verso publishes this stuff as if, like, that's advancing the socialist future, but I think it's it's a moneymaker for them Yeah. As for him. I mean, it's interesting

Daniel Oppenheimer:

to think about, I mean, this yeah.

David Sessions:

Like, I would consider, like, I would say he's a serious person that, like, I would have an interesting debate with. Right.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

And yeah. I mean, it almost doesn't have to be said, but of course part of the story in anything where you're talking about gay male life is AIDS, right, and how many people died who would have been, you know, who would have represented the continuation of some of these traditions, or were coming up and would have been the next generation of the interesting people who would have been writing about this stuff and they just died, right? So there's this kind of massive kind of elision in the story that obviously a lot of what you guys are trying to do is sort of reconstitute a tradition that was that maybe would have fallen prey to some other kind of macro forces even in the absence of AIDS, but but but with it was just kind of brutally kind of disrupted.

David Sessions:

Mhmm. Yeah. That

Daniel Oppenheimer:

was Maybe kind of it would have just

Blake Smith:

been eroded

David Sessions:

By assimilation. Right? But Yeah. Decimated by by AIDS, and then also maybe to a smaller extent kind of steered away from the gay male subject by academia. And

Blake Smith:

I I don't wanna say that AIDS doesn't matter or that, you know, I didn't disagree earlier when you brought up assimilation as something that's like, you know, why is everyone trying to write for the New York Times? Well, because of assimilation, because of the civil rights. But I don't think the timing of either of those is quite right. So like last year, maybe two years ago, was like in New York and went to the Museum of American Chinese, or like the Chinese in America, I forget what the acronym is, which is great. You don't have to be a rice queen, it's a nice museum.

Blake Smith:

And they had an exhibition on Asian American print media. And in fact, in the, let's say, late nineties, two thousands, there was like a a peak of number circulation and it seemed like quality of these magazines. And now, you know, there's so much, like, pessimistic Asian American critical discourse. There's all these losers who write for the New York Times and these, like, the New Yorker, and they were like, oh, you know, we don't have anything in particular. We don't have a tradition, as if there weren't, like, a several generation old intellectual literary tradition of Asian American thought.

Blake Smith:

And I don't think the, like, disappearance of those like, I think the disappearance of those publications has more to do with, like, stories about the media economy. Mhmm. Right? Then in in the same way, like, the decline of gay male bookstores, the decline of ethnically or identitarian specific, publications. I think that's maybe something more about the Internet, the publishing industry than it is about, like because, like, the the, you know, the history of Cat Fancier magazine, you know, I don't know how it's gone up and down over the years, but that isn't indexed to, like, oppression or acceptance of cat fanciers.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Right.

Blake Smith:

Right? Like

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Well, I guess maybe a smaller claim in a sense could be, you know, not so much the kind of erosion of the ecosystem, but like literally the number of people. I mean, look at how you you're struggling to come up with names. I'm saying like, give me a top 10 list. You're like, this has always been a small number of people, right? Like the real power players in sort of intellectual literary discourse has always been a small number of people, and then when you slice it even smaller because it's this percent of the population that's like, you know, 5% or 5%, let's say it's 5% gay, or five or 10, and then the the gay male is smaller, if you literally are just killing off a certain number of people in a generation, it may be that, like, two or three people who would have been really important figures now who would be in their sixties or seventies or something like that, like, just didn't get to that because they died.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I mean, that that that's a that's a kind of narrower argument or something.

Blake Smith:

Well, so so I mean, one, of course, many people who died of AIDS didn't get to have careers at all, but a lot of the people we're interested in had their careers because they didn't die of AIDS. So, like, Holleran, Denneny, you know, Charles Ortlieb, etcetera. And then somewhat younger, I mean, we haven't talked about, like, there's a kind of intermediary cohort of, like, with with many asterisks and qualms. I like, let's say, Hilton Alls, Wayne Kustenbaum.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh, yeah.

Blake Smith:

You know, Gary and Deanna's art criticism, I find interesting. You know, do not love the fiction. I mean, there there are many or, you know, Dennis Cooper also, like, I find an objectionable writer, but his blog is an interesting, like, curatorial thing. And these are also people these are these are prominent male homosexual intellectuals in New York, in nineties, two thousands, you know, still today, not Gary, Indiana, but died pretty recently, who did not have like, you know, they were at, like, the Village Voice or New York Magazine or having some, you know, academic appointments or having a blog in Cooper's case. But that that being connected to each other, being connected to, like, an ongoing gay male culture, all of them also had a kind of fraught relationship with gay male identity, right, and kind of positioned themselves a little a little askew from it.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Mhmm. So I think thought of Wesley Morris at the Times. Do you know him?

Blake Smith:

Who was that?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Wesley Morris at the Times.

Blake Smith:

I do not know Wesley Morris. Who Okay.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

A black gay male writer podcaster. Doesn't mostly write, isn't mostly writing about gay stuff, but has written some things. He wrote something about, I think he, it wasn't about it was a part of it was about being a gay black guy who, I guess, he didn't have a big penis. I mean, there was there was an essay in the Times Magazine.

Blake Smith:

Yes. See, Fanon. Fanon knew.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

There was something in the back. I mean, maybe it was just about maybe it was about the intersection of just kind of going and being in the gay male world as a black guy and all of the kind of fantasies or sort of tropes or things like that

Blake Smith:

to Andrew Sullivan's fantasies. You you know about this fact. Do you know about the the the looking through, like,

Daniel Oppenheimer:

you know, the black Sullivan? From Holleran. Yeah. I guess. Well, I remember there was the I mean, there was the big kind

David Sessions:

of he

Daniel Oppenheimer:

was outed. It was kind of personal preference list to sort of, you know, bareback it right in the AIDS airway. But yes. There's a clip that and if he wants to make the Oh, I see.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. And that and that connects interestingly with the

Daniel Oppenheimer:

bell curve and the Olls. Yeah. I haven't read Olls in a while. I liked him. What was that book?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

There's something like three women or something that was a book?

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Yeah. The the first book. Yeah. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

I mean, this is it's really it's inspiration to me as I'm working on a book about three women.

David Sessions:

Blake, you know, you mentioned this that you know about this kind of post gay discourse from the nineties, and that I was not aware of until I kind of just started running across it, and it really does seem like, I'm not sure what the play was like, There was this turn of the century, like, everyone wanted to think about, oh, what does the turn of the century mean, or how does everything change when the century turned? And, you know, I think it kinda relates maybe to that, like, Holleran ambivalence that we talked about recently in our pride episode where everyone is there's you not really the battle for gay marriage yet, there's not like a current political issue, there's kind of, it's like the waning part of AIDS, and so I think there's this kind of like sense that widespread among gay writers in The UK, The US, where it's like, gay culture is cringe, and it has it has, like, narrowed into this kind of, not a leftist moralistic political correctness, and maybe an Andrew Sullivan type, or a differently, a Larry Kramer type. It's they're they're all talking about like, now we're just this like, this corny family where, you know, everything has to be uplifting, and all the pop culture is shitty.

David Sessions:

We have to celebrate shitty pop culture, and and there's this kind of like, you know, it's gotta be more than this. Like, we don't like if this is gay identity, we don't like this, you know.

Blake Smith:

And and so for a long time, is one of the continuities that David and I are interested in tracing, there's been this since from the very as soon as gay culture is founded, the sense of exhaustion with it, it's corny, it's stupid. This is gonna be also something to connect with, like, American Jewish identity where these, like, great postwar American Jewish novels are also all pitted against Jewish American culture. Right. Right? Like, the foundational text for us now of, like, Roth and Bello are also, like, seething with hatred for the world that has been made.

Blake Smith:

And, you know, how one inherits that, how one passes that on, like, you know, open question, like, what's the non psychotic way of doing that? But, yeah, like, I I think part of part of what we're interested in is bringing together these people who founded Yeah. Gay male culture, and these people who position themselves as critics of it, but who, you know, from our perspective, like, well, you're actually totally in the thing. Like, Dennis Cooper, you think, like, you know, you're, you know, doing some post gay, non gay, whatever, but you're just in the thing. Or like, I'm getting really into Bruce Benderson, who is still alive, but, you know, it's gonna drop any moment.

Blake Smith:

He he's one of these, like, weren't things better before Giuliani cleaned up Times Square? Weren't things better when gay sex was illegal? And his whole life is, like, gay men publishing in small gay houses, hanging out with gay guys. It's like you are just part of the thing, and that's okay. Like, it doesn't have to be a revolt against this identity.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I mean, we should, before we go, at least wanna touch a a little bit on bros and heated rivalry. I'm not sure what the other. Weren't you resisting watching Heated Rivalry for aisle, Blake? Didn't you resist it for

Blake Smith:

a while? I have not watched.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Oh my Have

Blake Smith:

you watched? Have you watched? Of

Daniel Oppenheimer:

course. Has it ever been?

Blake Smith:

In the whole family?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Me and the whole family. Me and the wife and maybe my oldest have watched it.

Blake Smith:

See, I'm always saying that straight people are the real queers. Gays are not queer anymore because straight people are that's queer. That's weird to me.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

David, I've TV rivalry?

David Sessions:

Yeah, yeah, I watched it.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Did you enjoy it? I mean, I enjoyed it.

David Sessions:

Yeah, I enjoyed it. Not doing good. It was kind of the, yeah, my take was that, like, it just did a TV show, I enjoyed it. I liked terrible TV, and, yeah, and I didn't even think it was terrible, but the discourse around it was, like, not for me or not for us, like, that was kind of my take is, like and not that I, like, you know, I didn't wanna see there be, like, oh, we you know, everyone should hate this, that everyone likes heated rivalry. Was just like, yeah, fine, whatever, but like, can't we have can't we have gay stories that are about something else besides being closeted and coming out, and and can't we can't we ever talk about what happens after that?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Right. And I I will offer my one insight from heated rivalry, but then I wanna so maybe I won't try and drag you guys into heated rivalry discourse, but we can at least talk about bros, is it did strike me, you know, earlier I was saying, like, what is distinctive? Like, I'm trying to wrap my mind around what would be distinctive about kind of the being out in the open of two gay men in relationship and romantic relationship to each other, as distinct from like, you know, the sort of ancient Greek ideal where it's like the older man and the younger woman, and they're a younger man, and there's a kind of hierarchical, there's a kind of strict hierarchical relationship to it and all of those things. Yeah. What did strike me in watching Heat and Rivalry that I just had never thought about much, maybe because I just haven't watched a lot of men having sex with each other, was sex is different when you have two strong people in the bed.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Right? There is not the sort of physical

Blake Smith:

I would not know I can't lift a bag of flour out

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Sex of can be different. It was just like the physicality of it was fundamentally different from what it is with me or my wife or any other woman I've been with where I am

Blake Smith:

You've never done the Robert Crum like bodybuilder woman thing?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I have never done that. Right? It could happen with women. The women I have been with are not, you know, they're half as strong as me, half as big as me. Like, it's just a different sexual interaction when you have these two big strong guys.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I don't know, that was just it was just interesting. I didn't even know what that means. I think I sort

David Sessions:

never liked a woman that was like bigger than me, And so, like, my wife was, like, petite, small, you know, smaller than me. I could pick her up, you know. And and that was, yeah, that was one of the things I noticed immediately. It was, like, men are so their bodies are just so much harder than women. And they're, you know, they come in all different sizes.

David Sessions:

My boyfriend is all like, you know, very petite twinks, though he's like, you know, he's he's very strong and muscular, but he's, you know, he's still a little shorter than me. And so it varies, but but, yeah, it's that is true.

Blake Smith:

God, so right. I I, you know, the couple of times I was with women, I was not with the the Robert Crum female bodybuilder. And, you know, I remember telling a gay friend after, you know, one of the experiments, I was like, you know, they jiggle and power doesn't jiggle.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Title of your sex tape, Blake.

David Sessions:

Here we go. I got it in. Power doesn't jiggle.

Blake Smith:

Sorry, women. You know, I'm sure they're you know, the the Venus of Willendorf, I'm sure that's a kind of power, you know, fertility, that's something, but it just it's not it doesn't communicate I

David Sessions:

know your

Daniel Oppenheimer:

sixth date, title of your memoir, title of this episode, at least as it comes out, Eminent American's Power Doesn't Jiggle. What like, can we end on bros, or I mean, you can bring something else. So let me just I'll give you my brief

David Sessions:

We love Bros.

Blake Smith:

We love Bros, yeah.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

So mixed feelings about Bros, which is some gay friends of of ours sort of bullied my wife and me into watching it with them, and

Blake Smith:

Y'all not everything is for everyone. Y'all don't need to be watching all of this. What what did we not may not make still, like, full house or something?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Here's my take on Bros, which was perfectly delightful b plus, a minus rom com, except I found Billy Eichner just unbearably annoying, and sort of just like

David Sessions:

Yeah. I I think that was the ultimate probably defect of the movie, or like the reason that a lot of people felt that way, but

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Like the point of view of the movie seemed to be that his profound sense of entitlement to bend the world to his idiosyncratic personality was justified, like, politically morally, or something like that. Was like, no. You're a dick. And like Yeah. Like, can be a

David Sessions:

dick to your boyfriend's family, and it's okay, because they're a little uncomfortable with you being gay. And that's just, like, not how it works, you know?

Blake Smith:

Now, look, I don't want to be antisemitic, but when these characters no longer exist, the art from, like, Woody Allen to Sarah Jessica Parker to Billy Eichner, when, you know, a Jewish person cannot do a self insert annoying lead whom everyone has to tolerate, then y'all will truly you know, you need to make Aliyah, you know, you need to get out of the country.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Yeah. But Blake, here's the distinction is we were not expected to the Allen's movies did not make the case that everyone that Woody Allen was ultimately on some kind of redemptive political journey. Like, they were not justifying his neuroticism. Right? Like, the movie, the point of view of Bros was that it's exactly what David and that was the scene now I'm remembering where he's so awful to his boyfriend's family, and he's the and and they're the bad guys.

David Sessions:

Yeah. And they don't do anything wrong. They just are you know, they don't even say anything homophobic. They're just a little uncomfortable.

Blake Smith:

And I I think we can be given to understand that Billy Eichner as a person and character is very annoying, in part because he's driven insane by, like, his you know, the the project of launching this museum, like, the seethe that he has to contain while he's working with these people, that is real. And that's how, you know, we don't we don't have

David Sessions:

to I do think the movie does sort of satirize that a bit, or, like, you know, it does make him it does crazy. I

Daniel Oppenheimer:

mean, part of me was like, but I feel a little sad for you guys, because like, you have to embrace this because what else do you have?

Blake Smith:

We have to embrace bros. Yeah. It's We should be so lucky as to embrace bro. What, like, what no. This is this is this was this was my read, you know, my tablet thing about faggots and Larry Kramer a few years ago.

Blake Smith:

Was like, you know, many people think this is a bad novel. We should be so lucky as to have you know, this is like, you know, this this this this is the joke, like, you know, like, mommy, you know, the Christian kids get, you know, the the Christmas presents. What do I get for Hanukkah? You get to be Jewish. You get to have bros.

Blake Smith:

You we we are so lucky as to have.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

When's Billy Eisner coming on the show? When's he

Blake Smith:

He's not doing anything,

David Sessions:

so he's available. That. Look, I agree with that that it was it was still fun, it was still enjoyable, and it had a it kind of very savvily and carefully and playfully took on the moment of what it's like to be kind of a cis white gay man, and it kind of had, it kind of came from that perspective despite, you know, its parts that were annoying.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Didn't he kind of have a meltdown in the aftermath because he felt like it didn't get the the love that it

Blake Smith:

deserved? Yes. Because it was it was a money loser, and there were many it was attacked from the left as, like, looking was, also as girls was for, you know, not being representative of the full diversity of life in New York and blah blah blah blah. And then, of course, on the right, there were many terrible pieces in First Things and, you know, national reviews saying this proves that gay men cannot love, and Billy Eichner's flop, you know, reveals the vacuity of gay male existence.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Poor Billy. I'm look. I enjoyed the movie. I just like had he cast somebody else?

Blake Smith:

No. Because it's it's a great mise en abidem. The way, like, his character is driven insane and the way he himself is driven insane, it's all like, it it it performs the thing.

David Sessions:

Yeah.

Blake Smith:

He's he's a man driven mad by the state of gay discourse.

David Sessions:

So

Daniel Oppenheimer:

it's a text in that sense. It's an important text that

David Sessions:

It's absolutely a text.

Blake Smith:

Can real Billy Eichner be saved? I don't know. I mean, I loved, Difficult People, which he did not write, but I mean, he's he's a good

Daniel Oppenheimer:

He was better in that. Yeah.

Blake Smith:

He was yeah. He's better maybe when he's not doing the writing, but it was his first movie. Have you made a movie?

David Sessions:

Steve? No.

Blake Smith:

I'm sure it's very hard.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I don't know where we ended up, but this was a lot of fun for me. Guys, I don't know what's left to say.

David Sessions:

I would just say, like, thank you for yeah. I I, like, I love listening to your podcast. I really enjoyed your episode with Damon Linker who who you know, I kind of I thought the topic of Roger was was played out, and maybe it is, but I thought I still thought that was a great conversation. And just the way that both of you that's he and you both can kind of talk about yourselves and and another person in this kind of really interesting way. But, like, anyway, I just wanna say I appreciate that.

David Sessions:

And and it's a pleasure to get to it's helped me think about, like, oh, if I'm a guest, how would I talk about myself, or how would I talk about my work?

Blake Smith:

I mean, I haven't listened to the Rod Dreyer one yet, but you you and David have in common, I I am less of a I I dipped into the Dreyer fandom or whatever the word is for like, you know, being being fascinated by his insanity, but there's so much. Yeah. It's hard to keep up. But I do like, I I love your ability I mean, you you know, you're tracking the discourse in general, which is less exciting to me. But when you get when you, like, share your fascination with some oddball, where you're able to be also, like, both critical and kind of generous.

Blake Smith:

Yeah. Like, you know, Dre is like an unwell and pernicious person. But you know, like, it's it's not like you're not there, like, just like scolding or exposing, you know. It's

David Sessions:

Yeah. Yeah. I like and I feel like that's very my mode or, like, a mode that I respect or relate to.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Well, and let me just end by saying, you know, maybe I should have led by saying this. Like, I'm I'm just enjoying the podcast. I'm enjoying the Substack. Like, I'm excited that you guys are doing this, I think it's really good, and I hope you keep doing it. I mean I hope you give yourself the time and space, and I don't know, I think you're opening up space for other people, which is and and and, you know, if it was kind of if that was the goal in some overly earnest, you know, Ear Broccoli way, then the podcast itself would be boring, but but you're doing it by not being boring and being sort of authentic.

Blake Smith:

We can think of it as, like, you know, we're we're we're a sort of intellectual butt plug, you know, we're there to open things up space. To new possibilities. What's gonna come up?

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I'm trying to play out the metaphor in my mind.

David Sessions:

I mean,

Daniel Oppenheimer:

it's opening one thing up, but it's kind blocking another thing. Right? I mean, I don't you know? Well, well, right, I mean, we can we mean, that is the title of your memoir, Blake. Intellectual butt plug, I think.

Blake Smith:

Is this this this like this is this is family dinner conversation in your house as Oh by my way.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Would be shocked to know maybe that in fact it is. I mean, in fact, like, I'm not sure there's anything we've talked about that would not be dinner table conversation in my in ways that make just to give you a sense, my family thinks I'm the woke one. Like, that is a running joke in my family that I am the woke Okay. Okay. It's it's it's great and it's worrisome.

Blake Smith:

I I await I await your children's tell all, you know, because I'm I'm you know, I have, you know, the the text of your your therapy book, which I'm looking forward to. But what's what's gonna be interesting is later seeing you from, you know, someone else's confession.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

Yeah. Alright,

David Sessions:

for me.

Daniel Oppenheimer:

This has been fun.

David Sessions:

See you guys. Bye, guys. Bye.