We’re drowning in algorithm-optimized relationship slop, social media sob stories about the supposedly toxic gay dating scene, and ragebait on worn-out subjects like monogamy vs. open relationships. It can feel surprisingly hard to find real gay men talking honestly about what it’s actually like to be in a relationship. Even in the history of gay writing and thinking we talk about on this podcast, it’s easier to find depictions of sex, yearning obsession, or doomed love than of two men figuring out what it means to be together.

In this episode, we talk about one exception to the rule: A groundbreaking 1978 feature in CHRISTOPHER STREET that interviewed two men, Philip and Neil, about the drama and power dynamics of their relationship. The article included the beautiful—and sexy—photos they took of each other while they were together. We revisit Philip and Neil’s story a half-century later as a springboard for talking about our own relationships and experiences, and cover topics including:

• How sex is different in a relationship vs. as a single person
• How sexual positions and gender expectations shape gay relationship dynamics
• What’s unique about the male-male couple
• How gay lovers are different than gay friends
• What you should NOT talk to your boyfriend about

Chapters
(00:00) Why love is a perfect topic for Pride
(06:50) A groundbreaking look at a gay couple
(22:27) Philip and Neil’s images of each other
(30:10) Cruising and hookups vs. relationship sex
(42:24) How neuroticism and overanalysis kills desire
(48:00) What’s unique about the male-male couple
(56:44) Boyfriend twins, similarity, and competition
(01:04:34) Sexual attraction vs. common interests
(01:09:54) How we decided Philip is the villain
(01:17:32) Should your partner be your "best friend"?
(01:22:44) Sometimes your feelings are boring and stupid

Sources

Michael Denneny, Philip Gefter, and Neil Alan Marks, “Anatomy of a Love Affair,” Christopher Street, February 1978.

Michael Denneny, Lovers: The Story of Two Men (1979).

Michael Denneny, Decent Passions: Real Stories About Love (1984).

Adam Mars-Jones, Box Hill (2020) and Waters of Thirst (1994).

Renaud Camus and Farid Tali, Incomparable (1999)

Jackson Davidow, “Two Lovers,” The Baffler, September 7, 2023.

Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2010).

Pillion, directed by Harry Lighton.
Don Jon, directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Annie Hall, directed by Woody Allen.

Did gay men invent cancel culture? Even before it was filmed, William Friedkin’s gay serial-killer thriller Cruising (1980) attracted massive publicity and protests from gay writers in New York, who feared it depicted the gay men of the city’s leather bars as sex degenerates in a moment of rising homophobia and right-wing politics. In this episode, we talk about Christopher Street editor Charles Ortleb’s strange screed against the film, which also served as a political statement for the magazine’s desire for gay men to become a “people” with a collective identity.

We talk about how the controversy over a film now seen as a cult classic foreshadowed contemporary debates about representation and cultural appropriation, the long history of gay men analogizing homophobia to fascism and the Holocaust, and whether there’s a kind of identity politics that might be less dumb than what we experience on social media today.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(07:29) The making of ‘Cruising’

(14:16) How ‘Cruising’ became a gay controversy

(18:34) Charles Ortleb’s importance in gay intellectual life

(24:21) The “zap” and 1970s gay media politics

(31:47) The gay fascism analogy and Holocaust comparisons

(42:11) Gay identity politics vs. liberal universalism

(50:09) Why Ortleb’s paranoia was better suited to AIDS

(57:58) Defenses of ‘Cruising were insane, too!

(01:04:01) Art doesn’t need permission from minority groups

Sources

Domenic DeSocio, “Christopher Street Hits Fifty,” Gay & Lesbian Review, May-June 2026.

Blake Smith, “In Defense of Cruising,” Air Mail, November 9, 2024.

Arthur Bell, “On Cruising: The Hollywood Hassle,” The Village Voice, September 3, 1979.

Charles Ortleb, “The Context of Cruising,” Christopher Street, April 1980.

Michael Denneny, introduction to The Christopher Street Reader (1983).

Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (1996).

Janet Maslin, “William Friedkin Defends His Cruising,” New York Times, September 18, 1979.

Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (2022).

Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982).

Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990 (2025).

John Rechy, “A Case for Cruising,” The Village Voice, August 6, 1979.

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

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

Chapters

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

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

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

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

(31:58) Is democratic abundance less hot?

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

(40:02) The uniqueness of gay intimacy

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

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

(50:31) Sex is both amazing and boring

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Sources

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

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978).

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

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

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

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