All Episodes
Gay Therapy Slop: 'The Joy of Gay Sex'
In this episode, we kick off our occasional series on Gay Therapy Slop, in which we’ll talk about how therapy discourse has shaped modern gay self-understandings. What...
Gay Power, Gay Myth: Harvey Milk and Randy Shilts
Assassinated less than a year into his term as San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk is remembered today as one of the first openly gay elected officials and a sy...
Where Have All the Gay Writers Gone? (w/ Dan Oppenheimer)
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 in...
Andrew Holleran's 'Dancer from the Dance,' The Best Gay Novel of All Time
Our reverence for Andrew Holleran is no secret, and the appointed hour has arrived to talk about his 1978 masterpiece Dancer from the Dance, not just, as we argue, the...
The Scandalous History of Circumcision (w/ Ben Bernard)
We’re back from our summer vacation and ready, naturally, to talk about dicks. We’re joined for our tenth episode by fellow historian Ben Bernard to talk about the str...
Are Straight Women Gay Men? (w/ Phoebe Maltz Bovy)
In this episode we talk about gay men and women: friendships, commonalities, and the often overlooked sexual tensions. We’re joined by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who deals wit...
What is Pride For?
Down with corporate Pride! Pride is a protest! Stonewall was a riot! Pride month has become as much about social media discourse as anything else, and in this episode,...
Gay Love in the Age of Dating Slop
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 m...
Why Gays Tried to Cancel ‘Cruising’ (w/ Domenic DeSocio)
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 fr...
Why Are We So Angsty About Casual Sex?
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,...
The Messy, Sordid Spectacle of Gay Republicans (w/ Daniel Lefferts)
By day Terry Dolan coordinated the fusion of free-market radicalism and evangelical fundamentalism known as the New Right. By night he cruised DC's steamrooms and gay ...
Gay Masculinity and Its Discontents
Gays being masc has been making people mad for half a century now, and in this episode, we read Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 Christopher Street essay, “Where Have All the ...