Excited to republish Andrew Holleran's 1984 Christopher Street column on Pride, which isn't collected anywhere else and hasn't been reprinted since it originally ran. I'm a fan of the Holleran column in general, but this one is a gem of his craft, so subtle you almost don't notice its technical complexity.

I honestly hate gay dating standards so much. I haven’t read Deleuze and Guattari. I don’t go to salons all the time. I hardly ever can identify the Lacanian objet petit a. I read Kant and Russell. I prefer concrete notions. I don’t understand the semiotic triangle.

Why do people keep writing this article over and over?

🎧 NEW EPISODE 🎧 We look back at a 1970s critique of gay clone culture and the about the long-running false dichotomies between masc and femme, macho and camp.

I’ve seen way too much negative discourse about the gay community recently that I only want to highlight the best parts about being gay for pride month. What’s everyone’s favorite part about being gay/gay community? ⬇️⬇️

In 1979, the gay novelist Andrew Holleran heard tell of a gay man in New York who made someone go on 19 dates before he would even kiss them. 
 “How marvelous that in 1979 someone would still refuse his person to another!” Holleran wrote. “For people aren’t refusing their persons much anymore. In fact, grabbing a body is about as easy as going downstairs and buying a hamburger—which is why in San Francisco they call it “fast-food sex.” The “man who dated 19 times,” as Holleran goes on to call him, becomes an avatar for his ambivalence about gay promiscuity and yearning for domesticity. Cheap and abundantly available, 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, as well in revived reactionary critiques of the sexual revolution and a yearning for a type of eroticism imagined to be lost. Promiscuity is held to blame for an alleged shallowness of gay relationality, for preventing the establishment of deeper intimacy and coupling, and on and on. We love Holleran and his witty, queeny columns in Christopher Street, but we’re not having it. In this episode of @OffCSPod, we talk about how promiscuity is made into yet another questionable binary: casual sex vs. intimacy and coupling, for example, instead of seeing sex as something that signifies differently in different contexts, part of different modes we move between in different spaces and seasons of life. share.transistor.fm/s/dc4b36…

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 EPISODE SIX, 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. share.transistor.fm/s/9ca9d0…

NEW EPISODE: @daniel_lefferts joins us to talk about the gay right, from the "laissez-fairies" of the Reagan revolution to gay MAGA.

New @OffCSPod: We talk about Michael Musto's 1978 trend story about gays going to the disco every night of the week, and the perennial tension between going out as a central part of gay social life and the anxiety that it's a form of shallow self-evasion. Link below!