You may have noticed that hotness is in the news, so we decided it would be a good moment to drop the first episode of our new podcast, which is about exactly that.
In Off Christopher Street, we look into the archives of the gay literary magazine Christopher Street as opening into gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. Christopher Street published everything from political and literary essays to gossipy “scene” journalism not unlike the bogus trend stories that still today breathlessly inform us what “everyone” is suddenly doing. It’s a window on a historical moment when gay men were self-consciously creating their own world and a reminder of how perennial some of our debates really are.
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We kick off our first episode with George Stambolian’s “Interview With a Hot and Handsome Man,” from the February 1983 issue. Stambolian, a professor of French, contributed a series of fun, often sexy interviews with “archetypical” gay men to the magazine in the early 1980s, later published in his collection Male Fantasies / Gay Realities (1984). In this one, he talks to a man who had recently left his marriage to a woman, glowed up, plunged into gay New York, and now takes nude photos of himself in an apartment full of mirrors. Not only is he hot, but he’s philosophical about it.
One of the interesting things about the interview is how it models a more open, curious stance toward physical beauty and aesthetic self-creation than moralistic discourses that would associate those things merely with shallowness and vanity, or, as was the case both then and now, with elitism and exclusiveness. The Hot Man describes a number of situations, from letting an older man jerk off to him on a brief elevator ride to watching people try not to watch him at the bar, in which the power dynamics of attractiveness become erotic and playful. He has a lot more to say than we have time to talk about, including the jerk-off groups he attends with his partner.
From there, we talk about our own experiences of desiring and being desired, from Blake’s twink days to David’s go-go dancing. We explore the competing tendencies in gay history toward aristocratic elitism on the one hand and democratic communitarianism on the other and how, despite their apparent tensions, they manage to coexist in actual gay worlds, from drag queens to circuit gays.
