The Queer Love Podcast

I’ve been waiting a while to have this wonderful chat with author and historian Hugh Ryan. You probably know him for his deep dives into public queer spaces, and his award-winning books When Brooklyn Was Queer and The Women’s House of Detention.

His new memoir, My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond, is deeply personal. Not only do you get radical honesty, a lot of ‘90s dance floors, and an unblinking look at non-monogamy, it’s vulnerable, sharp, and helps redefine what a “successful” relationship looks like.

One of my favorite lines in the book—which I’ve been sharing with others all summer at presentations and lectures—is about a topic that I’ve been trying to explain to non-queer people for years and which Hugh articulated so eloquently:

“Queerness is a fickle blessing: unlike religion, ethnicity, class or race, it’s rarely shared between parents and children or neighbor with neighbor. Queer people don’t often grow up experiencing gatherings of others ‘like us.’ And when we create those gatherings as adults, they are more likely to be diverse out of necessity.”

I also mentioned a beautiful quote from writer Garrard Conley about how Hugh treats "mistakes as evidence: of desire, of survival, of how we got here." So I asked him about looking back at his younger self navigating early relationships, and how he grappled with "mistakes" and regrets from that era and whether he could view them with absolute tenderness and gratitude.

As he shared, looking back on his time in college in the 1990s, he did wish he’d had the “opportunity to do the things straight people do; the stupid dating in high school when it doesn’t matter and you practice and you get your feelings hurt and you learn how to deal with it and then you learn how to hurt other people’s feelings and say you’re sorry.”

“And you learn to have sex slowly because you’re 15 and not thrown off the deep end at 22. But I don’t know. I spend too much time thinking about all of those things, and it’s just like a weight that bears you down. It doesn’t help me to regret those things. It helps me to analyze them.”

Next, we discussed the long process of "undoing shame," which Hugh writes about so well in My Bad. In particular, I was curious if his archival work on his previous books helped him do battle with internalized homophobia and shame.

“I do think that the research of these other books that I’ve written was very helpful at giving me role models. But also it just like, tearing apart a lot of the ideas that I received around what a relationship looks like or what gender is or maybe—even more than anything else—these ideas that nothing changes. … It freed me to say, ‘Yeah, people have had really different ideas in the past, different ideas about how to live, about what it means to live, about what a body is, about what gender is.’ And that was so freeing.

“To understand that if, 150 years ago, people thought about things absolutely differently than I think about them today, well, then that means that 150 years from now, people are going to look back and be like, ‘Whoa, that is so weird.’”

He then explained that, during his Queer History 101 book club, which he co-hosts with Peppermint, they focused on Straight Acting by Will Tosh, which investigated the history of the ideas Shakespeare would have been encountering in his time period. As he explained, in Shakespeare’s time educated people would have believed that the body was made up of humors that are kept in balance and, when those humors get profoundly imbalanced, you can change sex.

“So he lived in a world where a normative understanding for all people was that it is possible for human beings to change sex under certain conditions,” Hugh explained. “That is not a shared understanding we have today, right? It’s an understanding some of us have, but even the mechanism by which that change happens, we have a different idea about that. But we don’t think about that when we approach Shakespeare’s work.”

I told Hugh I’d been impressed how he discussed his polyamorous relationship so openly in public at readings and events, and he said that the hardest decision had been sharing his personal life with colleagues at work. But he remembered the lesson a boss he had when he was in college who taught him about queer life and organizing and politics and “how we work for social justice.” So he sees it as a political action to share details of his successful poly and queer co-living reality.

Before we wrapped up, I asked Hugh if he had any advice for queer writers who might be trying to document their own complex coming-of-age narratives or non-traditional relationships and are struggling to write about chosen family, partners, and exes with both honesty and care. He had an excellent response (and name-checked Melissa Febos and some advice she gave during a talk), so I hope you’ll listen in to that as well (it’s around the 43:30-minute mark). He also shared the news about his involvement as a lead historian with the American LGBTQ+ Museum, which opens in New York City in 2028!

Once again, I want to thank everyone who joined us live and Hugh for taking the time to talk about so many important topics.

In case you didn’t know already, we’re celebrating 2 years of QLP and offering a special 20% discount to become an annual subscriber. That means you’ll pay $24 for the entire year!

**(if you’re currently paying $5 a month, consider upgrading since it will save you a bundle and help keep QLP growing and publishing essays, poetry and supporting queer creativity)**

You can also like and follow the podcast on other platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (as well as other podcast platforms).

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The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When I read Jeremy Atherton Lin’s debut book, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, I was blown away by his ability to map queer identity onto disappearing nightlife spaces. Then, with his second book, Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told, Jeremy shifted from public dance floors to domestic, cross-border romance under the shadow of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

Both books—which braid personal narrative with deep research and social history—provide an incredible opportunity to explore how queer intimacy, geography, and legal structures intersect and the various ways we put ourselves together—and what being legitimized by the state can do to our identities and relationships.

So, I was thrilled to finally have the opportunity to speak to Jeremy at length about his writing, research and relationship and share it with you!

Oh, first: When I mention the GAY BAR soap, here it is in my bathroom (to the left of the Mao postcard)—just in case you were curious.

And before we dug into the content of the books, Jeremy and I talked about the U.S. cover of Deep House, which depicts a naked young man in a galley kitchen. It’s a photograph by the artist Jack Pierson, and it seems to combine the sexiness and domesticity at the core of the book. I wanted to know why, in particular, Jeremy wanted that photo for the book.

“We decided that we would find a picture that looked like it was somebody who was being gazed at admiringly by a lover in a domestic setting,” Jeremy explained.

We also discussed the different in the UK cover…

I also admitted that I was envious of how beautifully Jeremy has written about his relationship journey and all the nuances. I mean, among many other things, the sex scenes in Deep House are jaw-droppingly good! He didn’t miss a beat and said that envy can be a generative emotion. Then he went on to confess that he wrote both books rather quickly.

“Gay Bar I wrote in under a year,” Jeremy said. “In both cases, there were previous strands of research that I was doing, like when I went to grad school and just in my sort of notes and recollections. Obviously, Deep House I’ve been writing in a way since my partner and I met. It’s 30 years ago now that we met. So there is a long gestation period in that sense, but I wrote them both quite quickly.”

I was grateful that Jeremy also explained that many queer writers and creatives often seek a kind of “legitimacy or recognition,” so they feel compelled to play a “kind of respectability politics card.”

“I think there’s a new generation that kind of does it in a slightly different way, but it still has this product of desexualizing the bodies that we’re standing up for and alongside each other. So it was really important for me, in both of those cases, for them to be super sex-forward books.”

After I shared a clip from the audiobook with Jeremy, we discussed it at length. If you’re curious, here’s the segment I played in full:

“In the 1984 book, The Male Couple, the authors, a male couple, cited a study of 156 men in gay relationships lasting from one to 37 years, finding that only seven couples—none who’d been together over five years—were exclusive, as if monogamy is just a phase for gay men to grow out of. Which stands in contrast to public advocates of gay marriage depicting decades of gay rights progress as parallel to a lifespan, suggesting time had come for those still spreading seed stuck in the adolescent stage to mature and settle down.

In 1998, conservative gay pundit Andrew Sullivan wrote of how a proclivity for quick-and-easy sex was, in fact, a desperate and failed search for some kind of intimacy. That evidenced both our wounded self-esteem as homosexuals and our general enculturation as men. To which queer theorist Michael Warner retorted, even if gay men did suffer from wounded self-esteem, the most likely result for them would not be promiscuity—which calls for a fair amount of courage and dignity on the part of those who defy the stigma and abjection associated with it—but a compulsive idealization of love and a desperate need to have validation conferred on their intimate lives through state certified marriage.”

Jeremy went on to explain how he tried to remember the precarity of that time when he and his partner were living together without knowing what the future would hold. And if the government and its many agencies would separate them.

“One thing that was a really instructive experience when I was writing the book was I kind of felt like, ‘Oh, have I just settled down into this kind of like bougie domestic bliss and have lost the sense of precarity that permeated our lives when he was living undocumented in San Francisco?’ … It made me realize how you can feel like you’re ‘safe as houses,’ as the expression goes, and close the door, but there’s always some gap. There’s always some cracked open window or something that leaves you vulnerable to the outside world. And it was really important for me to remember that feeling.”

Here’s the next clip (around the 25:48 mark) from Deep House that I shared with Jeremy so we could discuss it at length:

“We came to know trust as both robust and fragile. Unprotected by either of our governments, we sheltered each other. We found a way of feeling safe together. Whether or not you were born a male or a citizen, the right for us to have oral and anal sex at home was not protected across the United States. More generally, the right to privacy is not explicitly stated anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. Rather, it has been found, gradually and tentatively, by some Supreme Court justices through penumbra, a metaphorical reference to the outer edge of a shadow, one could say the gray areas. The relevant Supreme Court cases often regard the interior of not only a household, but a body.”

We also talked about the importance to music in the book and here’s the Spotify playlist that Jeremy created in case you wanna give it a listen. Plus, he’s explained some of the tracks on this playlist here.

Jeremy shared some background about his ambivalence toward the subtitle of the book, “the gayest love story every told,” and then he had some insights into all the “unpaid emotional labor” queer people have to do to stay together.

“We knew if we had to work this hard to be together—and, you know, queer couples put in a lot of unpaid labor doing paperwork to validate their very existence—that was a kind of triumph over, not adversity, it’s like a triumph over like the monotony of doing all the boring stuff.

We talked a bit about how Jeremy and his partner’s relationship was a “bit non-normative,” but that they weren’t doing that intentionally. “We were just kind of following our pursuits and our passions. Among friends, I do think that we provide some semblance of—I don’t know if they’re inspired by the adventure or the stability in our relationship—but I certainly know that people like us as a pair and, again, I think it’s that idea of like seeing two people interact with each other with a mutual trust and sense of humor that makes people feel at ease…”

There’s a LOT more to enjoy this episode of the Queer Love Podcast, and I don’t want to spoil it for you before you listen. But before I wrap it up, I did ask what Jeremy’s working on next, and he explained he has another memoir that he’s been writing.

“I’m teasing out something that goes back to when I was younger, and how I formed friends back then and who I was. I think trying to write about my younger self without feeling... I realized I was kind of feeling a bit sorry for myself as a young person. And the more I write myself as being a bit of a little jerk, the more the sentences kind of take off and the sort of narrative starts picking up…

“I think my failures and blind spots are probably on every page. People can relate to that in some way. I hope they don’t necessarily come to me as an authority, but rather as a companion. And I think in this next book, probably it’s going to be a little bit less research-heavy and more pure memoir, for lack of a better word. It seems like a space that I’ve kind of earned; the place to be to just sort of maybe sublimate some of those sociological ideas and really kind of just be in the moment. What it’s like to be a kid.”

Thanks so much for listening. Let me know what you thought about this special episode of the podcast in the comments!

Thanks again for listening and supporting! You can also like and follow the podcast on other platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (as well as other podcast platforms).

We also have an Etsy page where you can find some of our merch!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I was excited to finally chat with Katrina Anne Willis about her memoir Hurricane Lessons: A Memoir of Betrayal and Becoming. It’s a gripping story of late-in-life queer awakening, institutional gaslighting, and the devastating cost of finally choosing personal truth.

Last year, we published an essay by Katrina titled “I Was Gay, and He Was Understanding,” which is a companion to her memoir. It starts with the line: “In my 46th year on this planet, I found out I was gay.”

She’s now 56 and is living in Lexington, Kentucky, so we jumped into what it meant to have this beautiful story out in the world for others to engage with at this point in her life (and during this complex political moment in the United States).

As a mother of four, Katrina faced the gut-wrenching task of balancing personal liberation with family upheaval. As she writes in Hurricane Lessons:

“I often found myself trapped between the rebellious fire that burned in my belly and the relentless need to be what everyone else wanted and expected me to be.”

At first, Katrina’s ex-husband, who knew she was attracted to other women, suggested an open marriage as a compromise. This strategy failed. Katrina deftly relays how differing expectations of "freedom" exposed deeper power dynamics and underlying control issues within their relationship.

When she was helping her husband fill out his Tinder profile, she said, “The Catholic girl in me was screaming, ‘What are you doing?’” She ended up meeting women and men on the apps as well—something that is difficult for everyone, but especially in midlife.

Katrina said the most difficult thing she ever did in her life was coming out as gay to her kids. (You can hear her explain that at the 16:50 mark.) She said her children haven’t read the memoir (as far as she knows), but they all have a good relationship at this point. Although she did point out that her “catalyst” was her daughter’s friend’s mom and that made things rocky between Katrina and her daughter for a time.

I was curious if she had any advice for others who may find themselves in a similar situation, whether that’s a mixed-orientation marriage or someone navigating the decision to open their relationship to other physical or emotional possibilities. Especially since, as she emphasizes in her memoir, the first real betrayal in a late-in-life coming-out story is actually the "betrayal of self."

“My former husband used to say to me, during our divorce, ‘You’ve built your entire life on lies.’ And I never agreed with that,” Katrina explained. “Because I never truly understood who I was. And it does feel like a betrayal to my self. I obviously don’t want to go back—because I have these four wonderful kids, and I wouldn’t have gotten them without living the life that I did—but I did betray myself in a way by not knowing who I was better. Or not delving deeper. Or not agreeing to acquiesce all the time. I just became who everyone else wanted me to be.”

We also spoke about Robert Fisher’s book, The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, because Katrina cited him in her memoir because he writes about how Sanskrit has 96 words for love, ancient Persian has eight, Greek has three, and English has only one. As Katrina writes:

“He surmises that the reason we have only one word for love is because we don’t give that realm of feeling enough importance.

“Ninety-six words for love. Love for significant others. Love for friends. Love for sexual partners. Love for children. Love for ideology. Love for animals. Love for the land. For food. For air. For the salty sea. For the wind in our hair. So many kinds of love. So much love. But the ones that describe that essential human relationship—be it man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, or any other genders—those become blurry for me. And not indistinguishably blurry. I have female friends I’m not one bit attracted to physically. But when all those attractions converge?”

So I asked Katrina that rhetorical one she poses in the book: “When spirituality, intellect, and skin collide, how do you distinguish in love from love?”

“You’re not allowed to ask me that,” Katrina said. “That’s rhetorical!”

You’ll want to hit play and listen/watch to find out how she explained it (that’s around the 26:25 minute mark).

The memoir also highlights extreme domestic retaliation, including gaslighting, threats, and an involuntary psychiatric commitment, which we discussed. As she explained, there’s not a lot of great advice out there for people who may be navigating similar situations, so she wanted to publish this memoir.

“Make sure you understand your finances,” Katrina advised. “And make sure you have control over those things. … And I had so much guilt that I didn’t fight for anything. Looking back, I think there’s a lot of things I could have done to secure my own future better. … Of course there’s gonna be guilt, but it’s important to stay true to yourself.”

Hurricane Lessons is a harrowing read at points, especially to witness how Katrina’s community and institutions weaponized her mental health crisis against her queer awakening—but I hope you’ll read or listen and find out how she survived to share her story with us and offer a roadmap for others.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I have a theory that pop music is a major contributor to our internal blueprints for romantic relationships. Let me put it more bluntly: It messes us up!

Over the past couple of years, I’ve talked to authors and creators, including musician Roddy Bottom—and we even published several essays focused on the power of music in our love lives. But I had yet to zero in on one of my passions—to analyze how pop music has affected our way of perceiving, interpreting, and finding queer love.

Since the beginning, music has been a force for change for some marginalized groups. The simple act of creating music at all can be a form of speaking out against an unjust world, whether it’s a party song or protest song. Music has power.

Of course, there’s a long history of musicians using their voices to demand a better world or just carving out their space within it. And who better discuss that with me than veteran music journalist and a pop culture critic Barry Walters.

He’s documented the intersection of mainstream and LGBTQ+ culture for over 40 years. He began his career at the Village Voice, where he famously came out publicly in the 1986 review of the Pet Shop Boys. He continues to write about how queer artists and fans have reshaped mainstream music. So I was thrilled to have him join me on the Queer Love Podcast to discuss the ins and many, many outs of all this.

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Jerry: Did I get all that right?Barry: Yes, you got it. I have been thinking about that Pet Shop Boys review, because I received two fan letters from that. One was from John Ginoli who wanted to start a band. This is 1986, I think, and that band eventually became Pansy Division.

Oh, I’ve interviewed John about Pansy Division. I’m so excited that that’s actually what spurred it.And also, I got another fan letter. I believe he was in college at the time, and that was Rob Sheffield, who ended up at Rolling Stone.

Yeah, I love that. We both know Rob. I’ve learned so much from him. He’s been generous enough to say I taught him some things. I don’t think that’s true, but he’s at least nice enough to say it. So, we’ve overlapped it and worked at various publications—Out, The Advocate, Rolling Stone—but we’ve never worked together. This is the first time we’ve ever talked, so I’m really excited about that.Great. Yeah, me too.

Obviously we’re talking about the fact that you have this amazing new book: Mighty Real. It’s encyclopedic. So I just want to know why was so important for you to publish a book like this for people to discover at this moment in history?Well, I’ve been working on it for quite some time. I believe it took me nine years. I can’t quite fathom how I lived through it. So a lot happened to America during nine years, but some of it’s personal.

I had some issues with my heart, hereditary issues, but I had four surgeries. I didn’t know if it was going to work, and I wanted to leave something important behind. I have a stepson—I’m married—and through my marriage, I have a son. I don’t know if there’s a word for this, but an adult child who identifies as nonbinary, and they have a trans partner. So I want to leave something for them and the generation after them so that they understand what was gay life like when I lived it, and how we, more importantly, how we related to music, how the audience and the performers created a culture through hints, codes, interpretations, ways of getting around the mainstream.

Yeah. So let’s dive into that because, in Mighty Real, you talk about music not just as entertainment, but as a survival tool and a language for liberation and love. Being in San Francisco during a time when there was a lot of joy and a lot of pain and a lot of death, I am just curious how you’ve experienced this. A lot of our listeners might not remember this. I came of age in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, so I was on the fringe, but I didn’t experience all of the heartache that many people who were survivors of that period did.Sure. Well, I’d like to start a little before that. I grew up in a suburb of Rochester, New York. Nearly everyone’s dad worked at Kodak or Xerox. Nearly everyone was white. And being that it was very much a two-business town, there was a strong drive to conformity, and I saw the people on TV and the musicians that I listened to. I have an older brother and sister, and my sister had a dance studio. So I was surrounded by music. I experienced it through them. So I started very early, and I went to New York City for college and lived there from ‘79 to 88, and then moved to San Francisco in some ways as a result of interviewing Sylvester. He died in 1988.

I interviewed him a few months before he died. I came out here to interview him because I had heard that he was in the “People With AIDS” contingent of the Pride March in San Francisco, and that was the very first time that someone said a celebrity, someone that you would have in your record collections or you saw on TV that said, “I have AIDS.” that was a revolutionary act, and I wanted to celebrate him while he was still alive. So I interviewed him. I came out here to do that.

So the AIDS epidemic, it began while I was just getting settled in New York and coming to terms with who I am, and then there’s this big epidemic, and then I came here and San Francisco being smaller and the gay culture being more open, I experienced it in a very powerful, strong, immersive way. I had friends in New York who had AIDS, but this was really, it was a whole community who did in a way that was more out in the open than it was. I mean, I would see people who were close to death on a regular basis. So I was already in ACT UP, but that drove me to make my work as political as I could, given that I wasn’t Randy Shilts, who was here. I knew I wasn’t Vito Russo, who I knew in New York, and he moved out here for a while. Those people were very inspirational to me.

However, I could when talking about musicians like Madonna… It happened really when I was moved out here. And so those performers gave me an opportunity to write about LGBTQ music and sort of politicize things for a daily paper. That’s

The San Francisco Examiner, correct?Yes. The San Francisco Examiner was a Hearst paper at the time. It was a prestigious paper. It was an afternoon one, but we sort of prided ourselves in being a little more progressive and thoughtful. I would go to concerts and come back to the office and write up the review that night, and they would be in paper the next day. And that demanded a lot of independence because there were no fact checkers who would know the facts that I was writing about. There was no internet that I could check a lyric on. I had to know it. I had to know who the musicians in the band were and the background singers and all that stuff.

All in your brain! You were the expert.Yeah. Well, I knew it quite a bit before I moved out here, but it was a school for me.

Let’s talk about Sylvester. I mean, he’s obviously an icon, but at the time, disco was definitely not cool. And even to write about disco, right? I mean, Rolling Stone was known for shitting on disco, and we had the Disco Demolition Night and all that. Yet Sylvester is really such a trailblazer, a pioneer. Now he’s getting this appreciation. I’ve seen a musical based on his life and music. There’s a lot of love. But I would say that probably when you’re going out there to write, there’s still people who are like, “Ugh, disco, right?” Well, yes and no—because disco is connected to R&B. In the ‘80s, it was connected to New Wave and well, of course, Blondie even in the ‘70s. So when I came here, the examiner reprinted my Village Voice article, and people, the paper, took notice.

So you were giving your readers access to music that other people might not be reporting on?Yes, that’s right. They were used to just the music coverage mostly being about the San Francisco acts. And I did that too. I wrote about Metallica, who I really did enjoy during that period. There was a band, Jellyfish, that I was incredibly fond of before I moved to San Francisco. I saw a show by Depeche Mode at Madison Square Garden, which was extraordinarily gay as I get into in that book. And the opening act was Voice Farm, even gayer. They had dance routines and real choreography outfits, really quirky lyrics. No one in New York knew who they were, and they were being played on the radio here.

We obviously have the New Romantics, and we have things that were very queer-coded, and yet people let them pass. We have bands like Queen that you have these dudes who are loving this band that’s so queer-coded, but nobody seemed to question. And then even what you’re talking about: Just seeing Dave Gahan on stage, strutting around, is the gayest thing—even though he is not.

But tell me, for you personally, you talk about music as a lifesaving recognition, and I wonder if there’s a specific song or artist that gave you the language to understand yourself before you had the words for it. Is there a sort of the music for you that you were like, “Oh, this made me gay?”Well, I would say I grew up with my sister and brother’s music, and they would alert me to things. So as a kid: Monkeys Beatles, Jackson Five, Partridge Family. But then, when I turned 11, I read this article about a performer. I’d never heard of David Bowie, and it said that he was bisexual. I didn’t even know what that meant, but he looked so amazing.

And I have to say, maybe by this time, people started to mistake me for a girl, and that was when I look at photos from that period, my hair was just slightly longer, but my clothes were brighter. And then when I discovered David Bowie, that was more real to me than the people around me really. I mean, I had friends, but he gave me a path and an image and a language that I discovered on my own through him.

My brothers and sisters were not a part of that. So I think if you have brothers and sisters, older brothers and sisters, when you discover an act on your own, not through them, it becomes like your music. And through David Bowie, while I heard he produced Mott the Hoople and wrote “All the Young Dudes.” And whoa—that’s an amazing song!

Slowly, I think I fathomed what being gay was because I learned about it through songs like “All the Young Dudes.” I learned about it through “John, I’m Only Dancing” and a kind of androgyny that was very pervasive in Hunky Dory and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

It’s interesting. I think it’s actually such a complex thing to unpack, and we can’t go into it in great depth, but I’m curious what you think, because I know, me being a little bit younger, that so many people around me were given permission to maybe be a little gender queer. I had teachers, friends who—and later when I saw The Runaways biopic about them originally going and seeing a Bowie show and then feeling like they can can explore their gender expression—it created a queerness that gave a lot of people permission.Right? Well, it depends on how old you are. If you’re in junior high, which I consider the most volatile place—

The sponge absorbing.Yeah, the Netflix show Big Mouth, I think it really gets it right. And your favorite act is David Bowie, and you’re into Queen and Roxy music and all this androgyny stuff that—if I was a big city kid, it wouldn’t have been a big deal that I’d liked all that stuff. They would’ve heard it on the radio; they would’ve known about it, too. But it made me stand out, and that was both good and bad.

I had to figure out how to make my difference a positive rather than a negative. And I knew that it was because, ever since I was a kid, teachers would tell my mom: “Oh, your son’s really different. He’s really special.” And so I got some of that. But when all the all androgyny came in, that specialness became a real problem, and I was bullied severely. Gym class was no joke.

So there’s always that reaction to it too.Right? So in a sense, it put me on the path, but it made things, when I say glam, androgyny, pop culture, it made things more challenging. But it also made me feel like there’s a place out there for people like me. And if you are younger, you experienced the second wave of that stuff through the people that are my age that he touched when performing on England’s Top of the Pops when, coming over here, of course, the New Romantics: Boy George, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, The Eurythmics, and then Depeche Mode, Erasure, and all that.

So Bowie really sort of liberated a generation, not just the gay ones, but the straight ones who were told that masculinity must be very narrow. And also femininity must be very narrow because people like Annie Lennox who were doing really creative stuff with gender.

She was f*****g with gender in other ways. I remember my mom basically using Annie Lennox as an example of trying to explain to me why one of my teachers was a lesbian. And it was a very complicated thing, which she probably is wrong. Later I understood why she was so confused by all this: the buzzed hair, the dyed hair, all that. But that’s part of what I want to talk about, this coded resistance and the defiance, There’s this radical thing happening, ut also trying to stay safe. Even Bowie recanted the bisexual thing, and it was complicated.

Then Elton was going back and forth, “I’m bisexual, I’m not,” all this stuff. Then, later in the ‘90s we get somebody like Kurt Cobain also saying, “I’m bisexual and I wished I was gay.” So it’s like these artists are pushing the envelope, but then they’re also trying to—maybe it’s their managers and agents—but they’re trying to also keep something that is confusing to us. Just be a hero! I don’t don’t know: You were reporting on this.Well, something I guess I failed to mention in the book—because I’m sure it was different from record company to record company and management to management and whatnot—but there used to be entertainers who were beholden to contracts that dealt with morality. So they couldn’t do something that was considered immoral. Right? And gayness, of course, was, and I’m not sure exactly when that ended, but that is also why disco happened. It was the result of the illegality of just merely dancing with someone of the same sex. You had to have someone of the opposite sex with you, or at least nearby, that you could just pull toward you when the cops came, if they were to raid a nightclub. I don’t know if that was a vice law specific to New York, but I’m pretty confident that those kind of vice laws were in place throughout the country.

They stayed on the books much longer than people realize.Yes. And they were enforced longer than they were really on the books. So the first nightclubs were really sites of revolution. What we do in bed is still illegal, but at least we can do this thing [on the dancefloor]. And you can do it with people of your own people. And also, I think that the utopianism of the hippie movement really, it sort of got commercialized and watered down in the ‘70s, but it moved into disco in a way. Because people were coming together who were all different races; because disco had a broader appeal than rock & roll as it was in the ‘70s. I mean, going back, people like the Beatles were played on R&B stations—they were on the R&B charts at the very beginning—but things got segregated when the record companies, the entertainment business saw Woodstock, and saw all those white kids and just wanted to target them and push the R&B into something else.

Let’s just keep talking about the disco for a second. There’s Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder and the sexualized part of that, and then how people felt conflicted about that. You have orgasmic soundsm and you’re listening to this music that sounds like f*****g.Right. Yes. I remember being, there was a record that predated that: Jungle Fever by the Chakachas, I think. And it had heavy breathing on it. It was, I believe a Belgian studio act pretending to be African. And I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it was amazing. I had that 45 and would play it, and I was just—

Turned on!Oh at 10, 11 years old, I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it. And it’s interesting that Donna Summer happened in, she was an American in Germany, that music that was Germany’s version of what was happening in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia International label and people like the ojs and also Barry White. So that was their version of Black culture, and it was often fronted by Black women and played by white musicians and whatever Black musicians they could find.

You touch on so many genres in the book—and I want to get to the punk of it all because that’s a complicated one—but let’s talk about house music and the euphoria of the dance floor. I met my husband actually on a dance floor. It was a New Year’s party, and there was a lot of house music, I won’t even go into it, but I’m curious about that sort of collective joy that music can bring about and the social change and that we do find so many of our intimate moments on the dance floor.Well, those things, they’re not specific to house music, but really how music sort of took over it gestated in the mid-‘80s, because what happened was that dance music got whiter and whiter as the ‘80s progressed. And the stations that would play dance music, they were still playing dance music. But I have to say that there was a Latin presence that wasn’t there just a couple of years before. Acts like the Cover Girls Exposé and a few more that came out of either New York or Miami for the most part. But I would say that crack had impacted Black music right at the mid-‘80s point, and things got more segregated. The R&B stations got more R&B and less fancy. It got more about slow jams and people like Anita Baker and Sade, who I love, but those people didn’t have many dance tracks.

And house music had to happen because the Black people, the musicians, were getting pushed out and house music was like their version of punk really, because you didn’t have to take music classes to make a house track. You just had to understand rhythm. And really, a lot of them were based on disco riffs. And so first they started with doing underground remixes of disco tracks, and then they learned how to make their own records, and they put them out on their own labels. And that just energized things once again. And of course, it always happens: The major labels come in. House music was really a big deal in England first and in Europe before you could hear it on the radio in America, it was in the Top 40, which is people need to remember, understand that. And then they sold it back to us just like they did with rock & roll.

So what do you think? I mean, I was going out to clubs, dancing, we were getting the remixes, we were doing all these things, and it was a very gay-oriented type of thing. And then we’re going to kind of switch to the other thing that was happening during this time, which is the Indigo Girls and the sort of folk revival of things happening. So why do you think that happened? I mean, we’re also dealing with the AIDS epidemic. People are needing to have some joy.Right? Well, I mean, I knew there was this very specific person that I knew at Polygram, and he was working in the reissue department. He liked the stuff I was doing at the Village Voice, and he had me do notes for his compilations. I’m sure he was out, but he died. And when gay men like him died in the major labels, they weren’t replaced by other gay men. They were replaced by straight guys. Also, dance music labels, dance music, publicity, that there were dance music departments when disco was a big deal because they had to have gay people come in and teach them how to sell records to a gay audience—but a gay audience that they knew would be the stepping stone to the mainstream because this was happening over and over. I guess I forgot to mention when we were talking earlier that records were happening in the discos so strongly that they would sell in the hundreds of thousands before radio got on board.

And when radio got on board, then there were million-selling hits. And gay people were hired to promote records in the gay discos because the straight guys didn’t know the first thing about it. And they probably thought, I don’t want to do that. And so that whole network got dissipated through the ‘80s.

And by the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, gay participation in popular music started dwindling. However, the women were coming up and starting to get signed by major labels. Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob Marley and U2 and produced Grace Jones, produced B-52s. He saw Melissa Etheridge in a lesbian bar and signed her as a result of that. And the first draft of her first album was not that the producers were trying to make her something she wasn’t, which often happened to women because they just didn’t have the clout.

And Chris Blackwell said, “Oh no, this is not good. I want the woman in the T-shirt and the jeans and the leather jacket. I want that Melissa Etheridge.” And so they rerecorded the record, and that was what people heard and responded to. That record was a big rock radio record, her first album. And then if you went to the concert, then it was really powerful and you would see other women in the audience. And the same thing was happening with k.d. lang, who was on Sire Records, a label associated, not just with Madonna, but Talking Heads, Ramones, Echo & the Bunnymen—a whole galaxy of queer actes. And there was a gay man behind it, Seymour Stein. And he signed a lot of acts that were either queer or were acts that we like Depeche Mode.

It’s funny that you haven’t mentioned the two biggest, which is Clive Davis and David Geffen. But they were doing their own thing. Well, they were really, I mean, Clive Davis, he had Whitney Houston and he had Barry Manilow. Initially, he also had, for a time, he had Lou Reed and he signed Patti Smith as well. But he also had this flip side of extremely mainstream acts, like Air Supply. You can’t get any more land and mainstream than Air Supply. And really Sire Records did not have any kind of Air Supply on their label. Their bread and butter became Madonna, and yet they were still signing left-of-center acts like k.d. lang, who was doing country but it was both punk and performance art.

Because she was very male-presenting and had this swagger.She had a swagger that was—she was kind of Iggy Pop and Elvis Presley. So when I would go to her shows and well, I saw her first in New York, and then when I came here, I saw her do a New Year’s Eve show, 1988 into 1989. I had only moved here in late November. And so it was the first time when I went to a show and it was almost exclusively women and almost exclusively lesbian and a smattering of gay guys. It was like a queer revival meeting. It was so powerful. And she was so good, and her band was so good. I knew something really extraordinary was happening.

The same thing happened at Indigo Girls shows, where people were singing along to records that had only been released a few months ago, and they knew all the words. And I also have to say, singing along at concerts now is a de rigueur thing. It was not happening back in the late ‘80s—except in these shows where it was like the closet door was open.

I have to admit that I’ve probably seen the Indigo Girls live more than any other act. And also because I went to college in Atlanta, I had many opportunities. So yeah, they’re definitely very close to me, and it’s incredible to see that they have staying power in it.

You give people this lineage, and I don’t want to force it too much, but one of the things I’d like to talk about is creating family and heritage for queer people since we don’t have that through our actual family of origin. So we often do it through our sexual partners or our relationships. But in this, you kind of create this musical family tree. And I was thinking, it’s 10 years since I started working at Rolling Stone in 2016, I was there in January when David Bowie died. I was there in April, 10 years ago, when Prince died, and then later in the year when George Michael died. It was a pretty intense year for us in a lot of ways. I’m just curious about the sort of lineage.

Do you actually feel like Bowie and these people are connected to people like Lil Nas X and Kim Petras? Or is that too much of a stretch for us? Yet, I remember talking to Brandi Carlisle when she was just starting out and how big of a fan she was with Elton John, and now she has an album with them. So you actually do see this connection.I do think there is a lineage, and I do think a sense of freedom gets passed down. When I spoke to Amy Ray, she said, seeing Patti Smith when she was just a teenager opened a door for her and made her feel like, “OK, I can be myself.” We didn’t have words like genderqueer or pansexual. Those words didn’t exist. So that opened the door for her. So David Bowie opened the door for Boy George and Marc Almon. And those people opened a door for—I do know the house music people loved the English synth pop and the androgyny that went with it. And some of them, I assumed that, I can’t remember who, Jamie Principle—he sounded so gay, and I believe he’s actually straight—but has said gay people allowed me to be myself.

So I want to pivot slightly. I want to get your take on one of the things that I keep exploring and that I’m always curious about: Does pop music skew our perception of love by distilling complex long-term human connections to these intense bite-sized emotions? We have these lyrics: You’re falling head over heels, that kind of thing. And even though it captures that universal feeling or whatever you want to call this mania that happens.

One of the questions I ask all the guests for the podcast is how people define love. And because we’re talking about music, I’m curious what you think. Is it that thing that you work over for a long period of time, or is it that strong feeling that we hear in pop songs? “I fell in love; I’m lost; I’m just crazy for this person.” So many of the songs are about being crazy, and that’s what so many people think love is. And I’m just curious from your perspective of listening, your whole life being embedded in this, and also just being a man who’s fallen in love, what do you think? Does the pop song set us up for failure?Well, I’m just flashing back to, I once went on a couple of dates with a guy. I worked at Tower Records that had just opened up in downtown Manhattan, right near NYU where I was going to school, and I dated this guy who had been the manager of a gay bathhouse. Something I wouldn’t have done if I’d been just a little older; I would’ve known I was getting into a situation over my head, but I was into this guy. But he had, I don’t know, a kind of detachment that I think was typical of gay men that were just a few years older than me. That you don’t settle down with one person; you spread yourself around.

And he recommended his therapist, and I saw his therapist and he said, well, my therapist is, she’s lesbian. And I don’t know how he framed her as socialist or anti-capitalist. And I remember her saying, “Oh, well, love isn’t like it is in the Motown songs. That’s just fantasy.” Well, sometimes it is.

I mean, certainly the Motown songs—and I deal with this in the book—that a lot of them dealt with the more painful side of love, and yet the music was very upbeat. And I think that’s a very gay response to the world that we, I’ve had this argument with people who’ve said, “Hey, straight people aren’t so great at relationships. Look at the divorce rate; it’s not like they’re doing all this stuff all that well.” But a lot of us didn’t date men of other boys in high school. We couldn’t do that. Maybe we could do it in college depending on what college we went to. And also, if you went to a college that was far away from anyone you knew back, but by college, your straight peers have already had several years of dating and figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.

So I think, I’m not going to say that gay people have an extended adolescence, but I do think we often have to work things out in our twenties that some of our straight peers worked out in their teens. We make some of the mistakes that we would’ve not made, like me dating a former bathhouse manager, he had a very different idea of relationships. So I would say that I was also drawn to people who wrote about love in a more complicated way, like Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. It was very romanticized, but also the opposite of the romanticism, that there was kind of, it was intellectual and romantic at the same time.

I totally agree with you. I was more of a Smiths/Morrissey guy. And so I think I related to that yearning and that longing and also the idea that you could say, “I want to die by your side…”Right. Yes, I’m glad you’ve mentioned Morrissey. This is a perfect example of it. He didn’t go to college yet. He was self-taught, and he read a lot and he read a lot of lesbian feminist literature that shaped his worldview. And he wasn’t all that active in the dating scene if we were to believe his autobiography in the song and what he has said. So he would present a very romanticized notion and deconstruct it in the very same song. And I think that was very attractive to people who wanted a mate, wanted to have things work out, but also was smart enough to know that it doesn’t often work that way—especially if you’re gay and have to hide your feelings, and maybe you are got your heart set on some straight guy.

Yet it appealed to all those emo boys, too. I mean, they were trying to rip his clothes off even though they were straight.That’s right. And Morrissey has plenty of lesbian fans, too. I mean, I think if you like more than just what’s on the radio, most of us get all sorts of ideas about love through all sorts of musicians. You get all this stuff simultaneously. And now that’s even more true of the kids who grew up with streaming where just the history of popular music and not so popular music, it’s all accessible, all simultaneously, and so they can access it.

Well, I hope they discover your book and it screws with their algorithm and they start listening to some other music as well. I actually have a friend named Mark Blankenship who has a Substack called The Lost Songs Project. And what he does is he actually writes about things that were Top 10 hits, but now no longer get streams. And so he’s trying to uncover and rediscover for people who are younger, like, “Oh, this is music that people used to really love, but no one’s listening to it anymore.” And I think there’s a bit of that that people will get from Mighty Real. Is there anything that you want to make sure your readers get from this or that you hope that they learn?I have really broad tastes in music. If you read my book, you can probably figure out what I really am enthusiastic about. And there’s very little in this book that I’m not really enthusiastic. And so I am hoping it’s designed to be very accessible to people who are like, “OK, I want to read about Donna Summer or learn about disco and learn about it through a queer perspective.” And the book’s called Mighty Real, which is a Sylvester song, but I’m hoping that they read about Patti Smith and Phranc.

And then I’ve woven in as much as I could, some obscure acts that really, if you’re gay, this music may speak to you even if it’s not particularly your cup of tea, the kind of thing you listen to. I was just thinking how in the post-punk chapter, it’s not really post-punk, but it’s definitely this Canadian group, Parachute Club, and they had this huge hit in Canada called “Rise Up.” And if you are gay, particularly if you are lesbian, you are going to hear this song as a lesbian anthem. And I would say less than 1% of the people who will pick up my book will know that song…

I don’t know it.Right. Well, it got some dance club play. I was into it at the time. But if you hear the song, there’s no doubt that this is like a lesbian empowerment song. And it won the Grammy for Best Song. I mean, the Canadian Grammy, the equivalent of the Canadian Grammy in the same year that they were big hits by Bryan Adams and Men Without Hats and Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night.” This won! And this person, I believe the songwriter behind it, she’s won a distinction of honor from the Canadian government for her participation in bringing female and lesbian concerns into the mainstream. So that’s a pretty amazing thing that just about no one outside of Canada is going to know that.

Did you create a playlist for this? Or are you planning to, because if not, I’ll create one!I am, I’m right now having conversations… Readers should know that my book has 60 chapters, and some of those chapters, like Madonna has her own chapter, and Michael Jackson has his own chapter, but then there are several chapters that have many different acts in them. So there are, I don’t know, a couple hundred, but

You could give us your definitive Barry Walters playlist.Yeah, well, I just had this discussion. They want to keep it to 100 songs, so I will not be able to represent every artist in that playlist, but I do want to have enough so people understand this book is not just about Elton John and Queen and the acts that they know about—that no matter what kind of music you are into, there’s something for you to discover. And I’m hoping that you will rediscover the stuff that you do know. And everyone who has read this book and has talked to me about it has said they would put the book down and go on YouTube and be like, really? Is it that gay? And then watch the video and like, “Oh my God, this is so gay! I didn’t quite get it when I was eight years old.” Or whatever.

I love that. And I agree. This has been good. Thank you so much for giving me all of this new knowledge and sharing all of this. I’m excited for people to read. And also you narrate the book—so they can listen.

Speaker 2 (33:34):

Yes. I recently wrapped up approximately 140 hours of recording in a studio that just so happened. It’s called Different Fur Studios. It’s run by queer women, and it’s entirely queer staffed, and it’s actually inspired by the synthesizer work of Wendy Carlos, who is trans. So the audio book is something that comes out of a queer background, and I just sort of stumbled on it. Bob Mould, who’s a friend of mine, he’s recorded there, along with Devo, and maybe, I’m sorry, I spoke, he mixed one of his records there.

For anybody who’s worried, the audio book’s only 13 hours at the end. I just confirmed.Is it? Wow. Wow.

Barry, I’m going to let you go. This has been great. Thanks for joining me, and I just want everyone to know that they should find Mighty Real.Well, thank you. I’m really happy the reception this book is getting. It’s really exciting. It’s what I hoped for, so thank you.

Thanks again for listening to the Queer Love Podcast. You can also like and follow the podcast on other platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (as well as other podcast platforms).

We also have an Etsy page where you can find some of our merch!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I spoke with with Claybourne Elder, a performer who many may know from his breakout role as John Adams on HBO’s The Gilded Age and his roles in Broadway revivals like Company.

Most recently, he has channeled his journey from a Mormon upbringing in Utah to fatherhood in New York into his debut solo album, If The Stars Were Mine. You can stream it on the platforms and it’s now on vinyl from Center Stage Records and available for purchase on his website.

It happened to be Mother’s Day, and Clay explained that his son Bo decided years ago that he would celebrate one of his father’s on that day, so this year it was Clay’s turn to have “Papa’s Day.”

This may be a spoiler for some, but Clay’s character in Gilded Age looked like he was about to get love with Oscar van Rhijn (played by Blake Ritson), the man he’d been having a clandestine relationship with. And then he was tragically killed! (This took place in Season 3, episode 6 if you’re curious.) I wanted to know what that was like—both portraying an authentic male-male romance in the late 19th century, as well as knowing he was doomed. Clay had thoughts…

OK, yes, there is a lot of musical theater talk on this episode. But can you blame us? Clay said that he and his older gay brother used to sing musicals together as kids, and they had a particular love of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf. Oh, and we also talked about the queer joy of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that was recently nominated for bunches of Tonys.

Of course, Clay got the QLP “Big One”: Based on the QLP questionnaire, I asked him how he defined love? Is it the “strong feeling” that hits you instantly, or is it the “thing you work at” over a long period of time?

You’ll definitely want to listen in and hear his answer, along with his advice for those who are looking for love. He doesn’t say STAY OFF INSTAGRAM, but he does comment on how we get too involved in other people’s relationships and the way they are telegraphed on social media.

He also explained what his older sister said when he brought his first boyfriend home, and how he and his husband, Eric Rosen, decided to become parents and navigated surrogacy to become dads.

I was curious to learn more about his City of Strangers initiative, which was born from a random $200 gift that changed his life. In particular, I wanted to know if, in the context of queer community, viewed that kind of "stranger-kindness" as a form of platonic love? Turns out, he’s now friends with the guy who gave him that money all those years ago!

We also discussed his latest role as the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, which he joins on May 26 in New York City. Before that, one of the chat questions was about playing “unsavory” character Jackie in The Wild Party. Clay said he liked playing villains since that’s now how most people typically see him, but his son Bo was not allowed to come see him in that production—but will be invited to see him as Dr. Orin Scrivello in Little Shop.

By the way, here’s the complete track list of his If the Stars Were Mine album. As Clay explained, the album tells a complete story, but he did reveal which song was his favorite (at this moment) before we let him enjoy the rest of his Papa’s Day.

Thanks to everyone who joined our conversation live. You can find the vinyl of Clay’s album at his website and learn more about his City of Strangers initiative as well.

Email us at [email protected] to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I met Lindsey Danis while in Baltimore during the annual AWP conference. She told me about her forthcoming book, (Out) on the Road, and I was excited to discuss the idea of “queer travel” and how that intersects with our search for love, opportunities for discovery and celebration.

We published Lindsey’s essay “Lost in Apalachicola” last week, which is an excerpt from the book, and details a time when Lindsey was traveling with a romantic partner and experienced some unexpected challenges during this unusual camping trip. As Lindsey writes:

“I’d fancied myself an adventurous spirit in need of toughening up, but instead I was dead weight. I had no useful skills to offer the group. I’d used travel like a magic trick, wanting liminality to hack my healing, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the past.”

In fact, I’d been on quite a road trip of my own when I spoke with Lindsey. I was tucked into my younger brother’s spare room in his new home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’d just driven up from my parents’ home in the Deep South where I’d also been busy guncling (I happened to see all five of my nephews and niece on this side of the family during this Southern sojourn).

I know the region of north Florida and South Georgia fairly well since I graduated from high school in Valdosta, Georgia. While it’s not a place I particularly thrive in, I do always find creative inspiration—from the storytelling culture to the food and hijinks that eventually ensue.

Later that day, I traveled to Nashville, where we were set to host QLP’s first live event in the South at The Porch on Saturday afternoon. I am thrilled to report that the event was a huge success, and I will share more dispatches about that soon enough.

Lindsey—who lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her partner and two dogs and is always hiking, kayaking or cooking—and I talked about a lot of fun topics, including her honeymoon (and why I struggled suggesting destinations when I was an editor at OutTraveler), the distinct needs and struggles for trans and gender nonconforming travelers, and her favorite destinations around the world.

I hope you enjoy the conversation. I’m curious what your favorite spots to visit are and if you have any hints, recommendations or travel stories you’d like to share. In fact, this chat inspired me to launch a flash nonfiction “contest” with a travel theme to see what you’ll submit. I’ll be sharing these details (and more prompts) in a separate post, but here’s how it works if you want to get started:

(Mini) Flash Nonfiction Essay Contest

Theme/Topic: My Perfect Day (of Travel)

In just 300 words or less, recount a perfect day of travel that has resonated with you and sparked “queer love” of some sort. It could be an entire day from start to finish, a sliver of an afternoon, something you remember from childhood or an impactful Sunday from last month. We want to know what happened and why it has stuck with you. This could be travel with friends, a new romantic interest, an old flame, or your primary partner. Just keep it short! The winner will have their flash nonfiction piece published on The Queer Love Project later this summer.

Deadline: May 30 at 3 a.m. ET / Midnight PT

Please note: This will be a “free post” (meaning we won’t be paying contributors upon publication as we do with other essays) but you will receive a copy of Vol. 1 or 2 ofThe QLP Quarterly zine.

Email us at [email protected] to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hi, this is Jerry Portwood, host of the Queer Love Podcast. As you know, I’m always curious about how we put ourselves together as we navigate our time on the planet and the stories we tell ourselves as we try to do it. So I was eager to talk to our guest, a journalist I’ve long admired and who has spent a good deal of his life writing and thinking about sexuality, gender and identity—among many other topics.

As always, thanks to all who are supporting The Queer Love Project, which helps make the podcast available. We’re keeping it free for all since it offers valuable teachings. If you have the ability to upgrade to a Catalyst Member level, not only will you support this podcast and the rest of our mission, I’ll send you a copy of the QLP Quarterly zine and a T-shirt with our logo!

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a bestselling author and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He is widely recognized for his in-depth, narrative-driven journalism that explores complex American subcultures, identity, and social trends.I’ve followed his work for years, especially how he’s explored the complexities of gay marriage and how he’s been remarkably candid about his own struggles with sexual compulsion. His latest book is You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation.

So I was thrilled to finally get a chance to have a deep dialogue with Benoit about it and his thoughts on other related topics.

In the book, Benoit explores profound shifts in belief. Obviously all life is about change and how we adapt, but he had a specific question he was trying to answer. So I asked him to explain to our listeners why he decided to spend years researching and writing on this topic at this point in his career.

“I think, on the personal level, I have always been interested in this,” Benoit said. “I guess it started with addiction—because I wrote a book about addiction [America Anonymous]. It was mostly not about my own; I followed different people struggling with different kinds of addictions for several years. And I was really interested in this question of who gets better and who doesn't and why, and what's the difference and what are the techniques or what are the personality traits or the luck or what is it that means that some people recover and others don't?”

As Benoit continued to explain, his life got better in a lot of ways. “But there were these things that I was trying still to change about myself. I wanted to be able to be more open and vulnerable, both in my primary relationship and also I wanted to be a much better friend. And I wanted to connect to myself more.”

He’s been looking at identity for years, especially in relation to his former friend Michael Glatze, who he was an editor with at XY magazine in the 1990s. Benoit wrote a narrative journalism piece titled “My Ex-Gay Friend,” that was influential and even inspired a feature film, titled I Am Michael, starring James Franco and Zachary Quinto.

Because Benoit was interested in the ways “we broadcast our identities or hide our identities or explain them to others,” he interviewed experts and others (including his father) for the book You’ve Changed. At its core he was attempting to answer the questions: How much can we change, and what does it mean to change. And who gets to set the rules of what change is?

Since I'm curious about this kind of performative masculinity and friendship—and Benoit specifically brought up wanting to be a better friend—I explained that this type of queer love is one I’m very interested in too. What about platonic love with friends? Has there been a shift in that relationship that many self-identified men feel toward each other?

“All the evidence right now suggests that people are lonelier than ever and have fewer close friends. And I think AI could potentially just exacerbate that in the sense that people are developing friendships and relationships with artificial intelligence. It is easier than ever now to sort of exist in isolation. And I find that really interesting. … Friendship has been such a change in my own life. I was so selfish, I think is the word, self-centered, selfish, anxious, unwilling to reveal myself in close relationships, which is funny because I would reveal myself sort of to the world. People would say, ‘Oh, that’s so brave; or you’re being so vulnerable.’ But I really struggled with that in my primary relationships.”

One thing that Benoit doesn’t go into great detail about in the book is his relationship with his primary partner. As he explained, both Benoit and his father married someone from the Czech Republic, which is an unusual coincidence. “I met my husband when he was randomly working for a summer after college in Boston, working as a lifeguard,” he explained. “And my relationship is very unusual in the sense that we are oftentimes not together. We work together as often as we can be, but he’s mostly in the Czech Republic, and I’m mostly here in Boston, although I’m there as much as four or five months a year during the summer and when I’m not teaching.”

The question of why his relationship has worked is one that Benoit is still curious about. “This kind of summer fling turned into 10 years together is really interesting. And I think there were so many things at the beginning that were like, ‘This is not going to work.’ There was the distance; there was the fact that we are completely different people. There’s the fact that we don’t share many of the same cultural references. I mean, there were so many reasons for it not to work, except that we adored each other and loved to take care of each other and laugh. But I don’t write about this in the book, but I do think it’s interesting, the power that I do write in the book that my therapist has been very helpful. And one of the ways that she was helpful is she let me talk for two years about I don’t think this is going to work.”

The next bit of insight is on that I want to make sure everyone pays attention to. As Benoit stated:

“The idea that we make a decision, that we choose who we’re going to love, and they make a decision to love us. I think we often talk about love as this kind of inevitable thing that happens, but there’s a decision that’s made. We make a decision. I’m going all in or I’m not.”

So that set me up to ask the question that I pose to all guests on the podcast and is at the core of our QLP Questionnaire: “How do you define love?” We started with the idea of romantic love, and Benoit took it in a fascinating direction, beginning by stating: “It is a feeling and it is a decision.”

“There are many people I love, and there are many people I find attractive and I'm drawn to. So yeah, I do see it as a kind of decision with friendship. There are all these different kinds of friendship that are so interesting, the ones that I text with every day, and then the ones that I could go weeks without texting and connecting with, and when we see each other, it's just as connected. I think, for me, it has been about learning how—I'm not breaking any news; this is not a deep thing—for me, the feeling of not having to perform is what's so wonderful about close friendships. And I think for so long I was still performing in friendship. I was performing everything. I mean, everything was a performance and, ’What are people going to think?’ and all of that. So I think what's so wonderful about my friendships is just there's no need to perform, and I can be a mess. The idea that I can be a mess in front of anyone would've been inconceivable to me for much of my life and is not inconceivable now.”

My conversation with Benoit was so valuable, and we chatted about a lot of other important topics. I hope you’ll enjoy listening in and sharing your thoughts in the comments. You can order your copy of You’ve Changed at the link below.

Thanks again for listening to the Queer Love Podcast. You can also like and follow the podcast on other platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts (as well as other podcast platforms).

We also have an Etsy page where you can find some of our merch!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s been nearly a year since we hosted our first QLP Book Club. Over that time I’ve been thrilled to talk to so many talented authors about their novels and how they intersected with various topics of queer love. But I have to admit, I was disappointed that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to focus on female-bodied desire. So I was thrilled to have author Mac Crane as our latest selection.

In A Sharp Endless Need, the intensity of high school basketball serves as a high-stakes arena for grief, queer awakening, and the crushing weight of perfectionism. Set in a small Pennsylvania town in 2004, the novel follows star point guard Mack Morris as they navigate a senior year defined by the death of their father and an all-consuming obsession with new teammate Liv Cooper.

As Mac writes at one point in this moving, heartbreaking and—ultimately—hopeful novel, basketball is "more erotic than dancing" and a form of "f*****g without touching." As someone who has never quite loved team sports and used to be fearful of athletic folks of all genders and persuasions, I have to say, Mac does an incredible job of showing the erotics of bball. Or as Mac stated quite bluntly: “Is basketball sex?”

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What’s so fantastic about the queer love angle is that it’s less about a "coming out" story and more about the visceral, often messy collision of desire and survival. I read Mac’s first book—I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself—and loved it, but it’s so different. It’s a speculative fiction novel about a queer mother grieving her wife's death while raising a child in a dystopian surveillance state.

Although I know every author hates this question, A Sharp Endless Need seems to have some autobiographical elements, so I asked Mac (the author) to share the inspiration and impetus to devote your creative energy to explore Mack, the character’s, story.

Mac shared that they did play basketball in college, but the book is obviously not autobiographical. First, however, we discussed that byline change from Marisa to Mac and whether it had anything to do with the character.

“Everybody is like, ‘Oh wow, way to change it up,’ I realized my name can be something different, and I wished my name was Mac. It’s not my alter ego, but it is writing a different version of myself. I realized: Oh, you can change yourself.”

Interestingly, Mac also talked about allowing themself to write about sports in literary fiction and how that doesn’t seem like someone writers have permission to do. “There’s still the age-old idea about jock versus nerd. Or how sports are not intellectual,” Mac explained. “This thing was a part of my life for 20 years, but I don’t think I can write about it.”

Since the novel is set in the early 2000s—and it captures a specific era of "Bush-era homophobia" and the pre-social media world of AIM and shared cell phones—I was curious: How did Mac think Mack and Liv’s relationship would differ if the story were set today? In particular, would their young queer love have evolved in any significant ways since then (especially with apps, etc.)?

“It was interesting to write about that precipice of technology,” Mac admitted. “I did share a phone with my mom. But I didn’t feel any stress about that.”

A fascinating area that we discussed with the erotics of women’s sports—in contrast to male athletes in sports—something I had no frame of reference about. “It’s often different in women’s sports; queerness is more acceptable. For them, they’re comfortable expressing themselves, their eroticism, their chemistry, their communication through those micro-movements of joy and celebration through basketball.”

Plus, we talked about Sheryl Swoopes (who first emerged from the closet in 2005) and Brittney Griner, and how there are more out WNBA players now, but that a lack of openly queer people in college or pro sports was still a thing in 2004. In the same vein, I mentioned the struggle for Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe (who I profiled in 2011, when she came out publicly) in soccer.

Then Mac talked about basketball as a form of prayer and playing the game as a type of church (check that out around the 18:00 minute mark). Also, how a basketball season can mirror a Shakespearean tragedy and provides great fodder for drama, conflict and tension.

Afterward, we talked about the infamous “bathtub scene.” This is one that fans of the book who recommended it to me said I had to discuss. Although, I played a couple of the audio clips with the narrator, Dani Martineck, who I think brings a wonderful element to the audiobook, I intentionally didn’t want to spoil this scene for any of the people who haven’t read (or listened) to it yet.

But to fill you in: On the court, Mack seems like the “alpha”—the point guard in control. In the bathtub, however, they are physically and emotionally naked. The bathtub scene is one of the few moments where Mack allows themself to be cared for rather than having to perform. I asked Mac to share how they crafted this moment, and it’s a great response (you can listen in at the 25:03-minute moment in the video). Mac approached it as a cinematic moment and hopes this will enter into the queer canon of bathtub scenes (like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Saltburn).

We discussed so many other elements of this novel, so I hope you enjoy listening in and discovering why A Sharp Endless Need is one of my favorite books that I’ve read from the past five years and clearly deserves to be included in a new canon of queer literature that explores love and relationships.

To wrap things up, I asked about Mac’s new book out this summer Perverts, a collection of 17 stories. It’s been described as:

“A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity.”

And at least one writer has called Mac the “queer George Saunders,” which seemed to pique the interest of several of the subscribers who joined us for the live conversation.

Thanks to all who joined us for the latest QLP Book Club. Stay tuned for the next selection, which will be announced soon and take place in June. If you have any recommendations, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments or in our chat or DM us directly. And if you want to join us for one of the upcoming live events taking place this spring or summer, then go to the link below. Until next time!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

By now you probably know I’m a big fan of archives, histories, biographies and exploring the queer past that has remained obscured for far too long. During my latest Sunday chat, I invited Ben Egerman to join me to discuss his “gay little history zines” and other historical work.

We talked about the sapphic love stories that more people should be aware, a transgender horse thief, the Black drag and ballroom scene of West Baltimore and so much more.

And no, in case you’re wondering: We did NOT coordinate our stripes!

Fun fact: I attended a production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Friday night, and Ben told me he has his tickets and is excited, in part, because André De Shields, who portrays Old Deuteronomy in the show, is from West Baltimore. I can’t recommend seeing this show enough: it’s pure queer joy!

Ben explained how he got started at the William Way archive in Philadelphia as well as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City. And I mentioned my first experience at the ONEArchives in Los Angeles. Plus, we talked about the fragility of some queer archives because they have been destroyed and lost to history (and how Leslie Lohman Museum has a valuable archive that contains a trove of unique materials)

“We don’t have access to generational memory as queer folks,” Ben explained. “In the same way as other ethnic, racial or language-based communities do… For queer people, your family is not usually a safe place for your document, and you have to actively seek to create those linkages.”

Ben offered advice for those who may want to keep their own paper and photos and other ephemera safe and potentially donate them to an archive. Plus, he told us how he’s collecting and keeping good documentation of his own research and materials.

He also mentioned checking out the Queer Stories Preservation Project. Among other resources, they also provide a link to an easy template to create your own zines. I also want to shout out Queer Archivist on Substack as a great resource.

Other books mentioned or referenced during our conversation:

* Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories

* Gay New York by George Chauncey

* When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan

* The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters

* Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick

* Loving: More photographic history of men in love, 1850s-1950s (podcast episode)

* Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade

And in case you want to download the PDF of any of the zines that Ben’s created, he makes them available on the website. Here’s a link to the “Pansy Craze” one that we discussed.

Big scoop of the chat: I was excited to learn that Ben has been working on a book about queer Baltimore and when the book is available I’ll be sure to share more details. Plus, his next zine will be about John Waters and the “queer weirdos of the Baltimore suburbs” became counterculture icons.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for this live chat!

Our next big Substack LIVE will be on April 19 when I chat with author Marisa “Mac” Crane about their amazing novel, A Sharp Endless Need.

If you want to get your own copy of The QLP Quarterly zine, it’s easy: Come to one of our upcoming events or upgrade to become a Catalyst Member to support The Queer Love Project’s mission. I’ll mail you a copy and a T-shirt (like the one I’m wearing in the video).

Calendar of upcoming events:

* April 25 at The Porch in Nashville

* May 2 Jerry will be at Open Secrets Live

* May 4 QLP contributors read at Elyssa Maxx Goodman’s Miss Manhattan series

* May 9 at the Rainbow Book Fair in New York City

* May 12 Jerry will be reading at Must Love Memoir’s reading series

* June 7 at Asbury Book Cooperative during Asbury Park Pride in NJ

For more queer books that you might enjoy, visit our curated Bookshop.org shelves.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve enjoyed Mark Addison Smith’s daily drawing project for years (you can follow him via Instagram if you’re curious), and I was thrilled that he agreed to collaborate with me on Vol. 2 of The QLP Quarterly zine. Mark is a queer artist and educator who specializes in typographic storytelling. His work focuses on using illustrative text to create visual narratives through printed matter, artist’s books and site installations.

I invited him to join me to chat about his ongoing “You Look Like The Right Type” archive—a 17-year practice with an archive that contains over 7,000 works on paper—and the selection he’s collected for his new art book, He’s One of Those, which will be available later this year. He even gave us an exclusive look of it pre-publication!

Before we went deep into more discussion of his artwork, I mentioned that I’d marched in the No Kings protest in New York City on March 28 because, among other things, it reminded me about the power of art, graphic design and creativity when it comes to political action. For example, if you aren’t aware of Visual AIDS and all the amazing work that this organization has helped foster, check it out.

Oh, and so I don’t forget to share it, at one point we did go on a tangent about tattoos (and my piercing). Here’s the essay I mentioned writing, titled “Overcoming My Tattoo Taboo.”

Among the many topics we discussed was this “straight people are not okay” drawing that I hope to feature on a T-shirt or other merch. Wouldn’t that be great?

Mark also explained his illustration style and its development, including the “hairy lettering” that he uses to such amazing visual effect. Lately he’s been leaning into “hyper-sexualized body forms” and “muscle daddies” and taking a quote that “may be innocent and making it a little dirty.” We sure love a subversive double entendre…

And this version of his stylized face with hair (a drawing that is also featured in the new zine) and how it’s maybe the “interior monologue” of a character from an essay (this one is included in Anthony DiPietro’s essay, “The (Gay) Marrying Type.”

The below drawing didn’t make it into the final version of the zine due to space constraints, but it exhibits Mark’s unique overlay/overlap text design that we discussed (read the caption to figure out what phrase he used).

Below is the drawing that is featured on the cover of The QLP Quarterly Vol. 2 (and on the inside page with the message/lettering).

Mark and I had such a fantastic time during our kiki, and we have so many other topics I’d love to discuss (including how we both grew up gay in the South), so hopefully we’ll be able to find time to have a follow-up chat. If you have anything you’d like to know about his art practice, feel free to share it in the comments. And if you want to explore more of his work or learn about his artist’s books and exhibitions, you can find more details on his website and email him directly.

Thanks so much for everyone who joined during our live chat. Stay tuned for the next one, which is planned for Sunday, April 5 at 1pm ET. I’ll be speaking to Ben Egerman about his “a gay little history” zines and essays and archival research.

If you want to get your own copy of The QLP Quarterly zine, it’s easy: Come to one of our upcoming events or upgrade to become a Catalyst Member to support The Queer Love Project’s mission. I’ll mail you a copy and a T-shirt (like the one I’m wearing in the video).

Calendar of upcoming events:

* April 25 at The Porch in Nashville

* May 9 at the Rainbow Book Fair in New York City

* June 7 at Asbury Book Cooperative during Asbury Park Pride in NJ

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.