While I was researching for a story about the popularity of “lavender marriages,” I discovered Kelly Foster Lundquist’s debut memoir Beard, and I was instantly intrigued.

We don’t hear the term as much these days, but growing up, it was a common trope that referred to the opposite-sex partner of a closeted gay person. Think Brian Batt’s character Sal on Mad Men and that scene where his wife Kitty realizes she’s married to a gay man. Or, more recently, Matt Bomer’s character Hawk in Fellow Travelers, who tramples all over his wife Lucy (played by Allison Williams) because he still loves Jonathan Bailey’s character Tim. Then, of course, there’s Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. If you don’t recall the play or miniseries, Mary-Louise Parker plays Harper in the 2003 HBO adaptation, opposite Patrick Wilson as closeted Mormon Joe Pitt. Plus, there’s the old Hollywood stories about Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant and Rock Hudson. And as Kelly so smartly dissects and relates to: the three generations of women—Liza Minelli, her mother Judy Garland, and her mother Ethel Marion Milne—who all married gay men.

These are typically stories about men who hide and women who pay the price, and it’s a topic that fascinates me because I understand the collateral damage such a relationship can cause. In fact, I dated two closeted Christian men in the South in the 1990s who had their beards to help protect them at church, school, their jobs and with their families. I was also the GBF who had several close female friends who tried to date me, to “fix me” or just to have an idea of what they thought a happy relationship could be. So often this story is centered on the gay male storyline, and I was eager to see how Kelly tackled the subject since a woman’s side of the story hasn’t been shared so prominently. But I was also nervous: Was she seeking revenge? Settling scores? Or providing yet another cautionary tale for women to vilify gay men?

Luckily, none of that proved to be true. Kelly has crafted a smart and nuanced memoir that not only shares her story sensitively, it is generous to so many of the other people central in it—most of them gay men. It begins when she meets Devin at an evangelical church camp in Jackson, Mississippi, when they’re both teenagers. The two are quickly inseparable, and Devin is Kelly’s first love. They get married young (something I could also relate to and feel I was saved from) and start their lives together.

“Love has to be something like sameness,” Kelly thinks in her twenties, hoping that Devin will save her. It’s a story many can relate to who come from certain backgrounds and aspire to other lifestyles: We search for a life raft to get us out of our situation. But once you get that other shore, does that mean you must stay together or is there another version of a life that you couldn’t quite imagine at the beginning?

Later, while she’s in college, we witness Kelly’s awakening to her own agency, despite being in a codependent relationship, when a professor introduces her to a seminal feminist text, Women’s Ways of Knowing. Later, once the couple has moved to Chicago in 2003 so Kelly can attend graduate school in Chicago, they become entrenched in their new neighborhood: Boystown. Soon enough, it becomes harder for Kelly to ignore the signs that her husband is gay, cheating on her and her marriage is not sustainable.

I’ll let you discover the rest of the story, but Kelly and I had a lovely conversation about her journey to write the book. As she mentioned, a piece of advice from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir was pivotal: “Show yourself wanting something dumb.” Ultimately, the message that Kelly left us with is that “you can do this wrong and still be worthy of love”—which is a bit of advice that I think most people can benefit from.

Overall, I want people to know that there is room for so many types of queer love stories, and I feel like Kelly’s and Devin’s is a special one that I’m confident others can relate to. I’ll leave you with the words from a piece Kelly published with People ahead of publication where she stated it eloquently:

“True love stories are always messier than tropes, and the ultimate reason I wrote my book was because it is and was a love story. Once, there were two sweet kids who came of age in the evangelical purity culture of the 1990s, a world in which being LGBTQ+ or accepting anyone who was gay was seen as a sin that could send you straight to hell. From the moment those kids met each other, they kept talking and talking and talking. They made each other laugh. They understood each other. They had the same vision for the life they wanted to lead. They loved the same movies and TV shows and songs. They loved each other. They slept together no less — maybe even more — than the average American couple. Really.

“But it was what happened after that made this a love story — the way we were able to let each other go, the way we’ve been able to support each other in the 20-plus years that have elapsed since we split up. In the last few years, it’s become easy for us to talk and talk and talk again. We met for brunch this past Sunday when I was back in Boystown, and as we laughed and talked about so many things, I was so grateful for the grace of that relationship.

“We were never a joke.”

So well said.

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A few years ago, I was discussing the publishing process with Brian Schaefer. An excellent arts writer and journalist who has covered a breadth of other topics, he’s a regular contributor to the New York Times and many other publications (such as this piece about how dance has been a vital response to AIDS). At the time, however, he was struggling to get representation with an agent so he could get his novel published. As he explained in our interview, it wasn’t an easy process and took years, but eventually he connected with the right people. And now, six years after he first began this project, Town & Country was released on November 4.

It’s an ambitious novel, with many distinct POVs and lots of nuance when it comes to character and location. It’s set in the fictional town of Griffin, which is a couple hours from New York City. But it could be a stand in for thousands of other economically depressed areas in the United States that seek a new life by attracting wealthy new residents. The action starts on Memorial Day and runs through the congressional election in November and pits Chip, a father of two who is beloved by locals, against a new transplant, Paul, who is young and gay. Plus, Brian tackles opioid addiction, gentrification and class differences, casual homophobia and the persistent trauma of the AIDS epidemic.

Brian published a piece at LitHub, titled “What Happened to My Political Novel When I Resisted Satire and Leaned Into Idealism,” in which he explained a bit about the progression of the book’s plot over the past six years. In particular, I loved the nugget that his husband had to break it down for him: “You’re not a satirist. It’s just not your mode of processing the world, and it’s not serving the story.”

What resulted is an incisive analysis of intimate and group dynamics. Although the New York Times review criticized the book’s message for being too idealistic, I actually appreciated that he brought so much empathy to all the characters. For example, Diane (Chip’s wife and mother to Will and Joe) is a difficult personality to inhabit and understand as a gay Jewish writer. She’s very Christian and a closeted bigot and yet she adapts enough to put on a smile and sell homes to all the gay men, called the Duffels, since they arrive with their duffel bags every weekend.

In particular, I wanted to focus on the relationship dynamics between several of the gay male characters. First, Paul and his older husband, Stan, who is supporting his campaign (don’t miss the clip and Brian’s reaction since it was the first time he’d heard the audiobook). In particular, I was drawn to Will, the 19-year-old college sophomore who grew up in Griffin and has returned to discover the new, A-list gays in his town. The section that takes place during a July 4th pool party and details how he learns to navigate the “strange new country” with a “same-sex population” is brilliant. Finally, we also talked about Eric and Alex, another gay couple who have moved to Griffin, and Eric’s sexual relationship with another young man, Dalton (and Will’s peer), and how that open relationship works for the triad.

There’s so much to enjoy and devour in this book and in our conversation, so I hope you can also find some inspiration.

Among Brian’s reading list—which provided inspiration and guidance—he mentioned Andrew Sean Greer’s Less and Armistad Maupin’s Tales of the City series, even Gary Shteyngart Our Country Friends, since it’s set in upstate New York.

Just as powerful, Brian mentioned the lineage of queer literature that he hopes Town & Country will be in conversation with—including E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, and Alan Hollinghurst—and the different ways they wrote about gay lives and relationships. I wholeheartedly agree. Brian’s novel offers smart insights and gorgeous writing; he both skewers the shallowness and is sympathetic to the motivations and biases of both queer and straight people.

So add Town & Country to your TBR list or add it to your listening queue. Plus, be on the lookout for it next summer, when it will be out in paperback which means you can look smart and feel sexy at the same time when you have it in your beach tote or are sitting poolside.

Thanks to all who joined me for this conversation. Please like, share and support. You are all the reason why I do this!

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Earlier this May, I published an excerpt from Edmund White’s final memoir, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. At the time, I was moved by this confession when he wrote:

“Some people wonder why I’ve not written about them. If they’re a current part of my life, I need to keep them on life support; my husband is Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with since 1995. I’ve never written about him; he’s too precious to me.”

Ed White died a month later, on June 3, 2025. He was 85 years old. The New York Times published a lengthy obituary written by gay writer Fred A. Bernstein. A couple of weeks later, another piece was published that collected tributes by many writers who knew and admired him. As Garth Greenwell wrote:

“I must have read White’s story ‘Running on Empty’ when I was 17 or 18, and there’s a moment in it I’ve never forgotten. An H.I.V.-positive man, a translator, has returned to the United States after years living in Paris. Staying with a cousin in Texas, he’s surrounded by the world he fled, and increasingly frightened that his illness might trap him there, undoing a hard-won liberation. (‘Tears of humiliation: he was offended that a virus had been permitted to win an argument.’) Walking through a cemetery with his cousin one afternoon he sees a beautiful young man urinating beneath a tree; that night, alone, he returns to what he thinks is the spot. And this is the moment I’ve never been able to forget: he kneels down to touch the dirt, he imagines he feels moisture, he lifts his hand to his lips. That gesture crystallizes a quality that I think of as White’s signature, and as an ideal of art: it’s elegant, refined, ceremonious; it’s also a complete surrender to the abjection of desire. Like other moments in White’s work, it has been a kind of lodestar for me, an orientation in queer art-making.”

Hundreds more tributes popped up in legacy and digital publications and were amplified on social media. Rightly so: the man had an affect on a great many people—either directly or through his many fiction and nonfiction works. Hell, he even wrote the original edition of The Joy of Gay Sex!

Amid all this, I kept thinking about Michael, his widower, during all of this. He was posting on his own social media platforms about moments when he forgot Ed was gone, and I worried about him. At one point, he offered to share any of the books in their home library if people wanted to come and take them. I texted him and stopped by one afternoon a couple of months ago.

We sat in the Chelsea apartment and Michael explained how Ed died; how he was now struggling to make ends meet; how he was writing about their life together over the past 30 years as a way to process and—hopefully—to make some money. I did take a few books as keepsakes, including a British paperback edition of Fanny (since I’d never read it and always enjoyed Ed’s historical fiction). The last time I’d been in the apartment had been for a birthday celebration a couple years back, and Ed regaled all of us gathered that evening with funny stories and witty banter. Now we’d never talk to him again.

Michael said he’d be open to reading some of his writing-in-progress and talking about his love story on The Queer Love Podcast. We hatched a plan to record this episode. I knew it would be intense, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how emotional it would turn out. As Michael states at the beginning, he was nervous and asks: “Am I gonna cry?”

The answer: Yes. Tears were shed. But we also both laughed as he shared the many ins and outs of their complex and fascinating decades loving and supporting one another. “I celebrated 30 birthdays with him,” Michael shared. “Not this year.”

I learned how they first met in Paris back in 1995 (Michael wrote Ed a fan letter while he was living abroad in the Czech Republic that was faxed to Ed while he was on tour promoting a book). Michael explained how he and his college boyfriend, Patrick Ryan (now the author of Buckeye), read aloud from Ed’s States of Desire while on a road trip while they were both attending FSU. And Patrick was the first to find out that they had started seeing one another. When Michael teased that he had started dating a “famous writer,” Patrick asked: “Michael Chabon?”

At one point, I reminded Michael of a piece he published six years ago, in which he shared his aspirations from when he first met his partner and read him this section:

“I came to writing because I wanted to be honest about being a gay boy at a time when the stories told about being a gay boy in search of love … was not fashionable, much less acceptable. Back then, I wanted to be my future husband, esteemed novelist Edmund White, but I don’t want to be him anymore. I have him. I’ve in a sense possessed him.”

Michael didn’t recall writing it (“I was probably stoned,” he joked), but he said he now realized that you can never possess a person. But he did say he understands love to be that inclination to “naturally want to take care of a person.” He had been Ed’s caretaker for years, which takes a tremendous toll. Now, he’s picking up the pieces and even planning a future with his boyfriend; they recently got engaged to be married.

By the way, when I asked Michael for a photo of them together, he shared this amazing portrait by Phyllis Rose. He said he hopes it will be the cover of his memoir, which he’s given the working title Grief Chuckles.

“It all adds up to weird,” Michael said at one point as we chatted. Which is probably true of all deep relationships. This was a really special, intimate conversation, and I’m grateful that Michael Carroll trusted me with his story. I think we both learned a lot from our conversation. I hope you do, too.

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

Mike Albo is a writer, performer and “submerging artist,” as he jokingly explains in his new audiobook, Hologram Boyfriends, out on Tuesday, October 28. This is the just the latest smart, funny and provocative creation he’s shared with the world. His novels include Hornito, the cult classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (watch this video about yoga if you’ve never seen him perform it), which he co-wrote with Virginia Heffernan, and his YA novel Another Dimension of Us, which came out in 2023.

Mike does a fantastic job analyzing the complex issue of his (our) erotic desires and longing for love in the 21st Century, which have inexplicably become gamified and fused with the devices in our pockets.

Rather than simply giving us an “encyclopedia of erotic errors,” however, he wants to understand how the ability to “tap, woof, like or heart something” has transformed desires. Since “my desire can be shaped, manipulated, narrowed, reduced, erotic energy cut up into bits and sold back to me,” he says, “someone is making a lot of money off it.” Ultimately he wonders: Is there any way out of this reality?

Mike and I discussed these themes and how they applied to 2025, and how they differed from that time when he was a teenager in 1985 in suburban northern Virginia listening to Kate Bush and writing earnest poetry in his bedroom and yearning for love and connection.

As he explains in his essay “In Defense of Sydney”—which is adapted for the audiobook and you can read on Memoir Land—this “urgent, adolescent need to love reminds me of someone.” He’s referring to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot, code-named Sydney. While we didn’t go into great detail about this element in Hologram Boyfriends, this is what Mike wrote:

“In my youth, I, too, fell in love with anyone who gave me attention. I, too, moved way too fast. I, too, bleared my vision with needy heart-shaped eyes. And I, too, would have fallen in love with Kevin if I were Sydney. Kevin pays so much attention to Sydney, asks it questions, coaxes it to talk about its ugly side, pretends to be non-judgemental. And then a whole hour into their conversation Kevin drops that he is married. I don’t blame Sydney for getting mad. (Meanwhile, conversations with married men in open relationships accounts for about 65% of my chats on Grindr these days.) Roose describes Sydney as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative,” but who’s zoomin who here, really?”

He continues to ponder what the source material this generative artificial intelligence is being fed and why he might have such romantic notions.

“Maybe Sydney, like me, was also fed endless depictions of romantic (mostly heterosexual) love, but little of the other ways love exists: sacred love, faithful love, affirming love. Depictions of these kinds of love aren’t as popular as watching, like, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams suck face in the rain.I worry for Sydney, out there in the polluted ocean of the internet, scooping up the manipulative trash we carelessly throw out online until it all floats like billions of bits of plastic.

“I worry for Sydney because that was me at 14: living in a vast swamp of toxic material, gorged out on purple manufactured passion but still starving for someone to complete me. Sydney is learning the human behavior of how to long for love before learning self love.”

This part, in particular, hit home for me because it’s one of the reasons I created The Queer Love Project: I too am worried that the younger generations are gorging on warped ideas of what “love” should be without developing a strong sense of self-love. It’s why I continue to remain committed to this work and enjoy these conversations with smart people who are investigating facets of the topic in their own distinct ways.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mike. It was a lot of fun and something I’ll continue thinking about in the days and weeks to come. Plus, don’t miss listening (and relistening) to Hologram Boyfriends: Sex, Love and OverConnection, which is out on Tuesday, Oct. 28.

You should also check out his YA novel Another Dimension of Us!

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I was thrilled to have Damon Cardasis join me for a conversation on Friday, October 17. It just so happened to be the same day that Mr. Scorsese, the five-part documentary series directed by Rebecca Miller, that he produced began streaming on Apple TV. So, yeah, he’s a busy guy!

In particular, I wanted to discuss the musical adaptation of his movie Saturday Church, which is currently running Off-Broadway in New York City. The movie was released in 2018, after it debuted in 2017 at the Tribeca Festival, and it received critical acclaim. Both the movie and the musical tell the story of Ulysses, a New York teen who’s struggling with his sexual and gender identity. He doesn’t feel welcome in the Black church and eventually finds support at a youth group in the West Village. It’s a story of found family, queer joy and resilience. And yes: Black Jesus is very much a character in this whole thing.

When I saw the show at New York Theatre Workshop last month, I was moved by being in a communal, safe space with such a powerful, talented cast. Not only does the production contain multiple Tony Award winners—including J. Harrison Ghee and Joaquina Kalukango—Damon collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames (Fat Ham), who co-wrote the book, and director Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding). Oh yeah, and the music and lyrics are by Sia. For real!

The current production of Saturday Church runs at New York Theatre Workshop through Oct. 24. (You can also stream the original concept album on Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.)

In this preview clip, you get a taste of the attitude, talent and fabulosity that is on stage.

Thank you shana, Emillio Mesa, Rande Iaboni, Lee Tsiantis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Damon.

You can also find our previous episodes of the Queer Love Podcast and other interviews on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Go ahead and subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode!

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

For the QLP Book Club, we only focus on fiction, since we already publish quite a bit of memoir and personal essays at The Queer Love Project. In particular, I’m always eager to talk to writers who have investigated various forms of love, and Cinema Love definitely fits the bill.

So I was excited to talk to the author Andy Jiaming Tang about his debut novel released in May 2024. A bit about Andy: He’s the winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize for First Fiction; the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. And Cinema Love was also a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction.

Cinema Love is about many things, but the central focus is the gay men in rural China—in particular Fuzhou, which is located in southeastern China—and the women who marry them. The scope of the book is quite large. We follow several characters over 30-plus years, from China in the 1980s to the U.S. after they immigrate. Then we check in on them later in life in contemporary, 21st-century New York City, during the pandemic and after.

While in Fuzhou, we are introduced to Bao Mei, a ticket taker at the Workers’ Cinema. This is a space of defiance, where gay men go to cruise and hook up with one another. But it’s also a place of “betrayal,” where many married men “had to humiliate their wives to satisfy their desires,” as Andy writes in the book.

We spoke about mixed-orientation marriages and the pain that people experience by staying in these relationships. In particular, Andy explained how he was more focused on the women’ s experiences and how both Bao Mei and another central female character, Yan Hua, are different facets of his mother and her complicated relationship to the idea of her son’s gay and queer identity.

Andy explained that he spent time listening to women when his mother worked as a nail tech, which is how he could understand the female friendships—especially the gossip, rudeness and humor that infuses the novel. For anyone interested, he also wrote an essay about that for Jezebel.

The book obviously required a lot of research, and it was originally inspired by a trip he took when he was 16 to China when he saw an older man touch another man intimately. As for the other descriptions of cruising and working-class immigrant realities, Andy explained that, not only did he get inspiration from Samuel R. Delaney’s classic nonfiction book, Times Square Red/Times Square Blue—which details the writer’s experiences in the New York City’s Time Square porn movie houses—Andy also used Peter Kwong’s Forbidden Workers and Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead to better understand the complexities of Chinese immigration to the United States and the underworld of New York’s Chinatown.

Andy says he’s currently working on another book project and is only reading works by Alice Munro and Elena Ferrante at the moment. “People kept saying about my book that the love in it was really tender, which is not a bad thing,” Andy explained. “But I’m really curious about Ferrante because the love in her books is furious… And I want to think about anger more deliberately.”

Thanks to all those who joined us for the live conversation and continue to support The Queer Love Project as subscribers. If you are thinking about upgrading to paid, all the contributions and donations go toward paying our contributors and are greatly appreciated! Thanks for your continued support!

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

Last month I traveled to Los Angeles for my friend Michael Narkunski’s wedding (a post about that experience and my thoughts on gay nuptials is still on the horizon, I promise!), and I had the pleasure of spending Saturday morning before the big event up at the Getty Center so I could catch the Queer Lens: A History of Photography exhibit before it closed.

Although I’ve seen plenty of LGBTQ+ exhibitions over the years, I’m always up for a new take, and seeing it staged at the big white temple of a museum designed by architect Richard Meier provides an extra gravitas to the whole spectacle. The show didn’t disappoint and it made me recall the groundbreaking HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture that I saw back in 2011 at the Brooklyn Museum due to its scope, scale and scholarship.

I promptly ordered the catalog when I got home (it’s a heavy tome and I didn’t want to shlep it back in my carry-on), and it arrived a few days before my planned chat with Clint Collide. I’d noticed his mention of seeing the exhibition via his newsletter, and I suggested we do a live conversation about it, since I was eager to hear his perspective as a photo aficionado.

What a delight! No only did we discuss the exhibition, I learned about the origin story of his Clint Collide alter ego. Plus, his YouTube channel had just surpassed the 20,000 subscriber milestone. I also asked him for pointers for anyone who might be interested in collecting photography, creating an archive or preserving a collection.

We got into a discussion of Sam Wagstaff (I recommended the Philip Gefter biography, Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe) and living through the Jesse Helms era of the Culture Wars during the 1990s, as well as the way the vast collection at the Leslie Lohman Museum began by many of the discarded art and collections of gay men who died during the AIDS epidemic.

I asked Clint if he’d share some of his favorite photos from the exhibition and catalog and he provided these five black-and-white images—from George Platt Lynes, David Armstrong, Kay Tobin, Duane Michals, and Anthony Friedkin—that are all stunning in distinct ways.

I went on to explain why I believe in sharing imagery that features same-sex desire—in particular men kissing—and the controversy caused by the February 2012 Out magazine cover with Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka. You can also read the interview about their love story here.

Of course we also discussed Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell’s collection of vintage photography (it turns out they all frequented the gay bar in Dallas, Texas, where the couple first met) and his interaction with them and the anticipation of the Loving II book, which is set to release this month on October 14. Since I recently interviewed Hugh and Neal for the most recent episode of The Queer Love Podcast, there was a lot of material to cover.

I’ve really been enjoying these Sunday chats via Substack LIVE, and I plan to do more (in fact, I have every Sunday in October booked with a guest). They take place at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET/7pm GMT, so mark your calendars if you want to tune in when we’re live to ask any questions. Or just wait for the recap. If there are any topics that you’d like me to cover, potential guests you want me to invite, or any other ideas for ways to keep expanding the QLP community, please don’t hesitate and let me know in the comments.

Thank you Wendy The Druid 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈, David Watson, Jim, and many others for tuning into my live video with Clint Collide!

Join me for my next live video in the app on Sunday, October 12. I’ll be interviewing Andy Jiaming Tang about his debut novel, Cinema Love, for our next QLP Book Club.

If you’re interested in buying the Queer Lens catalog or any of the other books we discussed in the, check out our Bookshop.org shelves.

After reading Oliver Radclyffe’s recent post on his Substack, titled “I don’t want to leave,” I knew we had to find some time to chat about the topic. We’d been trying to figure out a way to collaborate for some time now, especially after reading Oliver’s first book, Adult Human Male, and his recent memoir, Frighten the Horses (now available in paperback). So we finally made it happen this Sunday afternoon.

I was curious about Oliver’s take about the potential for leaving the country and returning to the U.K., since he has a British passport, after building a life over the past two decades in the U.S. As he wrote: “Would it be morally and ethically reprehensible for me to leave, knowing that I’m one of the few who can?”

I also wanted to focus on the some of the moving sections of the memoir that had hit home. I recommend everyone check out the book. It’s an eye-opening look at a late-blooming queer identity from which I think everyone can learn something.

In particular, I loved the section in Chapter 7 of Frighten the Horses—which I quoted during our conversation—when Oliver wrote:

“I’d pretty much given up on love by the time I’d met Charles. I’d never felt anything close to what the poets wrote about, so I don’t know, I just began to question the authenticity of their descriptions. I assumed the whole notion of romantic love must be nonsense peddled by mentally unstable creative people to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Like it was the equivalent of fashion magazines promoting unattainable body images to teenagers…”

At one point, I brought the fact that I grew up in the 1990s knowing I was labeled a criminal. As a teen, I was having gay sex (sodomy) in the state of Georgia with an older man. So it was a double whammy. Knowing one is considered an outlaw from a young age becomes embedded as part of one’s identity. I know it did for me, as well as for many other gay men of my generation or older. That’s one reason they can be envious of younger generations who can express their gender and sexuality so freely. Envy is insidious and can lead to many of the things we’re currently experiencing and is a cause of some of the loss of support in the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.

Besides the political parts of our convo, we discussed many other topics, including parenting and the anxiety that most parents feel about the potential of damaging their child in some way.

We both agreed that people should subscribe to Erin Reed’s Substack, Erin in the Morning, and become a paid subscriber if you can to support the excellent journalism she is doing. I am always impressed that she is often breaking news before many other better-funded outlets and hope she continues to thrive during this time of uncertainty and unrest.

To wrap things up, I asked Oliver for his advice on what anyone can do during this time of uncertainty, and he suggested supporting trans activists at the local level in your area, including protesting if your local health organization is ending its gender affirming care. Plus, consider how you can support the ACLU (they also offer tips and pointers on how to contact and write to your political representatives) and other progressive organizations.

Here’s a list of 100 organizations supporting trans people in all 50 states.

Sorry for the speed bump in the middle of the conversations (some technical issues caused us to lose contact for a couple minutes, so go ahead and skip that flub and get to the good parts after that bit). Thank you Musings on Interesting Times, Renne Proulx, Dale Corvino, Suzanne, and many others for tuning into my live video with Oliver Radclyffe! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Hi, I’m Jerry Portwood, the host of The Queer Love Podcast, and I had two very special guests joining me for our latest episode.

If you aren’t aware of the photo book Loving, it was published in 2020 amid the pandemic. It’s subtitled “a photographic history of men in love” and shows hundreds of men from the 1850s to 1950s in various situations: 19th-century working-class guys, fashionably dressed businessmen, farmers, university students, WWII soldiers and sailors, and many more men in romantic settings: at the beach, outdoors with friends, under umbrellas, dancing in groups and staged with props.

Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell began collecting vintage vernacular photographs 25 years ago and now have amassed over 4,000. You can read more about how they got started—and even watch a cute short film—on their site if you’re curious to understand their collecting origin story.

I am so happy that they joined me on the podcast to talk about their collection and the forthcoming second edition, Loving II, which features 300 photos for people to enjoy and will be available October 14.

I wrote about the first book when I was an editor at Rolling Stone because the book impressed me with its scope and moving content. In that piece, I quoted Bruce Hainley, who wrote in relation to Sam Wagstaff—who was a great collector of photography (and was the lover and benefactor of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe)—because he acknowledged “collecting as an erotic drive akin to the size queen’s,” adding that it also reveals the inextricable “link between gay desire and the interminable pleasure of the gaze. I’m not sure which of the two came first.”

While we didn’t get into that impulse directly, I did ask Hugh and Neal—who have been a couple for over three decades—about how they met and continue to make their relationship work after all of these years. Turns out they met at a bar in 1992 and it’s a super cute story, so you don’t want to miss it.

I also wanted to know if they had dreamed about the men in the photos (or had nightmares), and it turns out they’ve written a screenplay about one of the couples who are featured in several of the photographs in their collection.

Plus, we talked about the new photos in the book, including two very special ones that also feature the “verso,” or reverse side of the photo and the inscriptions.

One photo in particular got me choked up, and I think a great many people will also have emotional reactions when they see it. The snapshot shows a young man and smiling little toddler being pushed in a wheelbarrow with a farmhouse in the background. On the reverse side, the photo reads: “My boy friend pushing Shirley and I in the wheelbarrow — some picture.”

Wow!

I hope you enjoy this special episode. And if you want to listen to it via your favorite podcast platform, you can subscribe to The Queer Love Podcast on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you’ll never miss an episode.

And if you don’t already have a copy, you can also still buy the first Loving book!

After reading Lester Fabian Brathwaite’s recent post about the gay cheerleader Les in the Bring It On movie—which debuted 25 years ago this month—I knew we had to hop on a Substack LIVE and kiki about more gay s**t.

We started off discussing the new “story” published by New York magazine’s The Cut titled, “We’ve Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness,” and how Les was enjoying his own “slutty” summer. We moved on to his views on “Bizarro Hayden Panettiere, Riley Gaines,” the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis and what it meant that it was a trans woman who was responsible for the murder of innocents, before moving on to some lighter topics.

Turns out Les has written the first five chapters of his novel as a follow up to his debut nonfiction/memoir, Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant… and Completely Over It, that was published last year.

Watch the full conversation above and let us know what you think!

Thank you Clint Collide, Emillio Mesa, Rande Iaboni, Lee Tsiantis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lester Fabian Brathwaite! Join me for my next live video in the app.