Benoit Denizet-Lewis asks: 'How much do we have to change to lose somebody we love?'

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. 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