Going Out and the Pleasures of Impersonal Intimacy

We read Michael Musto’s 1978 Christopher Street cover story “Every Night Fever,” about the gays who go to the disco every night of the week, an example of a journalism genre that fascinates us—cultural trend stories that simultaneously report and constitute a social phenomenon. We discuss the pleasures of displaying oneself in the gay social world, the way gays moralize about and evaluate each other based on how much they go out, clubbing as bookish people, divorces during COVID, why incels should go out, why we hate Hinge, whether Gen Z is bad at going out, and more.SourcesMichael Musto, “Every Night Fever,” Christopher Street, May 1978.Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night,” New York, June 7, 1976.Stephen Phillips-Horst, “Have We Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness?” New York, August 29, 2025.Kyle Munzenrieder, “Michael Musto Shares His Life in Parties,” W, May 12, 2023.Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (2008)Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978)