Where Have All the Gay Writers Gone? (w/ Dan Oppenheimer)

In this crossover episode with Eminent Americans, we take a step back from our regular programming to talk to our friend Dan Oppenheimer about the state of gay male intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located? We talk about why the editors of Christopher Street thought it was important to use new media strategies to cultivate a distinctive gay male identity and a shared, if not homogenous, literary culture around it. Are today’s gay writers part of anything like a common identity or intellectual world? We talk about Gay Twitter, non-gay Substack, the “house gays” at straight magazines, the gay podcasts and the gay slop. We name all the names. And we make the case that gay culture needs inheritors.David and Blake on Eminent Americans:David: “The David Sessions Session” (July 2026)Blake: “Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a Soupçon of Porn)” (January 2026)David: “Left Behind” (May 2025)Blake: “The Fall of the White American Gay” (May 2023)SourcesMichael Denneny, “Why Gay Men Need a Literary Magazine,” Christopher Street Reader (1983).Ben Nichols, Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020).Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023).Michael Denneny, “A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer,” On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall (2023).Paul McAdory, “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” Gawker, September 9, 2021.Tom Crewe, “My Hands in My Face,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025.James Kirchik, “Transgendering Stonewall,” Tablet, July 11, 2019.James Kirchik, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Liberties, Spring 2023.