The Queer Love Podcast

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 ContestTheme/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 PTPlease 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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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?”Thanks for reading The Queer Love Project! This post is public so feel free to share it.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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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 WadeAnd 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 NJFor 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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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 NJThe Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The Queer Love Podcast, we tackled one of the topics that continues to confuse and trouble so many people: religion. Our guest, Dr. Harry Tanner, has written a fantastic scholarly book, The Queer Thing About Sin, that will get you thinking differently about so many of the myths and misconceptions that persist—from ancient Greek and Roman beliefs to Christianity and our current debates.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!Harry’s personal history is the emotional core of his search for meaning. In it, he details his transition from a devout teenager seeking to cure his sexuality to a scholar of ancient Greek, which provided the lens through which he examines historical homophobia.For those who’ve read Jeanette Winterson’s trailblazing memoir, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, you may already be aware that England has its own evangelical religious environment. But many others may be unaware of the power of Christianity in the UK. As Harry helpfully explained:“So the UK does have an established church. It does not have separation of church and states as the United States does. The King of England is also the head of the Church of England. And although it’s a smaller group of people, you do have spots of evangelical Christianity throughout the Church of England. It kind of depends church to church where you are. They’re slightly better at hiding in Britain, I would say, than they are in the US because they have considerably less power. Despite officially being the Church of England, the church in Britain has much, much less power than it does in the United States. That’s probably a function of it being an official part of everybody’s lives and therefore essentially forced on the people rather than being something that people opt into, which you have in the US.”As Harry details in his book, he entered a conversion therapy as a kid hoping to “cultivate a numbness,” something I think a great many young people may still experience to this day. As he detailed:“When I was very young, I lost my dad and that made Christianity really, really appealing to me. And I spent a lot of time at prayer groups, which are essentially unregulated in the UK. So you can get pastors and you can get lay preachers who come in under the guise of looking after children and they will come in and they will seed their ideas. And I was particularly seduced by an evangelical group I was a part of.“As I started realizing that I was gay, I felt sufficiently safe that I could talk about this and explore this privately with certain senior members of the group. And it was not quite fire and brimstone, as I think it can be in the US, but the response to me was very clearly: ‘It is a mortal, grave sin. It is not something that you can ever practice in your life and you will have to do things to stop yourself feeling these emotions and these desires, or you will go to hell.’“And it was said in that very calm, matter-of-fact tone, I think if they had shouted it from a pulpit, I might have been inclined to disbelieve it. There’s something about a very calm tone of voice which really made it seem incredibly final. It took me not too long to become really very mentally unwell following some of the practices that had been suggested to me and also following a lot of literature online as well, which was also suggested to me. These are sort of in the days before internet filters came in for teenage kids. And I wanted to end my life, which I think a lot of your listeners may have similar experiences of in dealing with evangelism. Fortunately, I had a very good support network around me. I think one of the terrible things about evangelism in the US, as I see it anyway, is it tends to be your whole community, and that was not true of me in Britain.“So there were plenty of people who I was able to turn to, who when they found out what was happening, thought that it was not only ridiculous, but actively egregious. And I was saved by those people, but also by the real privilege of being able to study the ancient world, of being able to study the languages of the Bible, Greek and Hebrew and later Latin. And though that turned me into a very angry atheist for a period, I devoted the next few years of my life to the study of the ancient world such that I could do something about this, which that is the substance of the queer thing about sin, which is, I mean, you all go ... I went looking for a book that I couldn’t find and that book was why is it that St. Paul is so vehemently anti-gay? I wanted to know why. What was the reason? If I knew the reason, I felt those calm, voiced evangelicals would lose their power over me. And I have advanced a reason in the queer thing about sin, which I could not find. I could not find that book, so I wrote it.I’ll let you listen in on this fascinating conversation to learn more about why The Queer Thing About Sin is such a vital new text that I think a great many people will benefit from.Harry’s path to healing came from learning ancient Greek and learning how to read the Bible and reinterpret it in a more, let’s just say, “correct way.” It reminded me of a book that was very popular in the ‘90s when I was a teenager. What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality was a bestseller at many a gay bookstore I visited. Everybody talked about it because they were searching for some empirical framework to help them rationalize the pain they were facing. I feel Harry’s book is better on a great many counts, and it’s certainly important for our current debates in the 21st century. But Harry is also pretty blunt about one thing: “We do have to accept that these biblical texts are really homophobic. The question is why?” As he explains, once you understand the reason it’s homophobic, “you understand the societal pattern that caused it.” For him, that's the real “cure.” “If you can understand why something is, you can rationalize it, you can make sense of it, you can put it into a box and it stops being that thing that you are so frightened of every day because in moments of doubt otherwise, at least this was true of me, you'll be thinking to yourself, ‘Well, what if they were right?’”Harry then shared a personal story about when he was hooking up with a lot of guys and feeling unhappy and wondering if he’d ever find a sustainable, happy relationship. As he explained, he kept thinking: “This is making me miserable. Were they right? Now I can say to myself, ‘No, they were not right.’ But without that clear answer of why homophobia emerges, why it’s in the Bible, you’ll always have that ghost over your shoulder, wondering in the dark times, ‘Were they right? Did they get it right?’ We have to separate out those fears and the only way to do that is a rational explanation of what they were doing.”I had also just finished reading Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City—a popular history that details London from Roman to contemporary times—and it also gets into similar themes that Harry’s book does, so I asked him what he thought. In particular, I was curious about Harry views on the idea of self-restraint and that framing queer love as “excessive” or “lacking control” is part of the issue. As both Peter Ackroyd and Harry Tanner point out: Whenever people feel that there’s too much excessiveness, then a certain segment of the population (primarily, straight cisgender men) feel like they have to restrain it. It’s one reason why so many people who are into the Stoics, and they are promoting the teachings of Marcus Aurelius and saying, “Oh, we need to have more self-control.” Harry agreed that this concept of “self-restraint” is at the basis of much of homophobia and also much of the misogyny and hatred of women. But he reminded me that our next question has to be: “Why. Why do humans do that? And why is it that conservatism—which is essentially the politics of self-restraint and stoicism and all of that stuff—why is that so popular in the times we’re living in?”“There are some very good answers to that. The primary answer is that when things get really complicated, we want simple answers. The second answer to that is that when people get poorer, their sex drives go down. This is well established in the cognitive neuroscience literature and anybody who is seen to be having deviant sex or having sex for the purposes of desire rather than merely for procreation under those circumstances becomes a real outlet for the hatred of the rest of society, which is poor and angry. And particularly so because you would have thought that that poor and angry society would be really, really against the super rich, right?“No, because to be angry against those people is to remove aspiration. Everybody wants to have the supercar. Everybody wants to have the island and the yacht, but not everybody wants to have sex with another man or with another woman. So it becomes that perfect outlet for that rage. There’s a lot that we talk about in the media where we seem to think that this anger is set up as a sort of scapegoating exercise. People aren’t that stupid. This is really important to underline: People are not that stupid. You don’t just sort of set up a scapegoat and then everyone goes running at it. It’s not like that. There has to be a foundational reason why it works. The foundational reason why it works, why the attacks on queer people work is, again, people are poor, people are poorer than they felt before, people feel they have no hope. So they cling to self-restraint as their means to preserve themselves in these hard times. “And anyone who they see as not exhibiting self-restraint, they are going to attack—and violently. And that is the only possible reason why someone would attack a person wearing a dress or doing something as harmless as kissing another man or another woman. That is the only reason why that would take place, because there is an underlying envy and hatred about something else which is coming out.”We went on to discuss how transphobia existed throughout history, and that there is more evidence of trans people in antiquity than homosexual desire. We also talked about the need to “nobilize” homosexuality (the way Oscar Wilde did during his infamous trial) and much more before we eventually got the “how do you define love question.” Harry gave a very in-depth explanation to this. “I think that you have two types of romantic love, and this is often talked about in the venue of Plato's Symposium, but this is not the two types of romantic love that I mean. … I think that you get very ‘idealistic love,’ which is based on fragments of a person, little snippets of things that you hear… It's sort of, if you ever listen to Taylor Swift's Red album, [that kind of love]… And I think queer people are very prone to that kind of love, and it becomes unrequited and it becomes painful and awful.”So what about the other type of love? Let’s call it “real love”?“Real love is much less potent, but much more powerful—if that distinction can be made. Real love is about acceptance of who a person is and all they are in all of their facets. It is a much more sitting back form of support and the one can transform into the other, but with a great deal of humility and patience. “And I think that I have only quite recently, in my gay life, come to understand that the first type—idealistic love—is pretty melancholy and quite dangerous because it will always be the shadow of something that doesn’t really exist. And you’ll always really know that deep down and you’ll always be quite frightened of that. I think that we are more prone to that because we are more desperate for love, I think. And so we want to sort of create it and conjure it, but if we can, we have to try and do the other form of love, which is a sort of acceptance, a sort of going, “Oh, you’re pretty amazing in so many regards and I want to make a life with you and maybe with other people. “ I also think the sex is better and that kind of love.”It was such a powerful time I spent together discussing these topics with Harry. And I’m thrilled to share it with everyone. I hope you’ll pick up a copy of The Queer Thing About Sin, so you can dive into this rich history. Also, ask your local library to order a copy so that others might be able to find it in their community if they don’t have access otherwise.Thanks again for listening. And get ready for our next episode of the Queer Love Podcast, when I’ll be chatting with Benoit Denizet-Lewis about his new book, You’ve Changed. 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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

With a title like Men I Hate, Lynette D’Amico’s gorgeously written memoir in essays, you know people are going to raise an eyebrow. So when I invited her to join me for a chat recently, we definitely discussed the provocative title—and all the expectations that come with it. As she explained, many people imagine it will be about right-wing enemies or other detestable people, but the reality is much more nuanced and complicated. Plus, as Lynette pointed out, the cover design also has a shadow title that reads: “men i love…”By the way, her publisher, if you use Code “QLP” at checkout to buy Lynette’s memoir or other queer and sexuality studies books, you’ll receive 30% off + free shipping.Some of you may be familiar with Lynette’s husband P. Carl’s memoir, Becoming a Man, which received widespread attention and has been adapted into a play. Men I Hate is Lynette’s side of their story, and is also about the formation of her lesbian identity and how Carl’s transition complicated her identity. In the essays, she asks herself the question: Can a lesbian who loves a trans man still call herself a lesbian? After surviving coming of age in a traditionally gendered Sicilian American household, how does she make sense of men? What does it mean to love a man? So I was eager to discuss these topics with Lynette in more detail. It was a fantastic conversation, and I learned so much about the durability and elasticity of longterm queer relationships. We also spoke at length about another topic that I get asked about quite often: How do you write about friends and family in personal narratives? You’ll want to pay attention to what Lynette shares on the topic. You can also read more of her hard-won personal wisdom about it in this piece she published on her own Substack: “I started writing these essays to help me clarify my own thinking. Desperation to say everything you need to say about your own story is a good place to start, so in draft stages I just spewed.Which is what you do in a first draft. Tell the story, all of it. Don’t edit, don’t censor, don’t think how your pages will be received in the world. And be very judicious who you share your first pages with, especially as you are trying to work out your relationship to your subject, your own point of view to your subject. A first draft of an essay or a memoir is delicate, it’s a newborn. Don’t hand off the care and feeding of your pages to a brute of a reader, to someone who will slash and burn your pages and starve your creative energy. Your first reader needs to be generous and encouraging.The slashing and burning will come. Trust me.”Lynette generously read from the book, the piece titled “The Stasi Men,” which was also excerpted at Guernica magazine, and is an incisive bit of prose that examines masculinity. Plus, you can read an excerpt from another essay that QLP published earlier this year.I want to thank Lynette for joining me for this chat, and all of you who tuned in during the live conversation via the Substack app. I’m glad I’ll have an opportunity to meet her and other writers and contributors in Baltimore next week when I attend the AWP conference. Here’s a guide to find out more about the activities, events and signings that The Queer Love Project is hosting. We’ll be publishing a a new essay on Wednesday but you’ll also be invited to join us for some live communications—so I hope you’ll join us! The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

For those who may be too young to recall how weird the 1980s and ‘90s were to be gay, you’ll definitely want to read Roddy Bottum’s debut memoir, The Royal We. In it, the musician details what it was like growing up in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco and forming the band Faith No More. And, believe me, it’s a really gay book! He recently joined me on The Queer Love Podcast to talk a lot about his loves and losses, as well as his relationship with his boyfriend and bandmate Joey Holman. They formed the band Man on Man in 2020 and have since put out two albums. If you haven’t seen their video for “Daddy,” then you don’t know what you’re missing (and we discussed that controversy near the end of our chat).Some of you might remember that Roddy wrote Faith No More’s first internationally recognized song, “We Care a Lot.” He also was behind one of the greatest anthems to blow jobs, “Be Aggressive,” before he revealed he was gay in a 1993 interview with Lance Loud for The Advocate. To put it in context: This was before Rob Halford of Judas Priest had come out; before Michael Stipe of REM or Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü discussed their sexuality openly in the media. Plus, Elton John was only toying with being bisexual and Freddie Mercury never came out publicly before his untimely death in 1991.Roddy also went on to form the band The Crickets, with JD Sampson and Michael O’Neill, and you might also remember his ‘90s band Imperial Teen, with that hit song on the Jawbreaker soundtrack, “Yoo Hoo.” We also discussed his relationship with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, including his “good-bye kiss” with the Nirvana frontman. As Roddy reminded me, his Imperial Teen song “You’re One”— with the chorus lyric “You take it like a man boy”—was inspired by Kurt. To kick things off, I told Roddy how much I appreciated his frankness. Not only does he share details about his younger days cruising men in the bushes and toilets of Los Angeles, he writes such short and beautiful lines such as: “I didn't realize what a privilege it was to be gay until so much later.”We also discussed his first boyfriend, Jim Olson, and how that played out since, as Roddy writes: “Our sex was secret and incredible, but I was smitten with his intellect.” He goes on to explain:“In prison there is love. In the classroom. In the workplace. It happens where it’s not allowed, and it happens where it’s encouraged. Jim and I were in love and in the throes of growing up in a secret place where no one knew that it was…”Although we didn’t discuss it directly during the podcast conversation, I also wanted to quote this section from the end of Chapter 24 (you can find it on page 154 if you have your own copy): “What is love when you don’t want it? When you’re scared of it and need to keep it under wraps? What is gay when you don’t want to be? The tedium of not knowing who I was took a toll… What if the hiding place is so good you’re never found? … what if the hiding place is dark and dank and hard to breathe in, and you discover the lid of the box you’re hiding in locks from the outside? The panic. The horror. Being hidden was what I thought I wanted.”Luckily, Roddy did survive this time and has had an incredibly creative and productive life. As he explained to me during the podcast about that first relationship: “There was a regularity and a specialness to that particular relationship and to the insanity of what that person was and the drama that it brought to my life. It kind of did form my opinion of what love is, or was, in that context. Love to me was a lot of drama, and I’ve had to sort of readjust my take on what love is in today’s world; in my relationship now. Does it have to be these crazy peaks, these screaming matches and differences and ups and downs? I’ve had to sort of adjust from an early age of what it was to me then and what it is to me now.”We ended our chat on a positive note, with Roddy urging people to get off their phones and to show up in person to support one another. “It's always a good decision to go outside and be with people. Even as challenging as that is. And that's what these events that have been happening, the book events that I've been doing, have been about. I always say at every event. ‘Thank you so much for just showing up, for being here physically, for speaking and listening and being in the flesh."‘ It makes such a difference.” Thanks for listening, reading and supporting all we’ve been doing with The Queer Love Project. Let us know if you have any memories from concerts or events that helped you. Leave it in the comments or amplify this however you prefer. See you soon! The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

Michael Lowenthal is the author of a story collection, Sex With Strangers, and four more novels. His writing has appeared in a slew of prestigious publications, including Tin House, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Guernica and The Southern Review. Plus, he’s taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College and, for more than 20 years, he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. He splits his time between Boston and Pittsburgh. We first made contact when Michael submitted an excerpt from Place Envy, his latest memoir, which he calls a “quest-in-essays.” In that piece, titled “Estrangeiro,” he details a serendipitous encounter with a young man in Salvador, Brazil, while he was on an artist’s retreat. I was excited to discuss that story and the way the rest of the essays in the collection—which span decades of his life—came to be shaped. The memoir spans locations from a Mexican cruise for blind gay men to a remote Scottish island, so I was curious to find out how traveling to “un-queer” or unfamiliar spaces provides a better “orientation” for his own identity than staying in established queer hubs. Michael had a great response, so I’ll hope you’ll listen/watch to find out more. Then we went deep on that whole Amish experience in the essay titled “Ligature.” You’ll definitely want to hear about how he’s maintained a friendship with his Amish friends since his college days. Thank you Michael Horvich, Lynette D'Amico, and many others for tuning into my live video with Michael Lowenthal! The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

It was such a pleasure to read Steve Majors’ latest memoir in essays, Man Made: In Search of Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood, and an even greater privilege to be able to discuss it with him. He explores the intersections of race, identity and family in his work. In his debut memoir, High Yella, he recounted his experience growing up as a white-passing, mixed-race child in an all-Black family in rural Western New York. Now, he goes even deeper.Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what to talk about with a person who publishes so much about their personal experiences since it’s all on the page: What else is there to say? But with Steve that’s not the case. Although he explores so many facets of his life and writes eloquently and with great economy, he still has so much wisdom to impart, and I was thrilled to discover that he doesn’t skimp on sharing it.I don’t often quote from the publisher’s description of a book, but this collection covers so much territory, and they do a good job of summing it up: “Not all little boys want to grow up to be like their dads. The shy ones, the sensitive ones, the ones people mock as strange or call queer—sometimes they want to grow up to be loved by men who stand in for their fathers. They’ll put up with bullying from an older brother, taunts from the gym teacher, long work hours from a boss, and even discipline from a gay daddy, all as a means to discover what kind of man they truly want to be.“Steve Majors takes us on a journey of his own self-discovery as he grows from a gay boy in search of a father figure to a gay man grappling with what it means to be a father himself. In doing so, Majors creates various snapshots of time in which his—and the world’s—understanding of what it means to be a gay man changes.”Yes, yes and yes!Steve doesn’t shy from the difficult areas of his own life. As he explained during our chat, who he was as a kid is different than who he is was at 20 and who he is today. One particularly poignant moment is around the relationship with his brothers (you can read an excerpt here) and his regret that his gayness probably means he missed out on some opportunities of love and connection with them. Now for a pivot. I read a section of the essay “Dirty Old Man” that begins with the lines: “When it comes to sex and relationships, men are said to relish the role of hunters. It’s a toxic attribute that applies to some of us, whether straight or gay.” I was intrigued by the closing of the essay that details: “Like many young men, I first convince myself I am looking for a sexual coupling to bridge the gap in my life. I takes years for me to understand what I need is an emotional connection. “Like a sixth sense, this man and men like that, have the ability to tune into the vulnerabilities of other men and boys. And when they do, they use psychological coercion, physical force, and sometimes a boy’s drunken consent to fulfill their twisted desires. “We gay boys and men may think we are the hunters looking for our sexual conquest, but sometimes, all too late, we discover we are they prey.”That unearthed some vulnerabilities on my own side and I shared a bit about my own tactics to not be perceived as a hunter and how we twist ourselves into curious knots when it comes to hierarchical relationships.Plus, since he talks about his crushes on several hockey players while in college, I asked him what he thought about the popularity of Heated Rivalry, and the fact that so many straight people are loving the story of gay romance on the ice. I may have met my match with Steve: He seems to obsess over TV and pop culture, and it’s power and influence over us, as much as I do.Overall, Steve is adept at looking at many of the blueprints and scripts that we are given—by our families, popular culture, historical precedent—and pulling them apart, looking at them closer, questioning and exploring how to rewrite and improve them.For example, he’s not afraid to reveal that his relationship with his daughters (who are now in their early twenties) is complex and confusing. Although we didn’t have time to go deeper on the topic, he’s shared an excerpt that gets at the crux of the identity conundrum: “With time, I see the only doubts about my Blackness lie within me, not my kids. To my Black daughters, I am no different than other fathers. As dads, all of us are invariably set side by side against some ideal in our children’s eyes and found wanting. Sometimes, we are perceived to be missing something on the outside: not cool enough, not tall enough, not skinny enough, or not handsome enough. Other times, it’s on the inside, and we’re just not self-aware enough.Whatever we lack, we cannot convince our kids that we can be anything but who we are. We just have to convince them that we’re just like them — still learning, growing, sometimes failing, and ultimately still trying to find our own identities in this world.”There’s so much to discover and cherish in Steve’s latest book. I hope you enjoy our conversation and check it out for yourselves!Thank you The Studio: After Dark, Shant Knows It All, and many others for tuning into my live video with Steve Majors—stay tuned for our next Substack LIVE very soon! The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

I was thrilled to have Clarence A. Haynes join the QLP Book Club to discuss his solo debut The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery, which he describes as an urban fantasy and glam horror novel, and is now available in paperback.First, a bit of background: Clarence also co-wrote Omar Epps’s acclaimed young adult sci-fi/fantasy title Nubia: The Awakening and its sequel, The Reckoning. Additionally, he is the author of the nonfiction work The Legacy of Jim Crow, which provides young readers with an overview of the history of discriminatory laws in America. His new novel, The Broken Hearts Agency, is in the same universe speculative fiction universe as Ghosts of Gwendolyn, and it comes out in June.Clarence’s family emigrated from Panama, and he was born and grew up in the Bronx during the 1970s-‘90s, and he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. The book is infused with Caribbean culture and is steeped in Afro-Latine traditions, such as Santeria, which focuses on the orishas (deities). His main protagonist, Gwendolyn, was born in Panama and emigrated as well. So I was curious what inspired him to craft this fabulous, code-switching heroine at the center of his novel as well as Fonsi Harewood, the co-protagonist.Fonsi is a queer Afro-Latine medium from the South Bronx who runs a botanica (a shop selling spiritual goods) called La Playa, and he is involved in a love triangle with a ghost and his mortal ex. Listen in because I play a sexy scene from Chapter 2 that exemplifies how Fonsi is getting his erotic energy from these spicy encounters with a spirit named Amadé.Having Fonsi as “sidekick” could have easily slid into a “magical queer" trope, where an LGBTQ+ character exists only to help a straight protagonist, but Clarence makes sure Fonsi’s subplot is integral. In fact, both Gwendolyn and Fonsi struggle with “buried” versions of themselves, and they both struggle to find a “mortal” love while dealing with their mystical lives.Before we wrapped up the discussion, I asked Clarence about meeting the legendary queer author Octavia Butler (which was the subject of a new biography, Positive Obsession, out last year), who’s best known for her books Kindred and Parable of the Sower. He explained that they met at the Borders in Columbus Circle for a signing of her sci-fi vampire book, Fledgling. “I was editing at the time, not writing,” he explained. “She told me, ‘You need to write; we need your voice.’ And there are things in my book, The Broken Hearts Agency, that are my homage to her. It’s my way of honoring her work and saying, ‘I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t for her.’”You can find Clarence’s solo debut here (and pre-order The Broken Hearts Agency now)!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve known Rachel Kramer Bussel for nearly 20 years. She wrote for me when I was editor of the alt-weekly New York Press (RIP), and I read an essay from my memoir-in-progress at her “In the Flesh” event back in 2007 about the first time I went to a nude beach while living in Spain. (Yes, it’s one of my top goals for the new year: to get that manuscript in shape and send it out to be published at last!)After Rachel launched Open Secrets Magazine, I was impressed by all that she was accomplishing and it inspired me to launch The Queer Love Project in the summer of 2024. I’ve also published two essays with her: One about the shame I experienced during show & tell due to some prized childhood toys with an unusual provenance and, most recently, a piece for the essay writing tips column, titled “When Is Your Writing ‘Good Enough’.” This month, I also was proud to publish her personal essay at QLP about the elasticity of queer relationships and the grief she still feels since her ex-girlfriend and close friend died, titled “There’s a Hole in My Heart Where My Friendship With My Ex-Girlfriend Used to Live.”Not only did we chat about all the many highlights and achievements of the past year, Rachel and I discussed what excited us about the year ahead. First, we’re going to be sharing a booth at AWP’s Bookfair the first week of March in Baltimore. The conference brings together writers and publishers—including many excellent small presses—for panels and events. It was one of the most exciting things I participated in this past spring when it was held in Los Angeles, and I look forward to meeting contributors and subscribers March 5-7. This is my first time visiting Baltimore, so if you have any recommendations, please share them in the comments (Rachel already gave a shoutout for a friend’s barbecue joint that I’ll be checking out).Rachel is also planning the second Open Secrets Live Summit, which will take place May 2 in Manhattan. I’ll be on a panel along with many other writers and editors (40 so far!), so be on the lookout for more information around ticketing and the full lineup in the coming months. The Queer Love Project will also be hosting its second live reading with Elyssa Maxx Goodman Miss Manhattan nonfiction series on May 4 at Niagara in the East Village. So if you’re in town for the weekend, make sure to join us that Monday night!One thing that I’m also looking forward to that I didn’t get a chance to mention during our chat: On January 10–11, Paulette Perhach is hosting The Writing Life You’ve Always Wanted, a two-day live summit designed to help you choose your 2026 project, build a routine you can actually maintain, and create a writing plan that fits your real life. I’m joining Paulette and the rest of the panel of experts. Over this weekend, you will:* choose the writing project that matters most for your year* build a routine you can maintain with your real life* map out your 2026 writing plan* set up systems that make follow-through realistic* take your first meaningful steps while you’re still in the room* complete side missions assigned by Paulette, including a dinner with friends that Saturday eveningIt’s meant for writers who want clarity and accountability rather than more information they’ll never use. So, if you’re trying to figure out how you want your writing life to feel in 2026, join me, Paulette and the rest of the Get 10% off when you sign up today using the code JERRY.And with that, I want to thank all of you for joining me for this last Substack LIVE chat of the year. Thank you for subscribing and supporting the work that we publish and amplify. We are dedicated to keeping as much of our essays, interviews and other writing free, but if you can upgrade to paid, it helps me compensate contributors and continue to grow our community. We made it through a chaotic year and kept spreading queer love as a form of resistance against those who may want to quiet us. I wish you all a wonderful 2026 and I look forward to collaborating with you in the new year!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve done a lot of reading this year. My Goodreads challenge was to read 65 books, which if I’m being completely transparent, mainly consisted of a LOT of listening. As I recently shared via Notes, I used to question what “counts" as reading and what “counts" as writing. Yep, I used to be a snob about both. But my thoughts on the subject of both activities has evolved significantly over the years… Now I do a lot of listening, which means I get more writing and reading done than ever before, and I'm grateful for it. Some of the reading was to prepare for interviews with authors for the QLP Book Club—including Rasheed Newson, Troy Ford, Andy Jiaming and, most recently, Alejandro Varela—as well as for other conversations and pieces. For example, I had so much fun interviewing Samantha Mann about her memoir in essays, Dyke Delusions, and the profundity of my conversation with Katie Simon focused on her book about seeking more connected sex after being assaulted will stay with me forever. So many fascinating chats this past year, such as with Oliver Radclyffe, in which we also discussed his memoir about coming out as trans and how that affected his marriage and other relationships; Greg Bourke’s tale of fighting for marriage equality in the United States; Kelly Lundquist’s new memoir, Beard, about being married to a gay man; and Dale Corvino’s debut memoir, Afterlife of a Kept Boy, in which we discussed sex work and so much more. Plus, I loved listening to Mike Albo’s audio-only memoir Hologram Boyfriends and talking to him about all the insights he packed into it about how technology has warped our relationships over the past couple of decades. I also talked to my friend Brian Schaefer about his debut novel, Town & Country, which is a sensitive portrayal of rural America and the influence of gay men upon the culture of small towns. And how can I forget my interview with Manuel Betancourt for his book Hello Stranger back in January? It centered on the idea of “elasticity of queer relationships,” which became my mantra for the rest of the year. Of course, I loved Edmund White’s sex memoir, The Loves of My Life—the last book he published while he was alive—which we excerpted back in the spring. And the archivist/writers who produced The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters shared some wonderful advice for anyone looking to preserve their correspondence for posterity.Yet, so much amazing writing remains to be discovered! So I invited my co-editor Michael Narkunski and my pal Amelia Possanza, a literary publicist who has already introduced me to many amazing writers. They are both extremely plugged into the all things going on in the book world, so I wanted to know what they devoured over the past 12 months.I asked them to share some of the books published in 2025 that they felt deserved more attention, and you might be surprised by some of their picks! Among the many things we discussed, we chatted about these authors and titles:* Nell Stevens, The Original* Ariel Gore, Rehearsals for Dying* Bronson Lemer, The Lonely Veteran’s Guide to Companionship* Bryan Lee O’Malley, Snotgirl series* Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men* Jackie Domenus, No Offense* Torrey Peters, Stag Dance* Caro de Robertis, So Many StarsOne book I forgot to bring up that I absolutely adored was John Birdsall’s What Is Queer Food? I hope to invite him to join me for a conversation in the coming months. We also discussed these 2026 titles that we’re looking forward to:* Place Envy by Michael Lowenthal* Men I Hate by Lynette D’Amico* Night Night Fawn by Jody RosenbergMichael also shared the great news that his memoir, Macaroni Heart, is now under contract with University of Wisconsin press, and it’s slated to be released in 2027. Congrats!What did we miss? If there are any other books you want to recommend or ideas you want share with us, please add them to the comments. Thank you to everyone who tuned into our live video! Join me for my next live video in the app on December 28, the last one of the year, when Rachel Kramer Bussel joins me to discuss her latest essay—which we published this past week—as well as all that we’re looking forward to in 2026. The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

It’s that wonderful time of year: When our relationships—whether new or time-tested—can get complicated. So what better time to ask an actual expert about what it means to date in these complicated times? Luckily, I had the opportunity to invite Moe Ari Brown, Hinge’s first Love & Connection Expert, to join me to answer a lot of my burning questions.To kick things off, we focused on Hinge’s new Gen Z D.A.T.E. (Data, Advice, Trends, Expertise) Report. While the cultural conversation about Gen Z dating often centers around division, Hinge’s report finds that Gen Z are still desiring connection with one another.After surveying more than 30,000 Hinge daters across identities, the latest report reveals that 84% of Gen Z Hinge daters want to find new ways to build deeper connections with the people they’re dating. However, Gen Z daters are 36% more hesitant than millennials to begin a deep conversation on the first date.This nugget stood out: “The desire for more emotional connection in dating is strong, with 84% of GenZ Hinge daters wanting to find new ways to build deeper connections with the people they’re dating.”In many ways, that’s nothing new. We all want deeper connections right? But the GenZ cohort are still struggling to do so despite so many novel ways of making connections. I asked Moe about the people he’s talked to and the research he’s looked at, why this problem persists. The answer? It often comes down to anxiety around seeming “too much” or “too intense.”I’ve been asking others about this idea of coming off as “too intense” while also wanting to be authentic and what you think about when connecting via a dating app/IRL after the initial connection, so it was fascinating to hear Moe explain it in depth. Moe and I discussed: * The sorts of invisible scripts that queer people who are dating get caught in.* How people could navigate first dates and being empathetic to the other person.* The use of voice notes to get a “vibe check” before going out on a date.* How AI can assist people to communicate their most authentic self.We also discussed the expectations. You’ll definitely want to hear what Moe said about staying in the moment for that “first kiss” energy. Although I don’t personally have to worry about going on first dates these days, I hope many people can glean some valuable lessons from Moe and my discussion. Plus, if you haven’t already read his essay that we published earlier this year about dating as a trans man and his journey to granting himself “permission to want what you’re not supposed to want,” I hope you will! Thanks to all who joined me live during the conversation! The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

Alejandro Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was published in 2022, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His second book, a collection of short stories titled The People Who Report More Stress, came out in 2023. I invited Alejandro to join me for the final QLP Book Club of the year to discuss his third book, Middle Spoon—which was released in September—and details a gay man’s anxiety after his breakup with his boyfriend, while his husband and children and everyone else watch from the sidelines as he unravels. It’s an epistolary novel told through unsent emails—primarily to his ex-boyfriend Ben, as well as his mother, his child, and his therapists (yes he has two)—since, as Alejandro explained, this framework allowed for the narrator to be vulnerable and say many things that he needed to get out of his system as he dealt with the grief of a breakup.As I recently discussed with Alex Alberto, few contemporary novels explore poly relationships in a positive light (Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is often cited as another), and Alejandro’s is an essential new interpretation of modern queer love told with sensitivity. The narrative refuses easy categorization—the narrator is a mess—and is packed with some elegant, philosophical writing.We covered a lot of topics, and I shared a couple clips from the audiobook narrated by Eddie Lopez during our chat. Alejandro was generous with his insights into so many contemporary relationship issues, including: * Why public health research has figured so prominently into his books and stories.* The idea of PEPs—progressive except for polyamory—and why some people just can’t handle the idea of having a non-hierarchical relationship structure.* The “roles” in gay male relationships—both sexual ones and domestic ones.* The original working title of the novel was A Children’s Guide to Heartbreak.Finally, Alejandro’s answer to the question, “How do you define love?” was particularly sophisticated, and one I think many people can appreciate and incorporate into their worldview. “You can’t prepare anyone for heartbreak... I never talked to my parents about heartbreak. That was never a thing that my mom said, you know, ‘This may happen someday and it’s going to hurt.’ So, for me, love, in this book, is a little bit also transparency, like being able to be honest about your feelings and your fears with people and finding someone who can accept that and modeling it. So he doesn’t have that with his parents, so he tries to model it for his children, even though it’s hard.”Plus, don’t miss the advice he shared at the end before we wrapped up the session.Thanks so much to all those who joined us live during our conversation, and I hope the rest of you enjoy our discussion of Middle Spoon!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

Last December we had the pleasure of publishing this excerpt from Alex Alberto’s book, Entwined, focused on their relationship with their metamour, a term for a partner’s other partners. As Alex explained: “I often describe my book as an unexpected love story with metamours. While my initial interest in non-monogamy was about the freedom of developing sexual and romantic intimacy with multiple people, I eventually discovered metamours could become an anchor for me, and a core part of my family. I’ve experienced powerful platonic love with my metamours over the years; a mix of friendship, fondness, intimacy, and trust that stemmed from our romantic love for the same human.”At the time, Alex was also busy raising funds to produce a short film based on a section of the book. Last month, that short, “Coming Out Polyamorous for Thanksgiving,” was released and is available to watch on YouTube.I was excited to talk to Alex about the journey to publishing the book—including starting the Quilted Press collective to publish Entwined and other nonfiction titles—creating a short film with no prior experience, and all the creative projects they have planned for the coming year. Alex hopes to offer future workshops and other community-building activities, and I’m excited to see how it all shapes up!I’m always eager to hear how popular culture influences our internal blueprints, so we discussed what books, TV shows, movies and other pop culture is doing a good job of sharing poly relationship realities. Alex name-checked Sally Rooney’s popular novel, Intermezzo, as well as the poly relationship established in the science fiction book Iron Widow, and the 2017 movie Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (which you can easily stream for free on Tubi).When I asked Alex about the need for people in poly relationships to share their stories, they explained: “It is a really important part. You know, for me: I’m queer, I’m trans, I’m polyamorous. I’m so tired of coming out. It’s just every time I think it’s the last time—then there’s something else to explain to people. It’s difficult because there’s a balance of, you don’t owe personal information to people, but then, when you feel like you have to actively hide or when it sort of affects how you’re living your personal life, then even if you don’t want to share personal information for the sake of being seen, it’s almost just for the sake of being able to operate in a way where you’re not hiding.”I hope you enjoy this latest conversation since I’ve been having a blast chatting with all these smart and talented people who are harnessing their creative powers to share more stories with the world. I have a couple more scheduled for the next two coming Sundays in December—including our last QLP Book Club selection, Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon on Sunday, December 14 at 1 p.m. ET—and if you missed any, you can find previous podcast episodes and conversations here.For more books about polyamory, open relationships and other loving relationships outside the binary, check out the Queer Love Project’s Bookshop.org shelves—or leave a comment about any recommendations you might have. The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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.The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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! Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

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. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

In the latest episode of the Queer Love Podcast, trans pioneer and gender outlaw Kate Bornstein speaks with host Jerry Portwood about the reissue of her book, Hello, Cruel World: 101+ Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. The second edition now includes 20 additional alternatives and Kate’s urgent new essay, “Hello, Cruel Gender.”At the top of the pod, Kate addresses the hate messages coming from the Trump administration and beyond and what it means living a world when “cruelty is in power”: “That's not gonna stop us. We are a culture; we aren't a bunch of disjoined bunch of people. I was fortunate to be in the position of a gardener and plant some seeds along with some other folks of my generation and they have been watered and we have entire garden now. And you can't mow that down!”Kate also explains that she originally wrote and published Hello, Cruel World in 2006, before Obama was running for president, and things quickly became polarized the following year. “What I didn't know when I was writing Hello, Cruel World was how to deal with a bully who said, ‘Don't cross this line. Once you cross this line, you're on the other side. You are other. That makes you bad. Other is evil.’ “And I didn't really address that as deeply as I wished I could have in the first edition. That's why the 20 new alternatives to suicide deal mostly with the idea of good and evil culture—which is what we've become.”Listen in as Kate narrates one of the new “lessons” in the book: “Stay friends anyway.” Kate and Jerry also discuss how “stepping into the world of BDSM dykes” gave Kate’s writing a “rocket booster” when she was working on the Gender Workbook, her new theory of “gender in four dimensions” and how queer love is something not static. As she explains, “when you answer what is love, you've lost it. You know it when you embody it.” Plus, find out what to expect in her queer romance novel, Nearly Roadkill, which is being reissued in September with an expanded narrative and a new, nonbinary character.The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

On Sunday, July 13, Troy Ford joined me for our second QLP Book Club hosted via Substack LIVE, to discuss his debut book, Lamb. It felt especially appropriate to finally talk to Troy because, when I launched The Queer Love Project last summer, he was one of the first people I reached out to since he also hosts and runs Qstack, which is an invaluable resource for all the LGBTQ+ creators on the platform to find and support one another. He also answered the QLP Questionnaire! By now, it feels like we’re old pals, but it’s only been emails and DMs—so this was our first time officially talking.We discussed the many autobiographical elements that informed Lamb, including Troy’s time attending a California prep school and the friend of his who inspired the character of Lamb (aka Willam Broeder) and the the great line by D (the narrator of the novel), who stated: “I guess we all look at our friends through the lens of me.”In particular I was intrigued by the erotic and platonic love between D and Lamb and the elastic nature of gay male relationships. As Troy writes from D’s perspective: “We fooled around a couple times back at Wolcott, but having to hide that we were gay from everyone just sort of sealed this bond between us. In some ways, it was more intimate than sex—I didn’t need a f**k buddy, I had a hand for that. Two!”To dig deeper, I asked Troy to explain Lamb’s sexual dynamics, in particular the fact that he’s a big, 6-foot-6 punk and a bottom, which disappoints many potential hookups.“I think Lamb being a bottom, and the whole question of gay men and their elastic, fluid relationships is a really rich topic of conversation,” Troy explained. “The tone of the gay community changed significantly after AIDS hit, and sex became a much more fraught dynamic between gay men. After many years when it was gays vs. the world, the does/doesn’t he have AIDS/HIV introduced a gay vs. gay question that severely curtailed the ‘I f**k my friends’ attitudes of post-Stonewall gay liberation.”We also discussed Troy’s years of sobriety and the continuing issue of substance abuse in the gay community. “We want to present this idea of having it all together,” he explained. “But the reality that is not a lot of people’s experience. … A lot of my fiction deals with the ‘less glamorous’ sides of being gay.”“Do you think, above all else, your book Lamb is about the need for gay men to shed shame and fear?” I asked. Troy had a wonderful response, so make sure you watch the video to hear it in his words. (Hint: It’s around the 45:00 minute mark.)If you haven’t already secured your copy, Lamb is available in paperback or ebook at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Plus, as Troy mentioned: If you buy the book—either ebook or paperback—through any retailer wherever you can order or find it, he will comp you a six-month subscription to his newsletter, FORD KNOWS. Same goes if you review it on either Goodreads or Amazon—because authors depend on those reviews!Big thanks to Clint Collide, The Bathrobe Guy 👘, Homi Hormasji, Kimmy Win, Amarantha, Michael Horvich and many others for tuning into my live video!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

This is our third episode of the Queer Love Podcast, and I decided to do something a little different. Previously I’ve chatted with authors of essays that we’ve published. In case you haven’t already, make sure you can listen to Episode 1 with QLP co-editorMichael Narkunski and Episode 2 with Charley Soderbergh and Jeanée Ledoux if you haven’t already. For this episode, I invited Xandra McMahon, creator of How We Met: A Queer Love Archive, to discuss the first season of her podcast. Plus, she also took part in our QLP questionnaire, so we’ll talk about what that was like and go deeper into some of the answers.Xandra is a journalist and podcast producer and, as she explains, she fell in love with audio storytelling in college, and has been lucky enough to turn it into a career. She's worked in the public radio world, spent years making hyperlocal daily news podcasts, and nowadays produces podcasts for higher education institutions. How We Met: A Queer Love Archive launched in January and shares the real-life love stories of queer couples. She’s currently on hiatus but hopes to begin working on Season 2 this summer and hopes you’ll contact her if you’d like to be considered for a segment.I had the privilege of being on the finale episode of the first season with my husband, and I wanted to chat with Xandra since our project goals—specifically, as she states, “to amplify queer joy and serve as a historical record for queer people’s experiences, across generations, through the lens of love”—align in so many distinct ways. We had a great conversation about “the wisdom” she’s gleaned from hearing so many people share their love stories and what she hopes to achieve going forward. You can listen to How We Met anywhere you find podcasts and follow it on Instagram as well!Thanks for reading and listening and supporting us on our mission!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

For tonight’s inaugural Queer Love Book Club, Rasheed Newson joined from his home in Pasadena, California. And we’re living for his shade of green nail polish! He’s the author of the national bestseller My Government Means to Kill Me, and his debut novel was a Lambda Literary finalist for Gay Fiction and was named one of the “The 100 Notable Books of 2022” by The New York Times. His forthcoming novel, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, is slated for publication by Flatiron in 2026. And we got the deets first, which will be a delicious romp through 1950s Hollywood.As many may already be aware, Rasheed is also a television drama writer, producer, and showrunner. Along with his screenplay writing partner, T.J. Brady, he co-developed and is an executive producer of Bel-Air. The drama series has won three NAACP Image Awards and has been nominated several times for Best Drama Series. Additionally, Rasheed has worked on The Chi, Animal Kingdom, and Narcos, among other drama series. Rasheed was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He’s a graduate of Georgetown University. He currently lives with his husband and their two children in Pasadena.My Government Means to Kill Me starts in 1985 New York City when our protagonist, Trey Singleton, is 18, and it progresses over a couple of years. Trey is telling this story in a series of “Lessons,” looking back from a future 50 years later. The novel is packed full of information about that time in NYC.Trey’s parents are wealthy former Black Panthers who have “cashed in,” in Rasheed’s own words, and are now work as lobbyists for Eli Lilly and have powerful connections in D.C. They aren’t approving of his gayness, so he rejects his privilege and trust fund, leaves their mansion in Indianapolis to seek a new life in the big city. He eventually finds himself at the forefront of the Gay Rights movement in the late ‘80s and is even part of the founding of ACT UP.In a review of the book by The Harvard Review, the critic wrote: “My Government Means to Kill Me marries the radical sentimentality of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues with the jarring odyssey of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” I thought that was great—to yoke those two together—so I asked Rasheed what he thought of these comparisons. That jump started our conversation, which lasted approximately an hour, and here are a few highlights.Some of my favorite scenes in the book are set at the Mt. Morris Baths in Harlem… Rasheed provides lusty, delicious descriptions of his many sexual encounters. Since I know from experience that many readers can be critical of such joyous descriptions of sex—especially with the specter of HIV/AIDS.My first question: How did you manage to write about sex in such a positive way—so often it feels like it either needs to be “traumatic” or it gets labeled as erotica—so were you worried people would find Trey’s sexual recreation problematic?We also discussed his inclusion of legendary Civil Rights leader and political organizer Bayard Rustin being at the baths. This (naked) wise man educates Trey over the course of the novel and becomes a surrogate father figure who encourages him to find a purpose and pursue it. I’m so happy that more people are discovering his legacy, and hopefully you’ve seen Colman Domingo portray him in Rustin, which is currently on Netflix. Find the book of his life in letters, titled I Must Resist, if you’re interested in knowing more.Afterward, we discussed the relationship Trey has with his roommate Gregory—which is wild—after they meet by chance. Trey is attracted to him: Gregory is a hottie Haitian hustler. Although they never have sex, they have a very intimate bond. It’s a lovely display of the elasticity of queer relationships and friends—Trey says he feels fortunate that Gregory has chosen him as a friend and roommate. He prays that they’ll f**k and he says he “loves him madly.” Since he seemed “sexy, street-smart and glamorous. Everything I wanted to be one day.” They cuddle and fight and seem bound to one another until it all blows apart.I played the audio of Jelani Aladdin, the narrator of the book, reading from Chapter 6, titled “Lesson # 6: Romantic Notions Are Delusions.” It begins on page 76 of the paperback version for anyone who wants to read along.Then, finally, we addressed Chapter 9, titled “Lesson # 9: Touch at Least One Dead Body,” where we are introduced to Angie's home hospice care for many men dying from complications due to HIV/AIDS. Trey feels a kinship and bond to these complete strangers and eventually makes his biggest sacrifice for this woman.That struck me in particular because many people say gay men and lesbians don’t have a lot in common and, yet we see women sacrificing so much as caretakers. Later on, Trey, thinks "Lesbians had no place in my life," until he meets Angie—who schools him.He’s scared of Angie—thinks she could throw him down a flight of stairs—but she also is full of a type of love for her fellow man that she’s something else entirely. This type resembles agape love, a selfless, unconditional, and sacrificial love, often considered the highest form of love in Christianity. It’s something many LGBTQ+ people tapped into during the AIDS pandemic and continue to tap into. Rasheed explained why it was essential to explore this amid all the messy stuff that Trey was living through at the time.We took some excellent questions from those who were following the conversation live, including how to write effective sex scenes. That’s when Rasheed explained that sex is political and important and shouldn’t be negated. A huge thanks to Rasheed for being so generous with his time and talent and sharing so many insights with us, three years after My Government Means to Kill Me was initially published in hardback. Be on the lookout for There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, due out in 2026, which goes deep into queer 1950s Hollywood, and includes Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Diahann Carroll and many more notables of the era. We’ll sure to be reading and telling you all about it as soon as pre-orders are available!The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

In the latest episode of the Queer Love Podcast, Charley Soderbergh and Jeanée Ledoux join host Jerry Portwood to discuss their collaboration on the essay they co-wrote, “Love Is a Warm Curling Iron.” As Charley explains, he originally wrote a screenplay about his childhood years growing up with his family in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, during the Covid pandemic since he had free time since he couldn’t work at his salon at the time. When he shared it with his friend Jeanée—who he’d met when they both lived in Atlanta (but who had also grown up in southern Louisiana in nearby Opelousas)—she was intrigued by the character of his quirky mom Midge and eventually they began working on adapting it into a memoir. “There were so many synchronicities around this project,” Jeanée explains. “Out of the blue, I get this screenplay from Charley. I had never heard him express an interest in writing a movie—his frickin’ brother is one of the biggest directors in the world—but I’d never heard this man say he wanted to write a movie! The crazy thing is, I was taking my first screenwriting workshops. So he wanted to know what I thought about it, and I gave him some pretty deep feedback and a lot of encouragement, but I wasn’t thinking, ‘This is something for me.’ I just thought, ‘Good for him. He’s trying something’ And I’d been kinda doing a similar thing…”Although at that time, neither of them was thinking of writing a book together, they eventually began to work on it approximately four years ago. Since Charley is also an artist, they wondered if they could do some version of a book that combined his artwork with the stories and illustrate some of the scenes. Jeanée had read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, and she suggested Charley check it out for inspiration.People are often curious about the editing process, so Jerry asks the duo what it was like when he sent it back with suggestions that Charley do more investigation on how his parents’ relationship may have influenced his internal blueprint that was then applied to his friendships and romantic relationships with men over the years.“What the essay was missing was Charley’s relationship with Midge and how that affected his grown-up friendships and romantic relationships,” Jeanée says. She explains that she provided prompts in the text and asked him to “vomit” words and give “maximum detail,” which she could then shape and have his voice present in the final piece.“I joke that I came into this world as a raging empath,” Charley explains. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that, and I think it’s just another part of me that I didn’t know I had to be sensitive to. My impulse is to help, to be a problem-solver, and to be loved and appreciated, of course. Since I had a fractured family, that constantly needed patchwork, so I just took that into my regular life. … It was just second nature; I didn’t even know I was doing it.”When asked how the collaboration functioned, since it was Charley’s lived experience filtered through Jeanée’s perspective—and included a lot of research—they both expressed an ease to the process.“I feel like our work together is very much like our conversations,” Charley explained. “Jeanée’s very thoughtful about the questions that she asks, so even if she was trying to tease something out of me, it never felt like she was ‘mining for information.’ … But she’s also a great audience … with big explosions of laughter when I’d tell her a really nutty story.”Listen in as they tell more stories of how this essay came to be, including the time they employed some implements from a witchcraft shop they visited in Pittsburgh to summon Charley’s mom Midge to ask for her blessing on the project. Then, if you haven’t already, make sure you read and listen along as Charley narrates “Love Is a Warm Curling Iron.”The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe

On the first episode of The Queer Love Podcast, Jerry chats with The Queer Love Project co-editor Michael Narkunski to discuss their vision for QLP, and Michael’s latest essay, “A Pleasure to Have in Class.” Find out why he chose to share this story of a high school crush on his AP English teacher, which is part of his memoir that he’s working on publishing. Get full access to The Queer Love Project at queerloveproject.substack.com/subscribe