GLR May-June 2026

ESSAY

Christopher Street Hits Fifty D OMENIC D E S OCIO

I N LATE 1975 the film scholar Vito Russo called a meet ing at activist Morty Manford’s New York apartment to brainstorm about countering biased media depictions of gay people. Present were Russo, Manford, Patrick Merla, Arnie Kantrowitz, Arthur Bell, and Chuck Or tleb, a 21-year-old poet who had recently left the Uni versity of Kansas, where he had been involved with the antiwar and Black liberation movements. Those gathered were angry with mainstream cultural venues like The New Yorker , which refused to publish openly gay fic tion. They were stung by this exclusion, which relegated gay writing to a lower rung of literary status and discouraged gay writers from pursu ing their craft. They bemoaned the resultant lack of interesting, well-written fiction about liberated gay life and a serious magazine to showcase such writing, in the tradition of One Magazine , The Ladder, and DerKreis ( TheCircle ).

of the first courses on gay culture, was tapped to be the editor, in part because of his ability to fund the magazine. However, he was dismissed before its debut, and Ortleb was appointed chief editor. During Fone’s brief tenure, he introduced Ortleb to Christopher Street’ s first art director and cartoonist Rick Fiala, whose chic style, droll sensibility, and witty comics à la TheNew Yorker would set the magazine’s æsthetic tone. Furthermore, it was agreed that Ortleb and Beyer would be listed as co-pub

lishers. Beyer was responsible for securing a non profit corporation status and issuing stock for investors. The magazine found an initial home on the ground floor of an apartment building on 13th Street in Greenwich Village before moving by late 1977 into a proper office suite at 250 West 57th Street. When Christopher Street debuted in summer 1976, its founders expected that a trove of un published literary gems would emerge from the dusty drawers of unknown writers who had re mained unpublished owing to the delicate sensi bilities of a homophobic press, writers who’d flock to their welcoming shores. Instead the mag azine “found [itself] slightly embarrassed at the paucity of riches [it] had to lay before the pub lic.” Because writers believed that explicitly gay material was unpublishable in mainstream ven ues, they simply didn’t write it. Owing to the staff’s personal connections, the magazine still managed to publish an impressive roster of established writers and talented new comers in its first year: Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown, Kate Millett, Vito Russo, James Purdy, Christopher Isherwood, Tim Dlugos, Parker Tyler, William S. Burroughs, Audre Lorde, Ned Rorem, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and James Schuyler. By its third year, the magazine’s growing prestige, along side its editors’ dogged efforts, had attracted new authors who would come to define the gay literary scene of the 1970s and ’80s, such as Andrew Holleran, George Whitmore, Christopher Bram, Ethan Mordden, David Leavitt, and Robert Ferro. Kevin Fisher, an assistant art director, told me that many writers arrived at Christopher Street through word of mouth, sending unsolicited man uscripts or turning up at the office. (Merla added that many young writers tried to use their good looks to persuade Ortleb to publish them.) Tom Steele, the magazine’s longtime editor, said it re ceived dozens of unsolicited materials every day. Augustus Ginnocchio, the art director from 1979

Simultaneously, the group was intoxicated by the sheer newness of what they were undertak ing. As Michael Denneny, the legendary gay ed itor at St. Martin’s Press, described this moment, the “great surge of communal energy released by Stonewall” had jolted gay people to leave the closet and demand space where “we could un bend, stretch out, and breathe.” Beyond estab lishing places for gay men to meet, they yearned to let their imaginations roam free. They felt that gay people could not truly understand them selves or shape their own authentic realities if they didn’t have their own cultural spaces. Or tleb insisted that what was politically necessary was a magazine dedicated to contemporary gay literature, for he believed that political progress lay downstream from cultural change. Ortleb, who had been, with Bell, Martin Duberman, and romantic partners Peter Fischer and Marc Rubin, a cofounder of Out , a short-lived cultural jour nal from 1973–74 associated with the Gay Ac tivists Alliance, volunteered to start such a magazine. In early 1976, Ortleb invited Merla, Denneny, and co-publisher Dorianne Beyer, among others, to Byrne Fone’s townhouse for a meeting to found Christopher Street , named for the Green wich Village lane on which the Stonewall Inn stands. Fone, a CUNY professor who taught one Domenic DeSocio, Ph.D, is an assistant professor of instruction of German at Northwestern University.

TheG & LR

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