GLR May-June 2026

individual as seen in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to the vibrancy, joyfulness, and diversity of gay social reality in 1970s and 1980s urban America. Quality gay writing no longer needed to contain oblique references, allusively baroque language, or gender-switching, like many classics of the early 20th century. What makes Christopher Street exciting and fascinating, even today, comes from witnessing gay writers, in real time, explor ing new terrains of gay living and articulating the contours and textures of a gay world. Second, it transformed the way gay literature was dis cussed. It may be hard for today’s readers to imagine the ho mophobic responses that the best of gay literature from this era received. Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance , although lauded in Christopher Street, was panned by The New Republic and AfterDark for its purported narcissism, parochialism, and de piction of “sex monsters.” These reviews illustrate a set of trends and ideas that haunted the reception of gay literature: that the work would be unfairly evaluated based on the re viewer’s personal feelings about the form of homosexuality de picted, not on the writing itself; that being an out author writing self-consciously about contemporary gay life limited a work’s universality and originality; that “good” gay writing was self obfuscating and self-hating. To combat these tendencies, Christopher Street commissioned openly gay writers and in tellectuals to review books, promising an editorial commitment to a fair and reasonable review that took the work on its mer its. Furthermore, Christopher Street insisted that these reviews contextualize the discussed works within a larger history of gay writing, making the argument that a gay literary tradition ex isted. By placing reviews of chronologically and culturally dis parate books next to each other, the magazine encouraged readers to connect texts to their literary ancestors. These two radical shifts fueled a third by transforming what it meant to be a “gay writer.” By seeking out a diversity of tal ents without strict standards of style, genre, or theme, Christo pher Street created space for experimentation in form and content and freed authors from biased preconceptions of what a gay author would or could produce. The magazine embraced the controversial idea that it wasn’t just acceptable to be a self consciously gay writer—it was a good thing. As is still the case, many writers chafed at being “pigeonholed” as only a gay au thor and feared damage to their careers and reputations. (The magazine was rebuffed by the likes of Susan Sontag and Virgil Thomson for this reason.) By loosening the restrictions of what “gay writing” could be and reframing publication as an act of exploratory world building, Christopher Street proposed that writing as a gay per son was as an exercise in freedom and creativity, not limitation. By turning to gay readers themselves, it put forth a proud vi sion of writing by and for gay people as something worthy. It proved to gay and straight people alike that, according to Stam bolian, gay people “do in fact exist, that we speak and judge for ourselves, instead of being merely observed and judged by oth ers, and that our lives are to be taken as seriously as anyone else’s.” The magazine helped to emancipate the gay imagina tion from heterosexual mores and strictures, which would un shackle our ability to create ourselves anew. For Denneny and Ortleb, this was the only way to achieve real power: by becom ing visible and tangibly real to oneself and other gay people.

that the magazine was completely indifferent to nonwhite peo ple—there were features on gay life in Iran and Cuba and work by Manuel Puig, Audre Lorde, Darryl Pinckney, Samuel De lany, Essex Hemphill, and Ntozake Shange—but most issues didn’t have a single piece by or about people of color. Fiala re members that a gay publication from Boston criticized Christo pher Street’ s cartoons for rarely depicting a person of color. During his time at the magazine, he “recall[s] only one cartoon that included a diverse crowd. While I was there, race was not confronted as a topic.” Rereading the magazine fifty years later, Dennis Altman, an Australian contributor, was struck by “how white that world was—and how oblivious we were to the fact.” Several staff members described Christopher Street as a thrilling workplace where they could watch the gay commu nity grow. For Fisher, it was the place where he formed friend ships with contributing writers like Allen Barnett and Randy Shilts. Frayne and Beyer delighted in the office’s buzzy envi ronment. Intellectuals like Susan Sontag would sweep in un expectedly and stop to chat. Merla described the office scene as a “gay social club” of close friends that also served as a hookup center for those on the make. The sexual permissiveness of the office was both a manifestation of the sexual politics of gay liberation and a reflection of the more libertine ethos of the 1970s, an era in which, White told me, a blowjob was the pre ferred form of introduction. As one of the only staff members with experience working at established magazines, Merla felt that this environment was not professional, especially since Ortleb was always willing to give an attractive young thing a chance, which often did not work out. Frayne told me that each Monday there would be a “new ‘intern’”—someone Ortleb or another male colleague had met at a bar the previous weekend—who would “appear for a week or however long the romance lasted.” § M ICHAEL D ENNENY ENVISIONED Christopher Street as a “forum to appear to ourselves” and “to discuss what is happening in the world from the gay perspective.” Herein lies the magazine’s greatest accomplishment: in cultivating a gay world, it revolu tionized modern gay American literature and identity. By print ing short stories by the likes of Ethan Mordden and David Leavitt, excerpts of novels such as Dancer from the Dance and The Confessions of Danny Slocum, and works of creative non fiction in the vein of White’s States of Desire , the magazine en abled these writers and their readers, in Denneny’s words, to “examine portions of gay life from which we may develop a better understanding of the whole of gay experience.” It did so in three major ways. First, Christopher Street served as an incubator for gay lit erature by granting writers the liberty to write without censor ship and to articulate myriad expressions of gay life. With this unprecedented freedom, a new generation of gay authors came of age on its pages and created, to quote George Stambolian, “new literary forms and subjects” that “effectively moved the focus of gay literature away from the lonely homosexual figure doomed to unhappiness toward the elaboration of a world in which homosexuality was no longer an exclusively psycholog ical issue shrouded in secrecy and guilt but a social reality.” The magazine promoted a turn away from the tormented, isolated

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