GLR May-June 2026

Ortleb’s increasingly conspiratorial and denialist theories. By 1983 Ortleb began to doubt that HIV caused AIDS and was pub lishing articles from medical professionals and journalists who claimed that other infectious agents, such as the African swine fever virus, were the true causes and part of a genocidal cam paign against gay men undertaken by the White House and CIA. This shift did irrevocable harm to the magazine. It took attention away from its literary mission and repelled readers and contrib utors due to what White called Ortleb’s “villainous, denialist, and antiscientific” attitudes. The epidemic also killed many read ers and contributors (including Dlugos, Whitmore, and Shilts). In the face of mass death, those who survived felt that the magazine’s insouciant urbanity, its bemusedly arched-eyebrow attitude toward and joyful celebration of gay life were obsolete by the late 1980s. This was reflected in a decline in circulation from around 25,000 copies in 1981 to fewer than 10,000 by 1987. This devastation was also visible in the magazine: The length of each issue was halved, and it became increasingly dif ficult to find quality writers. Its pages, with the exception of Holleran’s column, were increasingly dominated by an eccen tric assortment of screeds against feminism, queer theorists, po litically correct gay culture, and AIDS activism. When the magazine folded in December 1995, it was a vic tim not only of AIDS but also of its own success. By introduc ing and cultivating so many of post-Stonewall’s greatest authors, it made the notion of excellent gay literature a reality,

§ A T THE HEIGHT of its prestige and influence in 1981, Christopher Street was confronted with the emergence of AIDS. Along with its sister publication The New York Native , it was one of the first gay outlets to cover the epidemic. Before much was known about the virus, Christopher Street served as a clearinghouse for informa tion, publishing multiple theories about origins, transmission, treatments, and prevention, including a March 1982 article by Dr. Lawrence Mass hypothesizing a likely connection between the disease and penetrative sex and an April 1982 reflection by Philip Lanzaratta about his experience with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Ginnocchio remembered Ortleb’s obsession with informing the gay public, which led to accusations that he was being para noid about AIDS when it was just a blip on the radar of most gay men. Steele felt that the magazine was, at first, lambasted for proposing sex as a possible vector of HIV. Yet in persisting in its reporting, the magazine became a resource for gay men to ac quire information to protect themselves and others, debate so cial and political measures to stop the disease, and mourn the loss of those already dead and the slow destruction of the world they’d been building—all at a time when the Reagan adminis tration and mainstream papers like The New York Times re sponded with ignorance, silence, and neglect. While Christopher Street’ s early coverage of the epidemic should be celebrated, its treatment of HIV/AIDS curdled under

In the Age of Christopher Street HISTORY MEMO

A NDREW H OLLERAN T ajar—was, I always thought, perfect: a dec laration that there would be nothing clos eted about this magazine. In fact, the joke was that Christopher Street was to be “the gay New HE FIRST COVER of Christopher Street magazine—a bunch of hangers in an empty closet whose door was

swered: “A play that sleeps with another play.” That joke made about as much sense as anything else being said about our new found freedom. But it was a heady time. Gay subject matter was only just being ex ploited by the publishing industry; gay writ ers were being invited to sit on panels to answer questions like, “Is there a gay sensi

suddenly that we may be forgiven for not knowing what should be in Christopher Street —which perhaps explains the oddness of “Nipples.” The opening line—“One has always had nipples”—was a joke, of course, treating a sexual subject in the voice of the Scarsdale matron in a Ruth Draper monologue. But it didn’t quite work. When someone told me that John Rechy called “Nipples” “Proust on poppers,” I winced. A line like “Nipples are the windows of the soul!” did not an swer the question of what is a gay magazine either. Was it possible there was no such thing as a “gay sensibility”? Ethan Mordden finessed the problem by calling his column “Is There a Book in This?” (There was, given Ethan’s amazing fecundity.) Edmund White published his tour of gay America, States of Desire , in individual chapters as he crossed the coun try. George Stambolian, the founder of the “Men on Men” series of short stories, inter viewed a masochist. Michael Denneny inter viewed a gay couple. The cartoonists—Rick Fiala and especially Roz Chast—made the magazine seem most like The New Yorker when their cartoons were the best things in an issue. I ended up writing about dance clubs and gay art exhibits and the fact that I thought

bility?” Middle-aged edi tors told me that my novel could never have been published when they were my age. The New York Times would still not use the word “gay.” There were writers, of course, who didn’t want to appear in Christopher Street because they didn’t want to be categorized as gay writers. Happy to be published by a small gay publisher for their first

Yorker .” (But, then, the joke went on, what was TheNew Yorker ?) The magazine was a year old when I was in vited to write a monthly column on anything I wanted to write about—a freedom that, while liberat ing, was also paralyzing. When you could write

whatever you wanted, but it had to be gay-related, what exactly did that mean? The uncertain tone of my first essay betrayed the problem; it was called “Nipples.” I’m not sure what I was trying to do in “Nipples.” Even now, years later, the essay betrays my discomfort at trying to find the right tone and subject. Nobody knew what it all meant. When playwright Robert Patrick was asked, “What is a gay play?” he an

book, they moved on to a “real” publisher as quickly as they could. And you couldn’t argue with them. The new gay section in Barnes & Noble, to be fair, was really no different from grouping cookbooks together so that people could find a better way to make mashed potatoes, but it felt like ghet toization. And all this was happening so

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