GLR May-June 2026

and gay writers no longer needed an exclusively gay magazine to publish their work. As gayness became increasingly normal ized and slowly lost its status as an underground subcultural identity, stalwarts like Harper’s and The New Yorker hadbegun, by the 1980s, to publish Christopher Street’ s authors. This mainstreaming led to the emergence of gay lifestyle glossies, like Out in 1992, which, sanitized of uncomfortably radical po litical takes or frank depictions of gay sexuality, hoovered up an unsustainable percentage of the limited marketing budgets of advertisers targeting gay consumers. Steele said that if it weren’t for a collapse in advertising revenue, Christopher Street would have survived. If Christopher Street ’s mission was dual—to discover, publish, and discuss high-caliber gay literature and bring to life a gay world—then the magazine was a success, a corner stone of contemporary gay American history. Its catalog of contributors who indelibly shaped American culture is breath taking. Many writers’ careers started with a debut in the mag azine, and these same authors would be crucial contributors to successor publications like TheG&LR . And in letting writers and thinkers address a wide swath of topics pertinent for the gay community—anything from the latest designer fashion to S/M etiquette and how to survive a plague—the magazine, as the Publishing Triangle noted in awarding Christopher Street with its Leadership Award in 2016, rendered “valuable work in creating and encouraging LGBT literature.”

I leave the final word to the magazine’s staff and contribu tors. Beyer believed that Christopher Street enabled gay peo ple to find their identities, what their culture should be, and what freedom looked and felt like. Frayne described the magazine as both of its time and before its time in seeking cultural visibility and equality in a world that was not ready to cede those to gay people. White believed the magazine singlehandedly made it possible to consider gayness an appropriate literary topic. For Denneny, the magazine granted us “a greater ease and sureness in moving in the world, a firmer grasp of who we are and what we think.” It ultimately proved to the straight world and, most importantly, to us “that the gay community was no fata mor gana ,” that it was “a tangible and concrete reality.” This article is based in part on the author’s interviews with former Christopher Street staff and contributors, including Dennis Altman, Dorianne Beyer, Christopher Bram, Michael Denneny, Rick Fiala, Kevin Fisher, Heather Frayne, Augustus Ginnocchio, Patrick Merla, Felice Picano, Tom Steele, and Edmund White. R EFERENCES Bush, Larry. “The New Separatism.” Christopher Street , August 1981. Denneny, Michael. First Love/Last Love . G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985. Denneny, Michael. On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall . University of Chicago Press, 2023. Leishman, Katie. “The Outcast.” Rolling Stone , March 23, 1989. Stambolian, George. MenonMen. New American Library, 1986.

of Henry James whenever I crossed Wash ington Square. I went to a show of photos on the Upper East Side, where I encoun tered the black-and-white image of a beauti ful young man standing naked in a doorway on crutches that I still remember. It must have been the contrast between his beauty and the helplessness conveyed by his crutches that left an impression. But I felt a bit sybaritic writing columns about “dark disco” (the slower, sexier music played after most of the crowd has gone home), or the Greek torsos in the Metropolitan Museum, or the enigma of Henry James’ sex life, be cause they seemed so slight. Chuck Ortleb, the editor-in-chief, used a funny line in one of the ads urging people to subscribe that went something like this: “Nobody will ever jerk off reading this magazine” (to distinguish it from Honcho , Mandate , InTouch , Rawhide , Blueboy , and on and on). Actually the magazine was a mix, as I saw when I came upon the No vember 1978 issue the other night while cleaning my closet. On the cover was the wonderful artist George Stavrinos. Inside, among the ads for mini-bidets, hair loss treatment, a gay tour of Peru, a gay resort in Orlando, electrolysis, and psychotherapy were the following: an excerpt from a new novel by May Sarton; the first chapter of John Lahr’s biography of playwright Joe Orton; a profile of Stavrinos illustrated with examples of his work; a spirited exchange

of letters among Edmund White, Patrick Merla, and David Lynch regarding a review that Lynch had written of David Kalstone’s Five Temperaments , in which the ethics of calling someone “homosexual” before they had come out on their own was debated. There were columns on dance, movies, and personal relationships, and even an ad for a housing development in the Berkshires. Il lustrating the article on Stavrinos was a group portrait of George and his friends that looked like a photograph of a gay fashion designer and his entourage of beautiful men—the glamor of gay New York. “Nipples” was in retrospect about a luxu rious problem: the way Fire Island’s mean ing inevitably changed if you were one of the people who went out there every sum mer—the way anything glamorous becomes domesticated, familiar, and routine, which can lead to intimations of mortality, if not to a midlife crisis. I suppose Christopher Street would have gone on featuring writing about such people and such problems. But one day Larry Kramer appeared in the har bor of the Pines to raise money for an or ganization of gay men worried about a new venereal disease, and that was the end of my search. Gay life (and death) had given me the solution to my problem of what to write next, in the most awful way. Christopher Street became somewhat ob solete when its editor-in-chief founded a newspaper called The New York Native that

came out once every two weeks instead of once a month, the better to keep up with the latest developments in the growing crisis. Eventually, the magazine’s shrinkage began to resemble that of my friends in the city’s hospitals, ever thinner with each passing month, more and more drained of their youthful vigor. By the time the medicines were found to make AIDS no longer a death sentence, the publications that Chuck Ortleb had founded had long ceased to exist, and he was living in Boston. So what was it, then, the gay sensibility that Christopher Street gave so many of us the opportunity to explore in the brief pe riod between Gay Liberation and AIDS? Had we really learned to separate sex and sentiment (an achievement people cited as if we’d discovered a new planet)? Was there a flowering of the written word and image that was peculiar to gay people? Are nipples windows of the soul? I doubt it, though one has always had them. The issue of The New Yorker that I’m reading now (February 9, 2026) has a re view of a new movie about a leather queen and his slave, based on Adam Mars-Jones’ novel BoxHill, in which the leather queen tells his slave to “get a butt plug” because his anus is too tight. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . Andrew Holleran is the author of Dancer from the Dance and The Kingdom of Sand.

May–June 2026

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