In this episode, we kick off our occasional series on Gay Therapy Slop, in which we’ll talk about how therapy discourse has shaped modern gay self-understandings. What better place to start than with some gay self-help that's not slop, a book that’s simultaneously a sex manual, a political treatise, and a literary experiment: Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s 1977 classic, The Joy of Gay Sex.

Organized A-Z as an encyclopedia of how to be gay, The Joy of Gay Sex is full of surprises, from its powerful introduction about the historical novelty of modern homosexuality to its entries on everything from cocksucking to how to make friends to why life is so hard for hot guys to Cosmo-style acrobatic sex positions no one has ever actually tried. It’s also a turning point in the career of Edmund White as he moves away from the fussy, coded style of his first two novels toward writing clearly, directly, and erotically about gay sex. Despite plenty of dated terms and hot takes to laugh at, we argue that The Joy of Gay Sex is anything but slop: it’s as relevant as ever and absolutely belongs in the modern gay canon.

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SOURCES

• Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (2008)
• Charles Silverstein and Edmund White, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977)
• Edmund White, Interview in Christopher Street, December 1977.
• Edmund White, Forgetting Elena (1973)
• Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
• Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story (1983)
• Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (2009)
• Wayne Hoffman, “On Its 40th Birthday, Revisiting the Powerful Communal Vision of The Joy of Gay Sex,” Slate, October 17, 2017.

Assassinated less than a year into his term as San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk is remembered today as one of the first openly gay elected officials and a symbol of the struggle for gay rights. But he’s less known for the unique style of gay politics he pioneered: a pragmatic populism grounded in neighborhood power and tactical alliances, combined with a skillful use of the media to broadcast a message of “hope” to gay people nationwide.

In this episode, we reconsider Milk’s vision of gay power through the writings of another figure we think was an underestimated political thinker: the pioneering journalist Randy Shilts, whose biography “The Mayor of Castro Street” (1982) helped create the Harvey Milk legend and impose a narrative coherence onto Milk’s politics. Shilts celebrated Milk as an alternative to two unsatisfactory types of gay politics: either being subordinated to elite Democratic Party insiders or to a broader radical-left coalition. Shilts saw Milk, instead, constructing a novel type of autonomous gay political power that could be used specifically in gay people’s self-interest. By transforming Milk into a political visionary and martyr, Shilts was also theorizing and re-enacting Milk’s savvy manipulation of the media, in which heroes and villains—sometimes ones he invented—could both catalyze gay power at the local level and connect it to a national struggle for gay rights.

We talk about what we can learn from Milk and Shilts today and have more to say about the current state of gay media.

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SOURCES

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• Randy Shilts, “The Life and Death of Harvey Milk,” Christopher Street, March 1979.
• Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982).
• Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987).
• Randy Shilts, “Go EST Young Man,” New West, June 19, 1978. (Note: We incorrectly identified this in the episode as appearing in the gay magazine Blueboy).
• Randy Shilts, “Cleve Jones Rising,” Christopher Street, October 1980.
• CBS News, “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” April 26, 1980.
• Blake Smith, “Randy Shilts,” September 2024.
• Richard A. McKay, Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic (2017).
• Michael E. Lee, When the Band Played On: The Life of Randy Shilts, America’s Trailblazing Gay Journalist (2024).
• Manuel Castells, “Cultural Identity, Sexual Liberation, and Urban Structure: The Gay Community in San Francisco,” in The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (1983).
• Jasbir Puar, “The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints,” GLQ (January 2012).
• Gus Van Sant, Milk (2008).

In this crossover episode with Eminent Americans, we take a step back from our regular programming to talk to our friend Dan Oppenheimer about the state of gay male intellectual life. Does it still exist? If so, where is it located? We talk about why the editors of Christopher Street thought it was important to use new media strategies to cultivate a distinctive gay male identity and a shared, if not homogenous, literary culture around it. Are today’s gay writers part of anything like a common identity or intellectual world? We talk about Gay Twitter, non-gay Substack, the “house gays” at straight magazines, the gay podcasts and the gay slop. We name all the names. Not because we think we have all the answers, but because we hope, in asking the questions, to provoke you to interest in the gay writing and thought we now have to inherit.

Watch the video version of this episode on YouTube.

David and Blake on Eminent Americans:

• David: “The David Sessions Session” (July 2026)
• Blake: “Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a Soupçon of Porn)” (January 2026)
• David: “Left Behind” (May 2025)
• Blake: “The Fall of the White American Gay” (May 2023)

Sources

• Michael Denneny, “Why Gay Men Need a Literary Magazine,” Christopher Street Reader (1983).
• Ben Nichols, Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Politics of Sameness (2020).
• "A Conversation with Michel Foucault," Christopher Street, May 1982.
• Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey, Bad Gays: A Homosexual History (2023).
• Michael Denneny, “A Mouthful of Air: The Case of Larry Kramer,” On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall (2023).
• Paul McAdory, “Gay Sincerity is Scary,” Gawker, September 9, 2021.
• Tom Crewe, “My Hands in My Face,” London Review of Books, June 26, 2025.
• James Kirchik, “Transgendering Stonewall,” Tablet, July 11, 2019.
• James Kirchik, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Liberties, Spring 2023.
• David Sessions, "The Year of the Gay Sex Zeitgeist," December 22, 2025.