What is Pride For?

Blake Smith (00:00.128)
If you successfully resist like a horrible oppressive state, then like the future versions of you, your like real or spiritual descendants, will be normal basic bitches, right? Like they won't be interesting, marginal, radical people with like crazy politics who are out in the street burning things down. Like they will be basic. And that's what we're fighting for, right? Like that's what we want. Like it's great that like now there can be so many basic gay guys. Like that's

That's what you know, they didn't know they were fighting for that in nineteen sixty nine, but that's what they were fighting for.

David Sessions (00:46.158)
This is Off Christopher Street, the podcast where we look into the archives of the magazine Christopher Street as a window onto the gay life of the past and the gay discourse of the present. I'm David Sessions and I am joined, as always, by my co-host and fellow historian Blake Smith. In this episode, we talk about the politics of Pride. Pride debates have become so predictable that the memes seem to be ready to go even before June rolls around.

And in the past few years, in our dark days at the end of history, we've often been exhorted to resist so called corporate Pride and get back in touch with Pride's radical roots. Pride is a protest. Stonewall was a riot. Cis white gay men turned the legacy of Pride into rights for a narrow elite. We want to go beyond these posturing slogans and history distorting morality tales and confront the many meanings of Pride, the complicated and sometimes ambivalent feelings that we all have about it.

And we see, as we often do, that our debates are nothing new. Gay people have had mixed feelings about Pride since the beginning, and it's meant different things at different times. Pride isn't always a protest, and maybe that's a good thing. Before we get started, we wanted to say thank you to our paid subscribers, who we are especially grateful for considering that we have not even released any subscriber only episodes yet, or even prompted you to give us money.

We are not doing this to make money. However, the show does cost money to make, so your support helps cover our production expenses, and we really appreciate it. So evil rich siswhite gays who might be looking to do some corporate Pride, pay pigs, whoever you are, we are not picky. We will take your money. You can sign up for a monthly subscription or make a one-time donation at our website, CHRISTOPHERSTREETMAG.com.

Just put in your email right on the front of the homepage and the options will pop up. You can also just subscribe for free so that you get new episodes and bonus content in your inbox. And if you listen on Apple, Spotify, or another platform, be sure to follow us there so that you get new episodes right in your app. And with that, happy Pride! And we hope you enjoy our conversation about the politics of Pride.

David Sessions (03:30.326)
All right, we are back. Blake is here.

Blake Smith (03:33.238)
Hello David. Hello listeners.

David Sessions (03:34.996)
Pride month is now in full swing. The discourses are coming thick and hard, and the takes are as hot as apparently it's gonna be in Boston for our Pride this weekend. I am going. We have usually there's on Saturday is there's stuff every night, but on Saturday there's a parade in the morning, there's an like an outdoor block party, and then there's like club stuff at night on Saturday and Sunday. Yeah, it's usually

Blake Smith (03:45.496)
Pride Boston, are you going?

David Sessions (04:00.81)
It often rains on the Saturday of Pride when the parade and all the outdoor stuff is, so we're always happy, we're always happy when the weather is nice. But it's gonna be quite blazing hot.

Blake Smith (04:11.746)
Are you taking your boyfriend to his first Pride?

David Sessions (04:13.878)
I haven't, I asked him that and I actually don't remember what he said. I, I know he hasn't or I don't know if he gave me a I, I don't know if he gave me a straight answer or I don't think he has been to Boston Pride. So I do not look maybe I'll tell the about my first Pride Parades, but I am you know I don't need to ever see another Pride Parade. But I might go this year with him because he is, you know he's having all his firsts

Blake Smith (04:20.559)
Listening is so important in a relationship.

David Sessions (04:41.42)
I'm getting to relive my youth of only five years ago. Did you have a first Pride or a know, a memorable one?

Blake Smith (04:49.92)
So yeah, I have been to Pride twice, once in Paris in 2011 and then once in Chicago in like 2013, twenty fourteen. And in both cases it was like at the behest of someone who was not yet out, but who was like, you know, using Pride to sort of test what being gay would be like, which is a really weird I mean we'll we'll talk over the course of this episode about like the uses of Pride, like the things that Pride can be for. But it's it's really weird that like a sort of pseudo ethnic parade can be a way that someone might be figuring out, like, you know, do I like to suck dick? Or you know, one of them was a future lesbian, so, you know, eat box. Like what is what this, how will this give me information about what my life might be like?

David Sessions (05:40.346)
Yeah, because I I I mean I guess it maybe if you're if you're like already thinking about it, like personally, like especially early in my marriage when I was like closeted, you know, I kind of stayed inside the w that weekend. Like I did not want to go around Christopher Street like at that or the the village at that time. Yeah. But it did yeah, I guess it did kind of have a this photo that I sent you of myself, which that was like five years ago, which was kind of like the anniversary of when I came out.

Blake Smith (05:56.482)
Yeah.

David Sessions (06:09.814)
And that was

I we ca we probably have to, but I don't want to. I'm so I have you can see the the crisis has already begun. I have also I gotta tell the story, but the crisis has already begun. I have this like awful bl bleach blonde hair and my like dark roots are growing out. I just I look so ugly to myself in retrospect.

Blake Smith (06:31.33)
When I got divorced and moved back to the US, I asked my the guy who cuts my hair, like if he would dye my hair blonde. And he was like, You you can do that, but I won't do it for you. And that was right. That was the right decision.

David Sessions (06:46.124)
well, I did my own, which is partly why it was so bad. Well, actually I had done it a few times by then, so I had gotten like better at it where it didn't look so horrible. But but anyway, that was you know, that was five years ago. I was still married at the time and my wife and I had gone out to dinner that night. It was like June nineteenth, I think. And we had gone out to dinner in the South End, which is the, you know, historic it's not so much the Boston Gaborhood anymore, but it it kind of used to be.

Blake Smith (07:04.718)
June team.

David Sessions (07:13.318)
And we would like gotten a little tipsy and we were like roaming around, you know, taking photos of each other and having fun. And we saw the, you know, there was this wall where there was like a ch a huge Pride flag. And at this point we had already been we had already been talking about it. She already knew we were kind of like figuring out like what we were gonna do. And I was kind of I was probably still I think at this point I thought we were gonna stay together somehow. I was kind of

blocking it out, but I was also feeling this like oncoming, you know, vertiginous excitement. So I think like looking back at those photos, like I look very happy, I think.

Blake Smith (07:47.434)
that's a right, that's a much w I don't I have I have no photos or even particular memories of my two prize except like you know, like here's the lesbian mothers against whatever, here's here in Chicago it was like a lot of aldermen and bang.

David Sessions (08:02.574)
But anyway, like y years later she was like, You never forget that I took my I took your first Pride photo.

Blake Smith (08:09.518)
Truly where where would gays be without women? You know, I was I was called out for being a monstrous misogynist in some comment to our last episode. But I you know, love women. Thanks women. Thanks for taking us to Pride, thanks for taking us to prom, thanks for giving birth.

David Sessions (08:25.24)
to us. Thanks for yeah, thanks for being our partners for many years in my case.

Blake Smith (08:30.128)
Ha ha ha.

David Sessions (08:32.614)
I no, I really no, that was a very s a sweet moment because she knew like at that you know, she she knew like more than I did that it was, you know, probably over and she was still like, you know, wanted to do that for me or like encouraged me to like I think she encouraged me to do it, to take those photos. So and she is now married to a woman. So now we are both Pride goers.

Blake Smith (08:54.904)
Well no man could replace, yeah. Is it is it like a bulldaggery woman or like what's the

David Sessions (09:00.272)
yeah, yeah. Her her wife is a f I think a former police officer.

Blake Smith (09:04.414)
great. I I love my college boyfriend's older sister is like a a butch in Arkansas, and she cleans up with late in life lesbians, you know, women who've been done wrong by men who are looking for like that masculine energy, but you know, with a vagina.

David Sessions (09:22.19)
Yeah. yeah, th I've there's been so many articles about that, like the last last few years.

Blake Smith (09:27.672)
Someone's someone's win like heteropessimism is working out for someone.

David Sessions (09:31.702)
Yeah, we're we're the w we're the winners of heteropessimism, I guess. Yeah, there there was this tweet t that's been going around the last couple of days and and I have some I have some tweets in front of me that I wanna read but and I'm not gonna remember this one exactly, but it's some straight guy that that was like, I started fucking guys because I just couldn't find people as as down to do it or it basically this guy saying like he's not really into dudes but he's so horny he just has to they're just so much easier to find and so so yeah, I guess

I guess het heteropessimism is you know, we've I've been publicly against heteropessimism, but I guess I guess maybe it's

Blake Smith (10:09.122)
I mean I went to liberal arts college, so like that tweet like that tweet has not been true of my life outside of liberal arts college, but it was true for those four years.

David Sessions (10:18.114)
But speaking of tweets, I I found some since mostly we criticize, make fun of the the stupid discourse. you know, as as is right and good. but when maybe when we see we shouldn't forget that there are people out there fighting the good fight, they're they're saying what we would say in the wilds of of social media relates to Pride discourse. So I wanted to I wanted to give a

Blake Smith (10:41.09)
For those of us who like myself are not on Twitter, like this is how I find out about the state of the

David Sessions (10:46.136)
Yes, I have to yeah, right. And I have to give you an occasional report about what's happening on Twitter. So I wanted to give a shout out to this guy. His name is Cory Jacobs. He Cory Jacob, he is @coreytimes on Twitter. And he is he has an OnlyFans, but I don't think he actually does porn. nevertheless he is, he's very handsome.

Blake Smith (11:05.166)
Yeah.

David Sessions (11:07.266)
He's very handsome and very hot, which as previously discussed, two different things. And he says here's some of the things that he says. "Not being able to find gay friends, because quote, everyone just wants to hook up with you is a skill issue. Sounds like something we would say. This one I thought was fun. There's 50 grams of protein and sucking uncut Latino cock." And then and then this and now we finally arrive at the point. So on May twenty seventh, before before Pride Month begins, he is trying to head off, he's trying to get in front of the in the inevitable incoming Pride discourse. He says, "I've seen way too much negative discourse about the gay community recently that I only want to highlight the best parts about being gay for Pride. What is everyone's favorite part about being gay / the gay community?" And of course, the only thing this did is bring out the miserable chuds.

Blake Smith (11:55.935)
Well, he was asking for them. Okay. He's he was chud baiting.

David Sessions (11:59.018)
So so one says, "It's always the shirtless persona gays getting on here with these fresh perspectives. Let's see how many real friends you have if you never show your body on social media." And then another one says, "Pride month is supposed to highlight the accomplishments of gay people and positivity to the world. Instead it's about people like you who only care about getting fit and fucking. I don't even go to Pride anymore because of it." So

Blake Smith (12:22.156)
I have to say I'm looking at his Instagram now and on the one hand he is a cutie patootie. On the other hand, he of course has many photos of himself at Barry's and even he had a regrettable blonde phase.

David Sessions (12:33.934)
Yeah, everyone's got, a everyone's had a regrettable blonde phase.

Blake Smith (12:37.088)
Well I didn't get to! Ryan wouldn't let me.

David Sessions (12:39.854)
But anyway anyway, Corey, we appreciate your efforts to make prize discourse better, even if it, you know, didn't quite work out.

Blake Smith (12:49.016)
Well, it makes you think, you know, if Andrew Holleran were 27 or whatever today, would he be like a WeHo queen with an OnlyFans tweeting instead of having these monthly columns? Probably not. Or would

David Sessions (13:02.964)
It's Or would he maybe be a chud or or maybe would he be in your would he be in their replies?

Blake Smith (13:09.57)
He might be a hater, might be a reply guy. I feel like Ed White has reply guy energy. Bruce Benderson, who I'm getting really into, who like I actually I've come around on, I think he's great. But he he feels like like all of the guys who pay hustlers, that has reply guy energy for me. Garth Greenwell, it's amazing that he's not.

David Sessions (13:27.478)
Ed White is like too like happy of a person, I feel like, to be a he's certainly couldn't be a chud. He could be a reply guy. He could be like a happy, like overenergetic reply guy, perhaps.

Blake Smith (13:37.56)
I also like the thing about insane Twitter people is like I want to imagine them as having miserable lives, but it only takes like fifteen minutes a day to be an insane Twitter person.

David Sessions (13:47.852)
Yeah, I mean it's also like really easy to get mad about stupid shit, you know, on if you if you're doing that, like there's why I don't like it. Like if you're if you're doing it often it's really easy to get mad and say stuff that you dumb stuff that you regret.

Blake Smith (14:02.698)
Never happened to me.

David Sessions (14:05.627)
I'm somewhat sad that I missed your Twitter era.

Blake Smith (14:09.194)
Yeah, it was not I mean, that it was COVID, it was lockdown, it was not a good, I should have just gotten like a blonde job and done online sex work.

David Sessions (14:17.75)
Yeah, I was I was not doing well on Twitter in 2020 either, which actually is kind of you know, is kind of my political crisis as well as my my sexual crisis, which kinda relates to maybe the the politics part we're gonna talk about. Do you wanna talk tell us what we're talking about?

Blake Smith (14:31.792)
Okay, do we want to set up

Sure, okay, so November 1984. Andrew Holleran's "We Must March, My Darlings," which is unfortunately titled within the magazine as "Queer Day," which I I assume that he did not choose this. That's it's a very stupid. Like, you were in journalism. Like what what's the name of, like when they changed the title inside the magazine, does this have a name?

David Sessions (15:00.502)
I don't know. It probably does. Like I never I never really worked in print magazines, so it's so I'm not sure. So the title "Queer Day," which is what's inside the magazine, refers to a quote that's in the article. I guess they're more, so like the cover and the table of contents are more like modern headlines like clickbait where you they have to be like enticing, like have to kind of like

Blake Smith (15:22.742)
Yeah at this but at at this point, once I see "Queer Day," I'm already you know, I've already decided to read it.

David Sessions (15:28.342)
Yeah, so it's they have to kind of tell you what you're reading or make you want to turn to it. And then once you get there it could be like So this also this design, this this is when design-wise they kind of shift from imitating the New Yorker to to imitating New York magazine. So New York magazine's front of the book looks exactly like this at the time.

Blake Smith (15:49.014)
This is a really good point. 'Cause like in the early eighties, like they do a couple of things to like experiment with, I guess, saving money and maybe getting more readership, but like they moved to like cheapo not quite newsprint, but like cheap rough print, like for like eighty two, eighty three. And now they're like back to glossy paper. But yeah, like I I could tell the format was different, but I didn't have New York magazine in my head. So that's

David Sessions (16:11.67)
That th that is what it is. And the other yeah, I other question I had is like, Why does this run in November? Like why is it why?

Blake Smith (16:19.662)
Yeah. So and I don't know if this is like the team on this, but eighty-four, I feel like, is a low point for the magazine and is like the start of a decade-long decline. And this New York notebook, so this is like the name of Holleran's monthly column, even though many times the column is written from Northern Florida and is sometimes about northern Florida, so it's not always a New York notebook. But Holleran like commits to doing like a feature in in every magazine, even though if you look at his correspondence from 84, 85, which is at Yale's Beinecke Library, he has a lot of doubts about the magazine's future and about the direction that Ortleb is taking in, specifically about Ortleb's like insane AIDS conspiracy theories, which are like, besides being insane and maybe bad for everyone's health, are also driving readers away. So like subscription is declining. And Holleran I think like he he and Ethan Mordden, who has like a a sort of fiction serialized novel in the magazine, both talk with each other about thinking about quitting because the editorial team is nuts, but feel like if they quit, then the magazine might go under and they feel like it's really important that Christopher Street like exist as a venue. So I I feel like maybe I don't know if this is the story for like this Pride essay, but I feel like maybe Holleran was like had committed to providing something every month and then November rolls around and he's like, "Fuck, I don't have I don't have anything to say. What what I'll t I'll talk about Pride, even though like that's a summer topic"

David Sessions (18:01.272)
I was curious about yeah, I was curious about the kind of editorial process. Whose fault is it that it came out in November instead of you know

Blake Smith (18:08.14)
Right. I mean maybe he sent it to them earlier and like they sent out like we would have to go back and look like what did they run?

David Sessions (18:13.952)
Anyway, so we are so we have we have talked about we know we have talked about Andrew Holleran a lot. We've even talked about his column in Christopher Street in the previous episode in the "fast-food sex" episode. It was one of these. So we know we're doing Holleran again, but we chose this because it is we chose it just because it is about Pride and we wanted to talk about Pride. But it turns out that it is a quite interesting essay. It has a lot it has a lot in it that, you know...

Blake Smith (18:42.526)
And listeners, you'll you'll only get this essay here. I so David will be like putting it online on the Christopher Street Mag website, but it was not anthologized in Ground Zero, the collection of Holleran's AIDS writing from Christopher Street and New York Native, even though it is, as we'll see, a bit AIDS-y. And in in general, like a lot of Holleran's writing, you know, whether it's An Christopher Street.

New York Native and certainly in the Gay & Lesbian Review afterward. Like he has hundreds and hundreds of uncollected essays. and like you cannot find this online elsewhere. So we're doing a real community service.

David Sessions (19:21.872)
We are being historians. Historians and archivists.

Blake Smith (19:24.462)
So okay, do you wanna do you wanna situate like this this is in some way like Holleran's like personal history of Pride, like walking us through his his different feelings at different moments about this practice?

David Sessions (19:36.854)
Yeah. So it's kind of narratively it's kind of constructed as a Pride march from beginning to end. It's almost like a reverie, kind of the thoughts that are going through his head as he and he sort of tells you, Now we're on Fifth Avenue and now we're at this on this part of the route and the things that he's seeing and what they make him think about. And it's kind of, you know, Holler and often he does this in his fiction too. He kind of plays with time and like collapses time into

you know, where past and future kind of blend together and you aren't exactly sure like w you know, he he's he's covering an expanse of time in one scene and that's kind of what's happening here, I think. Would you say?

Blake Smith (20:18.028)
Yeah, yeah. I mean she so she she's a Proustian. And I hadn't thought actually until you said just now about the way that the essay is structured as a march. Like we are walking through we're walking through New York in a weird kind of present which keeps looping back into various past moments. And and truly part of part I think Holleran in some ways doesn't get the respect he deserves as a writer because his craft is so like buttery smooth. Like he he's so good at what he does that he makes you forget that he's doing something technically complicated. And that that is also very Proustian, right? It's like this almost effortless movement of a complicated time structure, but he just does it offhandedly as if it's no big deal.

David Sessions (21:00.184)
Yeah, and it's almost right. It's so it's so deftly done that it's almost imperceptible. I don't I don't think I even really noticed it until like the third time I read it. And although he does he ha has a bruised call out, he does kind of call out what he's doing by like referring to Proust.

Blake Smith (21:14.318)"
Should say also speaking of literary references, that "We must march, my darlings, is a nod to Whitman's "Pioneers", which is a poem from 1865 about settling the Western United States, which has some weird, like racist, imperialist stuff, but is sort of, except for that, well suited to a call to an exuberant kind of nationalism, to like a a community making. And is very camp and faggy. Like it's it's a very faggy line.

David Sessions (21:48.311)
For some reason I have in my head like the memory of hearing it aloud, like on a recording, and I don't know where that would have been from, but

Blake Smith (21:56.94)
Whitman speaking to you in your dreams. It's also very if you know the Pet Shop Boys' "Go West", it's very in that spirit. like somehow settling the west, settling the west, going to San Francisco.

David Sessions (22:07.15)
So my reference would be the mi the the Michael W. the Christian Michael W. Smith song "Go West Young Man", which is that's my childhood "go West" song.

Blake Smith (22:15.758)
What different what different journeys we've had. Okay, so..

David Sessions (22:20.408)
So similar and yet so different. He starts with he starts in his apartment. His roommate says to the cat. He wakes up. The roommate seems kind of like a I don't know, like like a like an earnest, uncomplicated person. he comes out of the kitchen, he says in the voice of Maggie Smith, "We must march, my darlings," to the cat.

Blake Smith (22:42.968)
So right I mean I was imagining the roommate as like you know, there's a real life friend who died a few years ago who was the inspiration for Sutherland, for various like queenie characters in the novels. So I don't know if like that was this person or like how we should imagine the line being read.

David Sessions (23:00.364)
Yeah. Well this person also says later he says, Dodd, my roommate would say breathlessly, "Don't you love being gay? The only thing I'd rather be today is a lesbian." So yeah, so he's very exuberant, it seems

Blake Smith (23:11.694)
Right. I read I read "I'd rather be a lesbian" as, you know, somewhat ironic, but I guess

David Sessions (23:16.462)
I suppose that's right. It has to be ironic because other otherwise I was like, "what gay man would say that?" But anyway, so Holleran has his usual kind of shut in, you know, socially anxious self, you know, hesitates at the door. The idea of walking out the door into a crowd is like overwhelms him, so he hesitates inside the door and then goes out. Or no, he says that's what he usually does, but

Blake Smith (23:19.692)
The music and the fashion.

David Sessions (23:43.828)
on Pride Sunday, however, you know, he doesn't have that problem. He is like excited to to go out. And then he talks about it sounds like the march is kind of like going by like outside his door and he just kind of files in like a car like entering the freeway.

Blake Smith (23:59.682)
I love the line early on. "I marched for no particular political purpose. I marched because it was fun. I got to see my friends and enjoy the slight feeling of moral superiority which came from thinking about all the friends on Fire Island who had not come in for the march," which is how I feel whenever I do anything minimally political. I mean I don't like vote or anything, but like ten years ago I gave money to Bernie Sanders and I was eating out on the moral high from that for years, like years and years, like it's okay that I write for Tablet, it's okay that I'm like, you know, doing whatever evil thing. Listen, I gave money to Bernie Sanders! And I think now that that credit has exhausted itself, but it felt great.

David Sessions (24:40.072)
I campaigned for Bernie Sanders in the ice and snow in February in New Hampshire, so I'm not impressed.

Blake Smith (24:45.887)
Did he win New Hampshire?

David Sessions (24:48.206)
Did he? I think he did actually.

Blake Smith (24:52.232)
Time, memory, funny things.

David Sessions (24:54.348)
Yeah, all all all of that relates to my to my Pride Month crisis that led to me coming out. So like time will reveal in a Proustian fashion

Blake Smith (25:03.074)
Bernie Sanders made me gay, the David Sessions story.

David Sessions (25:05.87)
Bernie Sanders losing made me gay.

Blake Smith (25:09.518)
Okay, so once he's in the parade, one thing that we noticed, which is strange and we need to do some further research on for a future episode, Hollorin is disappointed that there aren't floats and he's wishing for a nine-foot penis composed entirely of gladiolas, or a handsome man in chains, a handsome man leading in chains, a string of his tricks. And you know, this this this made one wonder, well, when did the Pride float start? Because that's like a hideous Pride float is crucial to the community's self-perpetuation.

David Sessions (25:41.379)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. That is a good question. I was yeah, that was my when I read it I was like, Wait, what? There's always floats of Pride.

Blake Smith (25:49.43)
I feel like I've seen photos from the 70s where like Quentin Crisp is in a little car, you know, waving faggily at people. I don't know if that's a float.

David Sessions (25:56.858)
Yeah, especially by eighty five like this is eighty four. so yeah, I mean I'm pretty sure the first one the first Pride Parade's 1970, it's you know, a year after the Stonewall riots. And I'm pretty sure that one, you know, I think the first few were probably just marches and people kind of grouped together with their you know, their affinity groups and but yeah, I would think maybe by the mid eighties they would have already had floats.

Blake Smith (26:20.824)
So I should say, yeah, this essay from eighty force it starts with a kind of hazy, unspecified, timeless Pride, which is taking place i in in the seven what he calls the thoughtless seventies. But like when exactly that is Holland, I guess, moves to the city in the early seventies and then is like working as a cater waiter in Manhattan while he's writing Dancer from the Dance. But like when this non-specified Pride that he's remembering is taking place

And and one thing that is like exciting about like this essay in particular, and then I think about like reading Christopher Street from the late seventies, early eighties in general, is that you get to see how one one's own contemporary feelings are actually like fifty years old, right? That like Hollerman is already like, Well, I guess I have to go to Pride and then feeling better than the people who didn't bother to go into Pride. But he's mostly there just to see his friends. He he talks a little bit later in the essay about how like

The really important question with Pride is are we gonna go to dinner at the Faroe Grumleys, these these friends of his afterward? Like what are we gonna what are we gonna do for the after? Like that's and these are these are all already very like, you know, our experience in like the twenty tens, twenty twenties. These are these are like people are already having fifty years ago the kind of Pride fatigue or Pride indifference that we might be feeling now.

David Sessions (27:28.248)
Yeah.

David Sessions (27:44.428)
Yeah. I I did it did kind of make me wish that that you could just walk in the parade, like as a gay person, like that you could just you know, if you wanted to, that you could just that it or or that that was more of a tradition of everyone just walking the parade route instead of watching the, you know, Amazon and, you know, ray theology.

Blake Smith (28:02.548)
Yeah, like what's I wonder what's the history of that? Because like Holleran's description is is very much of like, you know, just stepping out from the sidewalk into the street, like crossing, as he says, the invisible line that separated spectator from marcher. Whereas like the Prides that I've been to

David Sessions (28:18.156)
Right. They are barricades and you have, you know, you have to register for it, you have to be with somebody or on a float. Yeah, yeah, totally.

Blake Smith (28:25.358)
So right, when when is there afloat? When is

David Sessions (28:27.926)
Maybe I mean maybe this is a product of the corporatization of pri the the much

Blake Smith (28:33.708)
Much room. And we'll have to talk about this. Of course you don't want peop once you have the floats, you don't want people to get run over by them. So you have to perhaps be a little more careful.

David Sessions (28:44.044)
Maybe this is just like modern security, you know, kind of asserting itself. Like it becomes a big enough thing. But I I I'm sure there weren't four million tourists in nineteen eighty four.

Blake Smith (28:55.596)
Right, so th I mean there's a very strong feeling that like, right, I mean the only people who would be showing up for this I I don't know, are there well intentioned, straight people on this essay? I don't think yet.

David Sessions (29:04.406)
I think yeah, he I think there's I think they're described as watching, you know, supportive people on the sidelines.

Blake Smith (29:11.918)
But there's th there's I I don't think there's like a P flag contingent in the March. But okay, you you you had framed this in a discussion with me earlier as like a kind of normie gay's take on Pride, that this is the sort of gay every man. So maybe you could expound on that.

David Sessions (29:28.29)
So I guess the f on my first read I was like I was kind of surprised how anti I said I think I said into Blake that it was anti political. It was like which I guess shouldn't really surprise us you know, knowing Hall and like his the way that he wrote. Like he was never you know, he never seemed like someone who was, you know, an an activist or a you know, an a a r a radical left leftist of any kind. And yes, someone who's like somewhat

oblivious to the world. Like there's a few like stray political comments in some of his novels that are like, no, this person knows nothing about politics. So that I guess that surprised me again being in eighty four when it, you know, was the AIDS crisis happening, or the way that he's he's pretty dismissive of gay politics of trying to pass like, you know, anti discrimination ordinances or whatever, you know, whatever legislation the gay political movement is focusing on at that

particular moment. So that struck me first. And then when I read it again, I saw kind of how there was I th I think maybe I just skimmed, but it kind of is this this shifting mood, you know, this series of moods about politics are about kind of about Pride, about the so there is, first of all, there's a kind of just joy and you know experience of happiness in just being around other people, of you know, walking, presenting oneself with other gay people, with friends.

running into people that you only see at Pride. That's always, you know, you know, I I enjoy that too. Like I I always see people that I no don't see anywhere else. And so so there's that. You know, he starts out from a kind of positive place, positive feelings about it. He has some various thoughts about, as all Pride designs do, about who the media fo who in the parade that the media focuses on and who they actually should focus on. Right.

Blake Smith (31:13.772)
So there there there's a line The evening news always shows a dusty, hoarse, excited, brawless woman with aviator glasses, an afro, and a blue chambray work shirt, and we were offended. Why show the militants? Why not us? For that was the extent of my politics.

David Sessions (31:31.446)
Yeah, so like that yeah, that was the extent of my politics. The march was essentially a chance to show the folks in Kew Gardens in Kansas that we were thousands of us who looked like just like them, ordinary to a fault. so yeah, so there's this kind of there's this kind of sense of that Pride is not super political. Like he's you know, one participates in it because it's what one does. It's like what's w you know, part of our, you know, c it's a community ritual and it's

Not necessarily one's kind of ambivalent about it, not sure exactly what it's for, you know, it's kinda fun, kinda corny, kinda

Blake Smith (32:04.92)
Mate pushes you into doing it, you're sort of dragged along.

David Sessions (32:08.43)
And then he says quite a bit that is expresses alienation, as I said, from politics. So he says, Most of us didn't care if the gay rights bill on which homosexual politicians seemed to stake everything, our status in society, our fortunes, our fate, passed. I wasn't even sure that the b bill mattered or would make life any different for me if it did pass. It had something to do with landlords, employers, public places. It was what blacks had obtained because they were black.

It was the sole concern of the leftovers of the movement who went down to City Hall each year, like swallows to the Capistrano, and engaged in another shouting match with the horrendous Hasidim of Brooklyn and the prim Irish Catholics from Queens who had no lips. So

Blake Smith (32:49.644)
I love Hollerin on ethnic groups. I mean he's he's one of like our great writers of ethnicity. 'Cause I you know, I can imagine him like having grown up in Aruba, like getting to discover like United Statesian ethnic types. Like it must have all been very exciting to learn about Jews and Irish and such.

David Sessions (33:07.748)
that's true. I forget that I forget that he grew up in Aruba.

Blake Smith (33:10.326)
Yeah, yeah. He grew up with like a mammy, which is part of why he's weird about black people. But where was this going? But one thing, okay, that Hollering was so real for is like in the 70s, like I forget what year in the 80s finally there was the anti-discrimination like municipal bill passed in in New York City. But like it was like 15 years that yeah, the leftovers of the GLF, GAA were fighting every year to try to get an anti-discrimination bill for gays passed.

And couldn't do it. And yeah, I think for like a lot of gay people in New York, it felt so pathetic and sad and annoying to be losing all the time. And one register of this is like, you know, there's a very cutting moment in Angels in America, where, you know, Tony Kushner has Roy Cohn saying, like, I'm not a homosexual. I'm a man who sleeps with other men. What's a homosexual? A homosexual is someone who can't get a fucking anti discrimination bill passed in a city.

David Sessions (34:07.333)
wow, ouch.

Blake Smith (34:09.473)
Yeah. And like, you know, like imagine if we had like kept losing on gay marriage, like

David Sessions (34:14.304)
It feels like the movement has fizzled out and they're just trying to make it happen and it's you know not

Blake Smith (34:19.69)
Yeah, and and like, you know, the spectacle of your team losing every single year, you know, like of course it makes sense to ask at a certain point, like, does this even affect my life? Can't I just enjoy myself? But there's Anita Bryant.

David Sessions (34:31.883)
Yeah. And so as he goes along, like as he continues to march and continues to think, he talks about kind of how the you know, maybe sometimes he not that not really that into politics, doesn't think of Pride as something super political, but there are these moments where due to what's happening in the country, it starts to feel political or starts to feel important in a distinctive way. So one of those is the Anita Bryant campaign in the late seventies that we've referred to a few times, just to review. It was called Save Our Children. It was like

kind of backlash to anti discrimination ordinances that started in Florida. They it was it was also a crusade against gay teachers, calling them groomers, and eventually made its way to California. So it would they try and they kind of tried to export it Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell around the country. And and that and one of the Lil the the historian Lillian Faderman, who wrote the book, I think it's called The Gay Revolution, she argues that like Anita Bryant actually created a lot of, or galvanized a lot of gay activism like around these issues kind of in that moment after the GLF, that that kind of before that, gay people kind of really didn't have much of a, maybe kind of like Holleran saying, like they didn't really believe that they could accomplish anything politically, or just the idea of like gays coming together and acting as a political unit was just inconceivable and them getting shellacked by Anita Bryant in Miami kind of galvanized everyone to fight back.

Blake Smith (36:01.312)
Well, and you know, we talked in the most recent episode or two episodes ago about cruising and Charles Ortleb's response to his his over the top response to the movie Cruising is in a way a response to a perceived threat coming out of Anita Bryant, the rise of the right. And as Holleran says, her threat was real, Anita Bryant's, but after she faded away the political program that is of of gays responding to it.

Seemed once again both hysterical and vague at the same time. And one thing that I love about Holler and he's so diplomatic, he's so vague. Because who does he mean here? Who's hysterical and vague? Well, surely Charles Ortleb, like, you know, you're in fact very close to the person who's being like totally insane about what's happening. And yeah, like something that's interesting about Holleran thinking about like it's good to have Pride around, even though it's mostly boring.

And of course, like most of my friends don't really want to participate, and I'm only participating because my roommate dragged me along. But it's useful to have when Anita Bryant seems threatening. And then he says a little later, it's useful now again in the early eighties, as you know, AIDS is happening, as people like Pat Robertson are gaining power. And it's useful because question mark like, is it that maybe kind of doubly Pride is somehow addressed to other gay people?

To show them that we exist, and maybe that, you know, as as he says earlier on, like that we're normal, that like, you know, you can see normal looking people and imagine a life for yourself, on the basis of like the media about Pride? Or is it to show, as he says, to show the teen thug in Kansas or in Brooklyn, who might otherwise consider homosexuals fags to be bashed, that we were numerous, unafraid, et cetera, et cetera. So is it like

Who like who is Pride addressed to? Is it addressed to like our friends who we get to see once a year? Is it addressed to like potential gay people out there? Is it addressed to our enemies? to show them that there are a lot of us. And somehow all of these things, although those are like different messages and different audiences.

David Sessions (38:16.428)
Yeah, that's what I thought was really interesting about this is kind of that it's I guess I've always felt kind of ambivalent about like what you know, what is Pride actually, what is it supposed to be, and to see that this was that people are all already felt this decades ago. And that and also that it had these kind of, or could have these multiple overlapping meanings, you know, at the same time.

Blake Smith (38:39.374)
Well and and I feel like this is part of the the value of going back to these texts where in some way Holleran is saying something that like you see in like contemporary Pride discourse that people are so exhausted by but also participating in. And I mean I I kind of love that yeah, this like Corey Jacob OnlyFans whore that he's like participating in the Pride Discourse by anticipatorily like staking out some like

You know, don't even say this. I already know that you're going to say this because it comes around every year. Like we know the shape of it. But that like we're very used to debates about what Pride is or should be. Like it's political or it's for families, like a normal people, or no, it's like for fetish stuff and like people fucking each other on the float. But I think Holleran like usefully avoids a kind of like ontology of Pride. Like he's not saying like what Pride is.

But he's thinking about how, like, given like this year's political conditions, who is Pride addressed to? Or like who are we trying to talk to? So, like, yeah, maybe at a certain moment in the 70s, it's really just for our friends, but maybe at another moment it's to send a message to Anita Bryant, or it's to send a message to Pat Robertson. like I I I like the idea that you know this is a a practice that we're keeping around every year so that we can use it in different ways.

David Sessions (40:02.71)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, which can seem a little bit it can seem a little bit non-political, but it's not exactly like, or it's not really. It doesn't say that Pride is not a protest, but it's it's more like Pride is not not a protest. Like it's it could be if it needs to be. It could be, you know, it's something that is there that that has latent solidarity or latent kind of collective power, but maybe it always it it isn't always clear, you know, what that's for or what that should be directed at. And he's also skeptical of a kind of hectoring effort to insist that it always must be some kind of stridently political affair, which is I think is kind of the the rhetoric we've heard, you know, it's you faded somewhat, but like the the rhetoric of the last few years.

Blake Smith (40:47.288)
Well, right. I mean there there was certainly a moment where the dusty horse excited braless woman with aviator glasses and an afro I mean, do you remember the two the two black women who would like commandeer the Bernie Sanders like 2020? like he you know, he'd be giving a speech and they would like rush the stage and and yell into the microphone. Do you remember?

David Sessions (41:08.91)
I don't I don't know how I don't remember that, but I should.

Blake Smith (41:12.662)
I'll have to upload some memes. But I feel like we heard a lot from that woman in the chambray shirt for a couple of years about how Pride was a riot, but how Pride was something that drag queens and, you know, gender creative people invented. And that is not certainly Holleran's, like Marsha P. Johnson does not appear in this text.

David Sessions (41:31.052)
Yeah, he says so I wanted to read that quote 'cause I thought it was... "And by the time we reached the park we were always bored and exhausted. And the tinny voice haranguing us from a distant stage through the huge cloud of yellow dust was politics itself. Irrelevant, hysterical, irritating. The question was not whether to pass a bill but whether to go to the Ferro-Grumleys' drinks." That's, you know, the quote that you have already mentioned.

Blake Smith (41:54.658)
That's I mean, that's a great tricolon crescens, like that triad. and true, like I don't know if you've walked past I'm sure there have been many No Kings rallies in Boston. I have accidentally gotten caught up in a couple in Chicago and you hear someone on a megaphone far away bum bum you know, and that's politics.

David Sessions (41:59.638)
Yeah, it's true.

David Sessions (42:15.95)
Well it also i it's kind of this idea of like politics haranguing us kind of constantly from the distance, I think is something that contemporary people relate to. Like this this perpetual interpellation to be political or you know, I think this is died. I can think that that was like the era that that Anton Yeager calls hyperpolitics and I think it's kind of at least in its most extreme form, has passed, even though that kind of

ambiently political or ambiently like discursively conflictual, you know, atmosphere is obviously still around. It's like what we talk about half the time.

Blake Smith (42:51.766)
And and Holleran is like an extremely unpolemical person. Like I mean you you see flashes of a certain conservatism here and there. and I mean he has some like funny like okay, so I dream of a collected Holleran essays book, which would be like a thousand pages long, but we don't need, for instance, his comments in the GLR about Black Lives Matter. Like those can those can, you know, be consigned to the dustbin of history.

David Sessions (43:00.404)
yeah.

David Sessions (43:19.886)
Does that is that a thing that exists or are you just making it up?

Blake Smith (43:23.008)
No, no, that's a thing that exists. Like he he was, you know, it's like I mean he doesn't he doesn't approve of the help yelling at him. But it was discovered. But I do think actually that he's like a really deeply political writer. And I think in fact that he's like a much more committed political writer than many of the other people, like in The Violet Quill or even in in the sort of broader Christopher Street scene, than someone like Ed White. So the fact that Holleran continues to writefor Christopher Street, like during this period. So like, you know, Ed White decamps to Europe, right? Like when AIDS starts in New York, like he he leaves and had already started trying to create a career for himself as a more kind of general intellectual. But Holleran is really committed to being like a gay writer and to helping keep Christopher Street afloat, even though he has like real discomfort with what Ortleb is doing. And I can I don't know if you know people would be interested like in the in the show notes, but like the letters are are there in the Yale archive where he's like everyone is going crazy and I have real doubts about like what the magazine is doing. But if we lose it, we lose this crucial venue for developing a gay literature. And like in in much of what Holleran writes and publishes, like even he had a a thing in the last issue of the GLR reflecting on fifty years since the first issue of Christopher Street.

Where he was very like weirdly dismissive and almost like excessively humble about like the role that the magazine and he had played in gay history and like the value of all of this. So if you just look at like what he's published, he can seem to be, I don't know, kind of self-mocking or indifferent. But then if if you look at his correspondence and think about what he chose to do with his life, he's really committed to a certain kind of gay cultural politics. And

This is may I may be the only person in the world who think this. But if you look at the penultimate page of Dancer from the Dance, there's to me like one of the most beautiful scenes in how yes, the penultimate paragraph.

David Sessions (45:32.91)
I remember there being a Pride march at the end, but I don't remember exactly what he says.

Blake Smith (45:37.154)
Yeah, and and so the the whole novel has been this kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, like romantic, doomed quest for love that ends with Malone's maybe suicide question mark, him going out like, you know, into the Long Island Sound in a kind of update of like the green light at the end of Fred Gatsby. But then the one of the correspondents in the epistolary exchange that frames this novel within the novel writes to the other: "And even so, do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? So, like all these people who were obsessed with Malone and who are like partying all the time, like that day we marched to Central Park and found ourselves in a sea of humanity. How stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces.

David Sessions (46:19.79)
Mm.

Blake Smith (46:30.86)
Of course, our friends were all at the beach. They couldn't be bothered to come in and make a political statement." So I mean this is this is like sort of reflecting back to the structure of the essay. We're like, yeah, most of Holleran's friends are at the beach party. "I used to say there were only seventeen homosexuals in New York and we knew every one of them. But there were tons of men in that city who weren't on the circuit, who didn't dance, didn't cruise, didn't fall in love with Malone, who stayed home and went to the country in the summer. We never saw them. We were addicted to something else, something I lived with so long it had become a technique, a routine, that was the real sin." And I feel like the the way that politics appears just for one second in the novel as a kind of indictment of these characters is way more powerful than if Holleran had written something that was like screamingly political. Yeah, I mean he could have been Larry Kramer.

David Sessions (47:18.516)
Shrill and yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

David Sessions (47:23.436)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. And and the way that that that novel kind of kind of like this essay like reads so there's so many read possible readings of it. There are so like it reads in so many different ways or it it seems to both because it appears to be a somewhat of a celebration or a romanticization of that world and yet it has this kind of very sharp critique of it that, you know, has even a political note there at the end.

Blake Smith (47:49.704)
so what do we how do we move into the contemporary? Are there lessons for today?

David Sessions (47:54.444)
Well, I think the you know, one reason I wanted to talk about this or do this subject was it's kind of, you know, Pride is kind of a focal point for I don't know, the only real debates that we have about gay politics, if s if such a thing can be even said to exist anymore. And I think the like the last the last few years there has been especially in especially since twenty twenty, it was like a year of protest and, you know, social unrest and that

Created this or galvanized this narrative of you know Pride is supposed to be radical. And this and this was, of course, this had had been around before, but this is not it was not a new thing. Pride has to get back in touch with its radical liberationist roots. You know, everything is corporate Pride, and it's the fault of the assimilationist cis white gays who turned you know gay rights into just neoliberalism and gay marriage. And some of all of that has kind of

Blake Smith (48:38.262)
You have to burn down a Wendy's.

David Sessions (48:52.984)
come back in the in the last few years. And I think probably for the average person, there's maybe this sense of, you know, the people who would be talking about corporate Pride on social media or just using the term, the buzzword at least, that maybe that's something a little bit alienating or unsatisfying about Pride being just corporate floats that makes us kind of wonder, we know, what is it really for? Like, is it really for us anymore? And then

You know, corporate that corporate Pride is a bit distinct from rainbow capitalism, but they kind of get mixed together, and that's more like Target selling rainbow shirts or, you know, Target having a Pride section. they'd had a massive Pride section around, you know, 2019, 2020.

Blake Smith (49:36.374)
cut down. We're we're very sad. They still have the dog bandanas, but it's not not the same quality merch.

David Sessions (49:43.886)
So interesting. I think people are just. I think the reason this is confusing is that we're sort of told that Pride is a protest, Pride is supposed to be political, Stonewall was a riot, and then we go to it and it's that. And there there is no real I don't think it's clear to anybody, especially especially to gay men. Like there's there's no gay male, particularly gay gay male politics anymore. And so I think it's that the sense of ambiguity and like that's why, you know, that I have felt as well. And I think so I came to the reason I kept referring to Bernie Sanders in my own political development is that it was, you know, kind of all that happened at the same time. My like, you know, Bernie losing my like disenchantment with, you know, being a left intellectual, not necessarily with what I believed, but, you know, coming to feel like I had tried to be I had been posturing or I had tried to I tried to make myself believe in an ideology that didn't quite fit with reality or didn't didn't you know it was more about me and my intellectual performance and my essays than it was about how the world really is. And so coming to gay stuff, like I had literally never thought about identity politics except to criticize it from a universalist Marxist perspective as as not materialist and neoliberal and things something like that. So this was a

Blake Smith (51:07.31)
Sometimes neoliberal things can be fun. Like, you ever been to a Sweetgreen? Yeah.

David Sessions (51:11.714)
Yeah, Sweetgreen's kinda bland.

Blake Smith (51:14.102)
I love a Sweetgreen, I love a Blue Bottle. I love some neoliberal slop. So I mean I you know, we're we're arguing that identity politics isn't necessarily neoliberal, but also there's some good neoliberal stuff.

David Sessions (51:26.584)
I mean honestly, yeah. Certain parts of neoliberalism go pretty hard.

Blake Smith (51:33.026)
That's, we should we should make our neoliberal playlist for summer

David Sessions (51:37.934)
What would be what would be on that?

Blake Smith (51:41.824)
Well, yeah, like our favorite Sweetgreen order, you know, with like the peaches and then goat cheese. I or maybe your a Just Salads girl. Is it's I feel like Tatte, Tatte is very

David Sessions (51:49.134)
I like Cava a lot.

David Sessions (51:55.014)
yeah, Tatte is, do you have that in Chicago?

Blake Smith (51:58.166)
We don't. No. That's because Chicago is not a real place. No. It's it's a total like East Coast, if you're not on the Acela, you're not getting Tatte. Right.

David Sessions (52:07.84)
it. I think it started in Boston, though. But anyway, I was just saying like this kind of it's genuinely ambiguous. Like people are not quite sure like what Pride is supposed to be political for, especially not, you know, what is what is radical gay liberation. And this is why this is why I find as some as someone who had been a leftist or been, you know, a left presented myself as a left intellectual. It would have been very easy for me to just slot straight into that radical

Blake Smith (52:10.238)
Where Mrs. Country.

David Sessions (52:36.654)
Pride critique or that critique of assimilationism, it would have, you know, it harmonized quite well with my previous politics. But I just found it so I found it so stale and performative, like this nostalgic posturing of of everything the gay rights movement achieved was somehow unimportant and somehow a betrayal that doesn't even apply to most gay people. And what exactly are we supposed to do with that? You know, what I was like, okay, so what do we do instead? What should we have done instead?And I think it's it that's an example of this broader thing that left us do, where it's kind of they're used to being losers. They like losing, they like being kind of beautiful losers.

Blake Smith (53:16.998)
And if you look at like even even from the mid seventies stuff that Dennis Altman and Martin Duberman write up to today, they're kind of potted histories of gay rights, for them like as soon as the GLF is over in like seventy two, like already the gay activist alliance when it splits from the GLF is a betrayal and then everything after the

David Sessions (53:40.322)
Pause for a second. So for listeners' footnotes, the the GLF is a Gay Liberation Front, it's this radical left, gay left group, the first one that emerges after Stonewall. It only lasts a few years 'cause it's, you know, a clusterfuck. And then some of the people in it start the Gay Gay Activists Alliance, which is more focused on specifically gay issues. But the people who started it, a lot of them were in the GLF. You know, they had quite radical politics themselves. They just wanted to be more organized and effective instead.

Blake Smith (54:11.052)
Well, and like the GLF was like, you know, we have to overthrow American hetero patriarchal capitalist imperialism. and like gay liberation means like not so much getting a rights bill passed, which was already a heavy lift, like they couldn't do it in the seventies, but it means like, you know, abolishing Amerikkka with three Ks. You know, you can see why people like Holleran be put off by that. And you know, one thing that's comforting is like

David Sessions (54:18.412)
Yes.

David Sessions (54:32.044)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Blake Smith (54:40.896)
Even though like the corporatization of Pride, like that's a sort of last twenty, twenty-five years thing, right? Like that wasn't at all on the horizon when when Holleran like didn't even have floats when Holleran was writing, but that already in the mid to late 70s, he could be thinking like, I'm sort of torn between there's these crazy leftover activists who like have never won anything, who are trying to say like Pride should be really intensely political in this way.

And like their agenda is never gonna get passed and like they're you know they're shrill and annoying. And then there's my sort of feeling of a social obligation, like, I guess one ought to be you know keeping Pride alive, one ought to be stepping out. Yeah. And I I think this is like the way that most gay guys probably have felt every year since 1974. So it's it it's kind of reassuring to know that although many things have changed.

That sense that like, there's the crazy lady in the chambray shirt with a megaphone, but I guess nevertheless I will step out into the street.

David Sessions (55:43.874)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we want to talk about the you know, the the Pride is a Protest discourses, or have we said enough about that?

Blake Smith (55:52.248)
Do I do I have a thought like

David Sessions (55:54.536)
Okay, wait. Let me read let me read the one that I maybe we could react to that. I found the the most twenty twenty Pride take that you can find. It kind of has, I said to like it has everything on the bingo card. It has you know, I couldn't have made one up better. so this is Carmen Maria Machado, the writer who is a she's famous for her memoir "In the Dream House", New York Times, 2020. "Pride was a protest. Many people have said it. And they are a right. It began as a police riot, violence against queer bodies, the bravery of activists like Sylvia Rivera and Marcia P. Johnson, and it has since lost its way. Jose Esteban Munoz, a queer Latinx academic, called queerness that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. If only the queer community's most privileged citizens, white queers, cisqueers, saw their queerness as a call as the call to action it has always been."

Blake Smith (56:51.182)
Yeah, I mean this this is many things in a nutshell. For one, it's like classic queer of color, like whiny loser. Like it imagining like some white cis gay who has all the agency, who is like the agent of history. And I mean speaking of yeah, the left being addicted to losing, like, you know, it used to be that the whole point of like being a Marxist, for instance, is to imagine that the contemporary order is rotten and and is fated to destruction. And like one is on the side of the heroic new class that will sweep everything away. "Du passé faisons tabla rasa." Instead, now, like, you know, if you're on the left, it's like, I am a pitiful loser. White guy, why don't you do something? Like how how and and how is this like the new you know, the New York Times, which at the moment of our recording, just a few days ago, had

They changed the title, but the original title was something like "It's great being straight right now."

David Sessions (57:52.554)
This is the the Magdalene Taylor article that like, it's basically about Phoebe's book or kind of like

Blake Smith (57:59.468)
Yeah, yeah. So they they scooped Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who we love, who we'll be talking to soon. We love you, Phoebe. but they scooped her book and then they gave her this like outrageous provocative clickbait title, which was like it's great to be straight. So like New York Times' own like swing between twenty twenty, where it was like kill the white gay man to like twenty twenty six, like also kill the white gay man, but for other reasons. like we we can't win.

David Sessions (58:25.454)
yeah, they also published I mean that's not really that's not really Pride maybe it was around Pride last year that Andrew Sullivan essay against trans rights.

Blake Smith (58:35.118)
yeah. Well, look look, critical solidarity on my part with Andrew Sullivan, who I think is like basically a moron, but I also don't want to have to see vagina at the bathhouse or whatever he's on about.

David Sessions (58:50.158)
Come on. No has a vagina at the bathhouse. That doesn't happen.

Blake Smith (58:51.934)
That's too big of a topic.

Blake Smith (58:58.054)
That it it he saw one! And it smelled! And it traumatized him and then he got a divorce. I don't know. I don't know.

David Sessions (59:02.683)
Is this real? You're ridculous.

Blake Smith (59:10.91)
But you actually had a conversation with him, with Andrew Sullivan. You found him charming?

David Sessions (59:13.132)
Yeah, I have. I've met him many times. And you he's he's very nice and he's always been very nice to me, is all I can say.

Blake Smith (59:20.674)
I think the tea is y'all were both probably high out of your mind at the beach in Provincetown.

David Sessions (59:25.226)
We were in fact. Yeah, we're

Blake Smith (59:29.664)
I wonder if his his being addicted to massive bong hits like may have had a role both in like the the notable paranoia of much of his writing over the past few years and also, yeah, the the tragic end of his gay marriage.

David Sessions (59:43.874)
But yeah, the I guess the last thing I would say about, you I don't want to belabor it, but the last thing I would say about this this very 2020, you know, Pride take is you know, that one still hears sort of the echoes of today, but not s not so much is you know, I'm all for talking about everyone who was involved in Stonewall and and you know, the queens and the trans women were definitely at Stonewall and so were the lesbians and like every every part of the rainbow was involved, which is one reason it's such a

It's such a cool event and cool story. And one reason it can be, you know, argued over so much is because no one knows exactly who did what. But the the broader effort of of almost every like radical leftist you know, Pride take haver is trying to impose on that this kind of simplistic morality tale of there were the assimilationists and the radicals, and if they had just this is what I was saying about kind of leftists being like if

Everything was always in our control and it was in in control of the bad people. And if the bad people, if the bad cis white gays had just done it differently, or if the other faction of leftists that I don't like had not been in charge and made ideological mistakes, if they had had my correct ideology, then history would have turned out differently. When I think what's actually interesting is to see the messiness of that history and to, you know, really feel what it felt like to be any kind of

queer person at the time. Like the you know, that's what stuck out to me kind of reading about Stonewall again is just how bad it was. Like it wasn't like this was all normal politics and we we decided to just do a a moderate centrist, you know, nondiscrimination bill. No, this was like this was a police state. Like people were being surveilled and trapped like on a daily basis, like in the places they went, the places there was literally nowhere that they could go to live without being

Followed, arrested, spied on by the police. Like this is these were massive police apparatuses that were well in hard especially gay men, but about everyone.

Blake Smith (01:01:51.394)
The the successful end game for resisting that, right? Like you if if you successfully resist, like, you know, a horrible oppressive state, then like the future versions of you, your like real or spiritual descendants, will be normal basic bitches, right? Like they won't be interesting, marginal, radical people with like crazy politics who are out in the street burning things down. Like they will be basic.

And that's what we're fighting for, right? Like that's what we want. Like it's great that like now there can be so many basic gay guys. Like that's that's what you know, they didn't know they were fighting for that in 1969, but that's what they were fighting for. In the same way that like, you know, every oppressed group of people throughout history, like, you know, if they if they could have known at Auschwitz that there would be like boring Jews in the suburbs of New Jersey or whatever, how thankful they would have been. What a relief, right?

David Sessions (01:02:48.846)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. We want to the good outcome of politics is people not having to be political or people having I think or politics not being so you know, yeah, the possibility of being basic and

Blake Smith (01:02:55.564)
Yeah.

Blake Smith (01:03:02.392)
I mean, th this is part of like the left not really wanting to win or imagining like if we win, like like th there's a kind of resentment projected onto like the figure of like the cis white gay middle class, whatever, because it's imagined that like this is a person whose only point of oppression is their sexuality. So if we have a movement that successfully eliminates oppression based on sexuality, they'll join the oppressor class and they'll be part of like

You know, mainstream American capitalist whatever. But like we want people to have normal lives, right? Like that's that's that that is the goal for everyone to have access to normal, boring bourgeois whatever. Andrew Holleran is at the end of history. And he he moved to Florida at forty. That's the end of history.

David Sessions (01:03:46.283)
Yeah, here here.

David Sessions (01:03:53.87)
Well also I mean yeah, I mean that's the thing that's the core thing. It's like we're all in the end of history whether we like it or not. You know, radical essays are not going to it's not just gay liberation politics that are over, it's you know, all liberation politics. And, you know, radical essays don't make them come back as I have learned.

Blake Smith (01:04:11.662)
So what Fukuyama didn't understand is that the Arc of History is taking us to an hour north of Gainesville.

David Sessions (01:04:18.99)
which for listeners it's where Andrew Holleran lived most of his life.

Blake Smith (01:04:23.982)
For the time being, I would not be surprised if I mean she's in great health, but you know, it iit's a bit weird talking about someone who is like 83, who by by the time this episode is released could have dropped dead.

David Sessions (01:04:37.398)
Yeah. Well we have to we have to have him on. He has to be a guest before before that happens.

Blake Smith (01:04:43.604)
Well, if you can if you can he he is ungettable. He is I mean, not quite as reclusive as Charles Ortleb, but you know love them.

David Sessions (01:04:52.226)
Well, challenge for the future, then.

Blake Smith (01:04:54.762)
Okay, so we have we have perhaps we have reached the end of history and perhaps also the end of the episode.

David Sessions (01:05:00.546)
Well, Blake, I assume you're not going to Pride in Chicago, but

Blake Smith (01:05:05.078)
Right. I g yeah, how how how does it go without saying that you will be at Boston Pride and I don't even know apparently you're maybe coming here for Market Days, question mark?

David Sessions (01:05:15.022)
But which is kind of I feel like I don't even know what Chicago Pride actually is. I think like Market Days kind of replaces it in a way. But

Blake Smith (01:05:23.864)
Do you know what I'll be doing this weekend? This is Andrew Holleran realness. I will be going to Memphis to visit my widowed mother.

David Sessions (01:05:33.964)
Yeah, that is that is very Holleran encoded.

Blake Smith (01:05:37.62)
I yeah, it's it's h Holerriana.

David Sessions (01:05:39.948)
All right, Blake, thank you for this. This was fun.

Blake Smith (01:05:43.448)
Thank you. Happy Pride. Happy we should we should begin we should begin the ep, you should begin the episode by telling people Happy Pride.

David Sessions (01:05:50.499)
I will.