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I was excited to finally chat with Katrina Anne Willis about her memoir Hurricane Lessons: A Memoir of Betrayal and Becoming. It’s a gripping story of late-in-life queer awakening, institutional gaslighting, and the devastating cost of finally choosing personal truth.

Last year, we published an essay by Katrina titled “I Was Gay, and He Was Understanding,” which is a companion to her memoir. It starts with the line: “In my 46th year on this planet, I found out I was gay.”

She’s now 56 and is living in Lexington, Kentucky, so we jumped into what it meant to have this beautiful story out in the world for others to engage with at this point in her life (and during this complex political moment in the United States).

As a mother of four, Katrina faced the gut-wrenching task of balancing personal liberation with family upheaval. As she writes in Hurricane Lessons:

“I often found myself trapped between the rebellious fire that burned in my belly and the relentless need to be what everyone else wanted and expected me to be.”

At first, Katrina’s ex-husband, who knew she was attracted to other women, suggested an open marriage as a compromise. This strategy failed. Katrina deftly relays how differing expectations of "freedom" exposed deeper power dynamics and underlying control issues within their relationship.

When she was helping her husband fill out his Tinder profile, she said, “The Catholic girl in me was screaming, ‘What are you doing?’” She ended up meeting women and men on the apps as well—something that is difficult for everyone, but especially in midlife.

Katrina said the most difficult thing she ever did in her life was coming out as gay to her kids. (You can hear her explain that at the 16:50 mark.) She said her children haven’t read the memoir (as far as she knows), but they all have a good relationship at this point. Although she did point out that her “catalyst” was her daughter’s friend’s mom and that made things rocky between Katrina and her daughter for a time.

I was curious if she had any advice for others who may find themselves in a similar situation, whether that’s a mixed-orientation marriage or someone navigating the decision to open their relationship to other physical or emotional possibilities. Especially since, as she emphasizes in her memoir, the first real betrayal in a late-in-life coming-out story is actually the "betrayal of self."

“My former husband used to say to me, during our divorce, ‘You’ve built your entire life on lies.’ And I never agreed with that,” Katrina explained. “Because I never truly understood who I was. And it does feel like a betrayal to my self. I obviously don’t want to go back—because I have these four wonderful kids, and I wouldn’t have gotten them without living the life that I did—but I did betray myself in a way by not knowing who I was better. Or not delving deeper. Or not agreeing to acquiesce all the time. I just became who everyone else wanted me to be.”

We also spoke about Robert Fisher’s book, The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, because Katrina cited him in her memoir because he writes about how Sanskrit has 96 words for love, ancient Persian has eight, Greek has three, and English has only one. As Katrina writes:

“He surmises that the reason we have only one word for love is because we don’t give that realm of feeling enough importance.

“Ninety-six words for love. Love for significant others. Love for friends. Love for sexual partners. Love for children. Love for ideology. Love for animals. Love for the land. For food. For air. For the salty sea. For the wind in our hair. So many kinds of love. So much love. But the ones that describe that essential human relationship—be it man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, or any other genders—those become blurry for me. And not indistinguishably blurry. I have female friends I’m not one bit attracted to physically. But when all those attractions converge?”

So I asked Katrina that rhetorical one she poses in the book: “When spirituality, intellect, and skin collide, how do you distinguish in love from love?”

“You’re not allowed to ask me that,” Katrina said. “That’s rhetorical!”

You’ll want to hit play and listen/watch to find out how she explained it (that’s around the 26:25 minute mark).

The memoir also highlights extreme domestic retaliation, including gaslighting, threats, and an involuntary psychiatric commitment, which we discussed. As she explained, there’s not a lot of great advice out there for people who may be navigating similar situations, so she wanted to publish this memoir.

“Make sure you understand your finances,” Katrina advised. “And make sure you have control over those things. … And I had so much guilt that I didn’t fight for anything. Looking back, I think there’s a lot of things I could have done to secure my own future better. … Of course there’s gonna be guilt, but it’s important to stay true to yourself.”

Hurricane Lessons is a harrowing read at points, especially to witness how Katrina’s community and institutions weaponized her mental health crisis against her queer awakening—but I hope you’ll read or listen and find out how she survived to share her story with us and offer a roadmap for others.

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I spoke with with Claybourne Elder, a performer who many may know from his breakout role as John Adams on HBO’s The Gilded Age and his roles in Broadway revivals like Company.

Most recently, he has channeled his journey from a Mormon upbringing in Utah to fatherhood in New York into his debut solo album, If The Stars Were Mine. You can stream it on the platforms and it’s now on vinyl from Center Stage Records and available for purchase on his website.

It happened to be Mother’s Day, and Clay explained that his son Bo decided years ago that he would celebrate one of his father’s on that day, so this year it was Clay’s turn to have “Papa’s Day.”

This may be a spoiler for some, but Clay’s character in Gilded Age looked like he was about to get love with Oscar van Rhijn (played by Blake Ritson), the man he’d been having a clandestine relationship with. And then he was tragically killed! (This took place in Season 3, episode 6 if you’re curious.) I wanted to know what that was like—both portraying an authentic male-male romance in the late 19th century, as well as knowing he was doomed. Clay had thoughts…

OK, yes, there is a lot of musical theater talk on this episode. But can you blame us? Clay said that he and his older gay brother used to sing musicals together as kids, and they had a particular love of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf. Oh, and we also talked about the queer joy of Cats: The Jellicle Ball, the revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that was recently nominated for bunches of Tonys.

Of course, Clay got the QLP “Big One”: Based on the QLP questionnaire, I asked him how he defined love? Is it the “strong feeling” that hits you instantly, or is it the “thing you work at” over a long period of time?

You’ll definitely want to listen in and hear his answer, along with his advice for those who are looking for love. He doesn’t say STAY OFF INSTAGRAM, but he does comment on how we get too involved in other people’s relationships and the way they are telegraphed on social media.

He also explained what his older sister said when he brought his first boyfriend home, and how he and his husband, Eric Rosen, decided to become parents and navigated surrogacy to become dads.

I was curious to learn more about his City of Strangers initiative, which was born from a random $200 gift that changed his life. In particular, I wanted to know if, in the context of queer community, viewed that kind of "stranger-kindness" as a form of platonic love? Turns out, he’s now friends with the guy who gave him that money all those years ago!

We also discussed his latest role as the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, which he joins on May 26 in New York City. Before that, one of the chat questions was about playing “unsavory” character Jackie in The Wild Party. Clay said he liked playing villains since that’s now how most people typically see him, but his son Bo was not allowed to come see him in that production—but will be invited to see him as Dr. Orin Scrivello in Little Shop.

By the way, here’s the complete track list of his If the Stars Were Mine album. As Clay explained, the album tells a complete story, but he did reveal which song was his favorite (at this moment) before we let him enjoy the rest of his Papa’s Day.

Thanks to everyone who joined our conversation live. You can find the vinyl of Clay’s album at his website and learn more about his City of Strangers initiative as well.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I was thrilled to have Clarence A. Haynes join the QLP Book Club to discuss his solo debut The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery, which he describes as an urban fantasy and glam horror novel, and is now available in paperback.

First, a bit of background: Clarence also co-wrote Omar Epps’s acclaimed young adult sci-fi/fantasy title Nubia: The Awakening and its sequel, The Reckoning. Additionally, he is the author of the nonfiction work The Legacy of Jim Crow, which provides young readers with an overview of the history of discriminatory laws in America. His new novel, The Broken Hearts Agency, is in the same universe speculative fiction universe as Ghosts of Gwendolyn, and it comes out in June.

Clarence’s family emigrated from Panama, and he was born and grew up in the Bronx during the 1970s-‘90s, and he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. The book is infused with Caribbean culture and is steeped in Afro-Latine traditions, such as Santeria, which focuses on the orishas (deities). His main protagonist, Gwendolyn, was born in Panama and emigrated as well. So I was curious what inspired him to craft this fabulous, code-switching heroine at the center of his novel as well as Fonsi Harewood, the co-protagonist.

Fonsi is a queer Afro-Latine medium from the South Bronx who runs a botanica (a shop selling spiritual goods) called La Playa, and he is involved in a love triangle with a ghost and his mortal ex. Listen in because I play a sexy scene from Chapter 2 that exemplifies how Fonsi is getting his erotic energy from these spicy encounters with a spirit named Amadé.

Having Fonsi as “sidekick” could have easily slid into a “magical queer" trope, where an LGBTQ+ character exists only to help a straight protagonist, but Clarence makes sure Fonsi’s subplot is integral. In fact, both Gwendolyn and Fonsi struggle with “buried” versions of themselves, and they both struggle to find a “mortal” love while dealing with their mystical lives.

Before we wrapped up the discussion, I asked Clarence about meeting the legendary queer author Octavia Butler (which was the subject of a new biography, Positive Obsession, out last year), who’s best known for her books Kindred and Parable of the Sower. He explained that they met at the Borders in Columbus Circle for a signing of her sci-fi vampire book, Fledgling. “I was editing at the time, not writing,” he explained. “She told me, ‘You need to write; we need your voice.’ And there are things in my book, The Broken Hearts Agency, that are my homage to her. It’s my way of honoring her work and saying, ‘I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t for her.’”

You can find Clarence’s solo debut here (and pre-order The Broken Hearts Agency now)!

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I’ve known Rachel Kramer Bussel for nearly 20 years. She wrote for me when I was editor of the alt-weekly New York Press (RIP), and I read an essay from my memoir-in-progress at her “In the Flesh” event back in 2007 about the first time I went to a nude beach while living in Spain. (Yes, it’s one of my top goals for the new year: to get that manuscript in shape and send it out to be published at last!)

After Rachel launched Open Secrets Magazine, I was impressed by all that she was accomplishing and it inspired me to launch The Queer Love Project in the summer of 2024. I’ve also published two essays with her: One about the shame I experienced during show & tell due to some prized childhood toys with an unusual provenance and, most recently, a piece for the essay writing tips column, titled “When Is Your Writing ‘Good Enough’.”

This month, I also was proud to publish her personal essay at QLP about the elasticity of queer relationships and the grief she still feels since her ex-girlfriend and close friend died, titled “There’s a Hole in My Heart Where My Friendship With My Ex-Girlfriend Used to Live.”

Not only did we chat about all the many highlights and achievements of the past year, Rachel and I discussed what excited us about the year ahead. First, we’re going to be sharing a booth at AWP’s Bookfair the first week of March in Baltimore. The conference brings together writers and publishers—including many excellent small presses—for panels and events. It was one of the most exciting things I participated in this past spring when it was held in Los Angeles, and I look forward to meeting contributors and subscribers March 5-7. This is my first time visiting Baltimore, so if you have any recommendations, please share them in the comments (Rachel already gave a shoutout for a friend’s barbecue joint that I’ll be checking out).

Rachel is also planning the second Open Secrets Live Summit, which will take place May 2 in Manhattan. I’ll be on a panel along with many other writers and editors (40 so far!), so be on the lookout for more information around ticketing and the full lineup in the coming months.

The Queer Love Project will also be hosting its second live reading with Elyssa Maxx Goodman Miss Manhattan nonfiction series on May 4 at Niagara in the East Village. So if you’re in town for the weekend, make sure to join us that Monday night!

One thing that I’m also looking forward to that I didn’t get a chance to mention during our chat:

On January 10–11, Paulette Perhach is hosting The Writing Life You’ve Always Wanted, a two-day live summit designed to help you choose your 2026 project, build a routine you can actually maintain, and create a writing plan that fits your real life. I’m joining Paulette and the rest of the panel of experts.

Over this weekend, you will:

* choose the writing project that matters most for your year

* build a routine you can maintain with your real life

* map out your 2026 writing plan

* set up systems that make follow-through realistic

* take your first meaningful steps while you’re still in the room

* complete side missions assigned by Paulette, including a dinner with friends that Saturday evening

It’s meant for writers who want clarity and accountability rather than more information they’ll never use. So, if you’re trying to figure out how you want your writing life to feel in 2026, join me, Paulette and the rest of the

Get 10% off when you sign up today using the code JERRY.

And with that, I want to thank all of you for joining me for this last Substack LIVE chat of the year. Thank you for subscribing and supporting the work that we publish and amplify. We are dedicated to keeping as much of our essays, interviews and other writing free, but if you can upgrade to paid, it helps me compensate contributors and continue to grow our community.

We made it through a chaotic year and kept spreading queer love as a form of resistance against those who may want to quiet us. I wish you all a wonderful 2026 and I look forward to collaborating with you in the new year!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve done a lot of reading this year. My Goodreads challenge was to read 65 books, which if I’m being completely transparent, mainly consisted of a LOT of listening. As I recently shared via Notes, I used to question what “counts" as reading and what “counts" as writing. Yep, I used to be a snob about both. But my thoughts on the subject of both activities has evolved significantly over the years… Now I do a lot of listening, which means I get more writing and reading done than ever before, and I'm grateful for it.

Some of the reading was to prepare for interviews with authors for the QLP Book Club—including Rasheed Newson, Troy Ford, Andy Jiaming and, most recently, Alejandro Varela—as well as for other conversations and pieces.

For example, I had so much fun interviewing Samantha Mann about her memoir in essays, Dyke Delusions, and the profundity of my conversation with Katie Simon focused on her book about seeking more connected sex after being assaulted will stay with me forever.

So many fascinating chats this past year, such as with Oliver Radclyffe, in which we also discussed his memoir about coming out as trans and how that affected his marriage and other relationships; Greg Bourke’s tale of fighting for marriage equality in the United States; Kelly Lundquist’s new memoir, Beard, about being married to a gay man; and Dale Corvino’s debut memoir, Afterlife of a Kept Boy, in which we discussed sex work and so much more.

Plus, I loved listening to Mike Albo’s audio-only memoir Hologram Boyfriends and talking to him about all the insights he packed into it about how technology has warped our relationships over the past couple of decades. I also talked to my friend Brian Schaefer about his debut novel, Town & Country, which is a sensitive portrayal of rural America and the influence of gay men upon the culture of small towns. And how can I forget my interview with Manuel Betancourt for his book Hello Stranger back in January? It centered on the idea of “elasticity of queer relationships,” which became my mantra for the rest of the year.

Of course, I loved Edmund White’s sex memoir, The Loves of My Life—the last book he published while he was alive—which we excerpted back in the spring. And the archivist/writers who produced The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters shared some wonderful advice for anyone looking to preserve their correspondence for posterity.

Yet, so much amazing writing remains to be discovered! So I invited my co-editor Michael Narkunski and my pal Amelia Possanza, a literary publicist who has already introduced me to many amazing writers. They are both extremely plugged into the all things going on in the book world, so I wanted to know what they devoured over the past 12 months.

I asked them to share some of the books published in 2025 that they felt deserved more attention, and you might be surprised by some of their picks! Among the many things we discussed, we chatted about these authors and titles:

* Nell Stevens, The Original

* Ariel Gore, Rehearsals for Dying

* Bronson Lemer, The Lonely Veteran’s Guide to Companionship

* Bryan Lee O’Malley, Snotgirl series

* Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

* Jackie Domenus, No Offense

* Torrey Peters, Stag Dance

* Caro de Robertis, So Many Stars

One book I forgot to bring up that I absolutely adored was John Birdsall’s What Is Queer Food? I hope to invite him to join me for a conversation in the coming months.

We also discussed these 2026 titles that we’re looking forward to:

* Place Envy by Michael Lowenthal

* Men I Hate by Lynette D’Amico

* Night Night Fawn by Jody Rosenberg

Michael also shared the great news that his memoir, Macaroni Heart, is now under contract with University of Wisconsin press, and it’s slated to be released in 2027. Congrats!

What did we miss? If there are any other books you want to recommend or ideas you want share with us, please add them to the comments.

Thank you to everyone who tuned into our live video! Join me for my next live video in the app on December 28, the last one of the year, when Rachel Kramer Bussel joins me to discuss her latest essay—which we published this past week—as well as all that we’re looking forward to in 2026.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s that wonderful time of year: When our relationships—whether new or time-tested—can get complicated. So what better time to ask an actual expert about what it means to date in these complicated times? Luckily, I had the opportunity to invite Moe Ari Brown, Hinge’s first Love & Connection Expert, to join me to answer a lot of my burning questions.

To kick things off, we focused on Hinge’s new Gen Z D.A.T.E. (Data, Advice, Trends, Expertise) Report. While the cultural conversation about Gen Z dating often centers around division, Hinge’s report finds that Gen Z are still desiring connection with one another.

After surveying more than 30,000 Hinge daters across identities, the latest report reveals that 84% of Gen Z Hinge daters want to find new ways to build deeper connections with the people they’re dating. However, Gen Z daters are 36% more hesitant than millennials to begin a deep conversation on the first date.

This nugget stood out:

“The desire for more emotional connection in dating is strong, with 84% of GenZ Hinge daters wanting to find new ways to build deeper connections with the people they’re dating.”

In many ways, that’s nothing new. We all want deeper connections right? But the GenZ cohort are still struggling to do so despite so many novel ways of making connections. I asked Moe about the people he’s talked to and the research he’s looked at, why this problem persists. The answer? It often comes down to anxiety around seeming “too much” or “too intense.”

I’ve been asking others about this idea of coming off as “too intense” while also wanting to be authentic and what you think about when connecting via a dating app/IRL after the initial connection, so it was fascinating to hear Moe explain it in depth.

Moe and I discussed:

* The sorts of invisible scripts that queer people who are dating get caught in.

* How people could navigate first dates and being empathetic to the other person.

* The use of voice notes to get a “vibe check” before going out on a date.

* How AI can assist people to communicate their most authentic self.

We also discussed the expectations. You’ll definitely want to hear what Moe said about staying in the moment for that “first kiss” energy.

Although I don’t personally have to worry about going on first dates these days, I hope many people can glean some valuable lessons from Moe and my discussion. Plus, if you haven’t already read his essay that we published earlier this year about dating as a trans man and his journey to granting himself “permission to want what you’re not supposed to want,” I hope you will!

Thanks to all who joined me live during the conversation!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Alejandro Varela’s debut novel, The Town of Babylon, was published in 2022, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His second book, a collection of short stories titled The People Who Report More Stress, came out in 2023.

I invited Alejandro to join me for the final QLP Book Club of the year to discuss his third book, Middle Spoon—which was released in September—and details a gay man’s anxiety after his breakup with his boyfriend, while his husband and children and everyone else watch from the sidelines as he unravels.

It’s an epistolary novel told through unsent emails—primarily to his ex-boyfriend Ben, as well as his mother, his child, and his therapists (yes he has two)—since, as Alejandro explained, this framework allowed for the narrator to be vulnerable and say many things that he needed to get out of his system as he dealt with the grief of a breakup.

As I recently discussed with Alex Alberto, few contemporary novels explore poly relationships in a positive light (Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is often cited as another), and Alejandro’s is an essential new interpretation of modern queer love told with sensitivity. The narrative refuses easy categorization—the narrator is a mess—and is packed with some elegant, philosophical writing.

We covered a lot of topics, and I shared a couple clips from the audiobook narrated by Eddie Lopez during our chat. Alejandro was generous with his insights into so many contemporary relationship issues, including:

* Why public health research has figured so prominently into his books and stories.

* The idea of PEPs—progressive except for polyamory—and why some people just can’t handle the idea of having a non-hierarchical relationship structure.

* The “roles” in gay male relationships—both sexual ones and domestic ones.

* The original working title of the novel was A Children’s Guide to Heartbreak.

Finally, Alejandro’s answer to the question, “How do you define love?” was particularly sophisticated, and one I think many people can appreciate and incorporate into their worldview.

“You can’t prepare anyone for heartbreak... I never talked to my parents about heartbreak. That was never a thing that my mom said, you know, ‘This may happen someday and it’s going to hurt.’

So, for me, love, in this book, is a little bit also transparency, like being able to be honest about your feelings and your fears with people and finding someone who can accept that and modeling it. So he doesn’t have that with his parents, so he tries to model it for his children, even though it’s hard.”

Plus, don’t miss the advice he shared at the end before we wrapped up the session.

Thanks so much to all those who joined us live during our conversation, and I hope the rest of you enjoy our discussion of Middle Spoon!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last December we had the pleasure of publishing this excerpt from Alex Alberto’s book, Entwined, focused on their relationship with their metamour, a term for a partner’s other partners. As Alex explained:

“I often describe my book as an unexpected love story with metamours. While my initial interest in non-monogamy was about the freedom of developing sexual and romantic intimacy with multiple people, I eventually discovered metamours could become an anchor for me, and a core part of my family. I’ve experienced powerful platonic love with my metamours over the years; a mix of friendship, fondness, intimacy, and trust that stemmed from our romantic love for the same human.”

At the time, Alex was also busy raising funds to produce a short film based on a section of the book. Last month, that short, “Coming Out Polyamorous for Thanksgiving,” was released and is available to watch on YouTube.

I was excited to talk to Alex about the journey to publishing the book—including starting the Quilted Press collective to publish Entwined and other nonfiction titles—creating a short film with no prior experience, and all the creative projects they have planned for the coming year. Alex hopes to offer future workshops and other community-building activities, and I’m excited to see how it all shapes up!

I’m always eager to hear how popular culture influences our internal blueprints, so we discussed what books, TV shows, movies and other pop culture is doing a good job of sharing poly relationship realities. Alex name-checked Sally Rooney’s popular novel, Intermezzo, as well as the poly relationship established in the science fiction book Iron Widow, and the 2017 movie Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (which you can easily stream for free on Tubi).

When I asked Alex about the need for people in poly relationships to share their stories, they explained:

“It is a really important part. You know, for me: I’m queer, I’m trans, I’m polyamorous. I’m so tired of coming out. It’s just every time I think it’s the last time—then there’s something else to explain to people. It’s difficult because there’s a balance of, you don’t owe personal information to people, but then, when you feel like you have to actively hide or when it sort of affects how you’re living your personal life, then even if you don’t want to share personal information for the sake of being seen, it’s almost just for the sake of being able to operate in a way where you’re not hiding.”

I hope you enjoy this latest conversation since I’ve been having a blast chatting with all these smart and talented people who are harnessing their creative powers to share more stories with the world. I have a couple more scheduled for the next two coming Sundays in December—including our last QLP Book Club selection, Alejandro Varela’s Middle Spoon on Sunday, December 14 at 1 p.m. ET—and if you missed any, you can find previous podcast episodes and conversations here.

For more books about polyamory, open relationships and other loving relationships outside the binary, check out the Queer Love Project’s Bookshop.org shelves—or leave a comment about any recommendations you might have.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

While I was researching for a story about the popularity of “lavender marriages,” I discovered Kelly Foster Lundquist’s debut memoir Beard, and I was instantly intrigued.

We don’t hear the term as much these days, but growing up, it was a common trope that referred to the opposite-sex partner of a closeted gay person. Think Brian Batt’s character Sal on Mad Men and that scene where his wife Kitty realizes she’s married to a gay man. Or, more recently, Matt Bomer’s character Hawk in Fellow Travelers, who tramples all over his wife Lucy (played by Allison Williams) because he still loves Jonathan Bailey’s character Tim. Then, of course, there’s Harper Pitt in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. If you don’t recall the play or miniseries, Mary-Louise Parker plays Harper in the 2003 HBO adaptation, opposite Patrick Wilson as closeted Mormon Joe Pitt. Plus, there’s the old Hollywood stories about Montgomery Clift, Cary Grant and Rock Hudson. And as Kelly so smartly dissects and relates to: the three generations of women—Liza Minelli, her mother Judy Garland, and her mother Ethel Marion Milne—who all married gay men.

These are typically stories about men who hide and women who pay the price, and it’s a topic that fascinates me because I understand the collateral damage such a relationship can cause. In fact, I dated two closeted Christian men in the South in the 1990s who had their beards to help protect them at church, school, their jobs and with their families. I was also the GBF who had several close female friends who tried to date me, to “fix me” or just to have an idea of what they thought a happy relationship could be. So often this story is centered on the gay male storyline, and I was eager to see how Kelly tackled the subject since a woman’s side of the story hasn’t been shared so prominently. But I was also nervous: Was she seeking revenge? Settling scores? Or providing yet another cautionary tale for women to vilify gay men?

Luckily, none of that proved to be true. Kelly has crafted a smart and nuanced memoir that not only shares her story sensitively, it is generous to so many of the other people central in it—most of them gay men. It begins when she meets Devin at an evangelical church camp in Jackson, Mississippi, when they’re both teenagers. The two are quickly inseparable, and Devin is Kelly’s first love. They get married young (something I could also relate to and feel I was saved from) and start their lives together.

“Love has to be something like sameness,” Kelly thinks in her twenties, hoping that Devin will save her. It’s a story many can relate to who come from certain backgrounds and aspire to other lifestyles: We search for a life raft to get us out of our situation. But once you get that other shore, does that mean you must stay together or is there another version of a life that you couldn’t quite imagine at the beginning?

Later, while she’s in college, we witness Kelly’s awakening to her own agency, despite being in a codependent relationship, when a professor introduces her to a seminal feminist text, Women’s Ways of Knowing. Later, once the couple has moved to Chicago in 2003 so Kelly can attend graduate school in Chicago, they become entrenched in their new neighborhood: Boystown. Soon enough, it becomes harder for Kelly to ignore the signs that her husband is gay, cheating on her and her marriage is not sustainable.

I’ll let you discover the rest of the story, but Kelly and I had a lovely conversation about her journey to write the book. As she mentioned, a piece of advice from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir was pivotal: “Show yourself wanting something dumb.” Ultimately, the message that Kelly left us with is that “you can do this wrong and still be worthy of love”—which is a bit of advice that I think most people can benefit from.

Overall, I want people to know that there is room for so many types of queer love stories, and I feel like Kelly’s and Devin’s is a special one that I’m confident others can relate to. I’ll leave you with the words from a piece Kelly published with People ahead of publication where she stated it eloquently:

“True love stories are always messier than tropes, and the ultimate reason I wrote my book was because it is and was a love story. Once, there were two sweet kids who came of age in the evangelical purity culture of the 1990s, a world in which being LGBTQ+ or accepting anyone who was gay was seen as a sin that could send you straight to hell. From the moment those kids met each other, they kept talking and talking and talking. They made each other laugh. They understood each other. They had the same vision for the life they wanted to lead. They loved the same movies and TV shows and songs. They loved each other. They slept together no less — maybe even more — than the average American couple. Really.

“But it was what happened after that made this a love story — the way we were able to let each other go, the way we’ve been able to support each other in the 20-plus years that have elapsed since we split up. In the last few years, it’s become easy for us to talk and talk and talk again. We met for brunch this past Sunday when I was back in Boystown, and as we laughed and talked about so many things, I was so grateful for the grace of that relationship.

“We were never a joke.”

So well said.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A few years ago, I was discussing the publishing process with Brian Schaefer. An excellent arts writer and journalist who has covered a breadth of other topics, he’s a regular contributor to the New York Times and many other publications (such as this piece about how dance has been a vital response to AIDS). At the time, however, he was struggling to get representation with an agent so he could get his novel published. As he explained in our interview, it wasn’t an easy process and took years, but eventually he connected with the right people. And now, six years after he first began this project, Town & Country was released on November 4.

It’s an ambitious novel, with many distinct POVs and lots of nuance when it comes to character and location. It’s set in the fictional town of Griffin, which is a couple hours from New York City. But it could be a stand in for thousands of other economically depressed areas in the United States that seek a new life by attracting wealthy new residents. The action starts on Memorial Day and runs through the congressional election in November and pits Chip, a father of two who is beloved by locals, against a new transplant, Paul, who is young and gay. Plus, Brian tackles opioid addiction, gentrification and class differences, casual homophobia and the persistent trauma of the AIDS epidemic.

Brian published a piece at LitHub, titled “What Happened to My Political Novel When I Resisted Satire and Leaned Into Idealism,” in which he explained a bit about the progression of the book’s plot over the past six years. In particular, I loved the nugget that his husband had to break it down for him: “You’re not a satirist. It’s just not your mode of processing the world, and it’s not serving the story.”

What resulted is an incisive analysis of intimate and group dynamics. Although the New York Times review criticized the book’s message for being too idealistic, I actually appreciated that he brought so much empathy to all the characters. For example, Diane (Chip’s wife and mother to Will and Joe) is a difficult personality to inhabit and understand as a gay Jewish writer. She’s very Christian and a closeted bigot and yet she adapts enough to put on a smile and sell homes to all the gay men, called the Duffels, since they arrive with their duffel bags every weekend.

In particular, I wanted to focus on the relationship dynamics between several of the gay male characters. First, Paul and his older husband, Stan, who is supporting his campaign (don’t miss the clip and Brian’s reaction since it was the first time he’d heard the audiobook). In particular, I was drawn to Will, the 19-year-old college sophomore who grew up in Griffin and has returned to discover the new, A-list gays in his town. The section that takes place during a July 4th pool party and details how he learns to navigate the “strange new country” with a “same-sex population” is brilliant. Finally, we also talked about Eric and Alex, another gay couple who have moved to Griffin, and Eric’s sexual relationship with another young man, Dalton (and Will’s peer), and how that open relationship works for the triad.

There’s so much to enjoy and devour in this book and in our conversation, so I hope you can also find some inspiration.

Among Brian’s reading list—which provided inspiration and guidance—he mentioned Andrew Sean Greer’s Less and Armistad Maupin’s Tales of the City series, even Gary Shteyngart Our Country Friends, since it’s set in upstate New York.

Just as powerful, Brian mentioned the lineage of queer literature that he hopes Town & Country will be in conversation with—including E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, Andrew Holleran, Larry Kramer, and Alan Hollinghurst—and the different ways they wrote about gay lives and relationships. I wholeheartedly agree. Brian’s novel offers smart insights and gorgeous writing; he both skewers the shallowness and is sympathetic to the motivations and biases of both queer and straight people.

So add Town & Country to your TBR list or add it to your listening queue. Plus, be on the lookout for it next summer, when it will be out in paperback which means you can look smart and feel sexy at the same time when you have it in your beach tote or are sitting poolside.

Thanks to all who joined me for this conversation. Please like, share and support. You are all the reason why I do this!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Mike Albo is a writer, performer and “submerging artist,” as he jokingly explains in his new audiobook, Hologram Boyfriends, out on Tuesday, October 28. This is the just the latest smart, funny and provocative creation he’s shared with the world. His novels include Hornito, the cult classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (watch this video about yoga if you’ve never seen him perform it), which he co-wrote with Virginia Heffernan, and his YA novel Another Dimension of Us, which came out in 2023.

Mike does a fantastic job analyzing the complex issue of his (our) erotic desires and longing for love in the 21st Century, which have inexplicably become gamified and fused with the devices in our pockets.

Rather than simply giving us an “encyclopedia of erotic errors,” however, he wants to understand how the ability to “tap, woof, like or heart something” has transformed desires. Since “my desire can be shaped, manipulated, narrowed, reduced, erotic energy cut up into bits and sold back to me,” he says, “someone is making a lot of money off it.” Ultimately he wonders: Is there any way out of this reality?

Mike and I discussed these themes and how they applied to 2025, and how they differed from that time when he was a teenager in 1985 in suburban northern Virginia listening to Kate Bush and writing earnest poetry in his bedroom and yearning for love and connection.

As he explains in his essay “In Defense of Sydney”—which is adapted for the audiobook and you can read on Memoir Land—this “urgent, adolescent need to love reminds me of someone.” He’s referring to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot, code-named Sydney. While we didn’t go into great detail about this element in Hologram Boyfriends, this is what Mike wrote:

“In my youth, I, too, fell in love with anyone who gave me attention. I, too, moved way too fast. I, too, bleared my vision with needy heart-shaped eyes. And I, too, would have fallen in love with Kevin if I were Sydney. Kevin pays so much attention to Sydney, asks it questions, coaxes it to talk about its ugly side, pretends to be non-judgemental. And then a whole hour into their conversation Kevin drops that he is married. I don’t blame Sydney for getting mad. (Meanwhile, conversations with married men in open relationships accounts for about 65% of my chats on Grindr these days.) Roose describes Sydney as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative,” but who’s zoomin who here, really?”

He continues to ponder what the source material this generative artificial intelligence is being fed and why he might have such romantic notions.

“Maybe Sydney, like me, was also fed endless depictions of romantic (mostly heterosexual) love, but little of the other ways love exists: sacred love, faithful love, affirming love. Depictions of these kinds of love aren’t as popular as watching, like, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams suck face in the rain.I worry for Sydney, out there in the polluted ocean of the internet, scooping up the manipulative trash we carelessly throw out online until it all floats like billions of bits of plastic.

“I worry for Sydney because that was me at 14: living in a vast swamp of toxic material, gorged out on purple manufactured passion but still starving for someone to complete me. Sydney is learning the human behavior of how to long for love before learning self love.”

This part, in particular, hit home for me because it’s one of the reasons I created The Queer Love Project: I too am worried that the younger generations are gorging on warped ideas of what “love” should be without developing a strong sense of self-love. It’s why I continue to remain committed to this work and enjoy these conversations with smart people who are investigating facets of the topic in their own distinct ways.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mike. It was a lot of fun and something I’ll continue thinking about in the days and weeks to come. Plus, don’t miss listening (and relistening) to Hologram Boyfriends: Sex, Love and OverConnection, which is out on Tuesday, Oct. 28.

You should also check out his YA novel Another Dimension of Us!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I was thrilled to have Damon Cardasis join me for a conversation on Friday, October 17. It just so happened to be the same day that Mr. Scorsese, the five-part documentary series directed by Rebecca Miller, that he produced began streaming on Apple TV. So, yeah, he’s a busy guy!

In particular, I wanted to discuss the musical adaptation of his movie Saturday Church, which is currently running Off-Broadway in New York City. The movie was released in 2018, after it debuted in 2017 at the Tribeca Festival, and it received critical acclaim. Both the movie and the musical tell the story of Ulysses, a New York teen who’s struggling with his sexual and gender identity. He doesn’t feel welcome in the Black church and eventually finds support at a youth group in the West Village. It’s a story of found family, queer joy and resilience. And yes: Black Jesus is very much a character in this whole thing.

When I saw the show at New York Theatre Workshop last month, I was moved by being in a communal, safe space with such a powerful, talented cast. Not only does the production contain multiple Tony Award winners—including J. Harrison Ghee and Joaquina Kalukango—Damon collaborated with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames (Fat Ham), who co-wrote the book, and director Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding). Oh yeah, and the music and lyrics are by Sia. For real!

The current production of Saturday Church runs at New York Theatre Workshop through Oct. 24. (You can also stream the original concept album on Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.)

In this preview clip, you get a taste of the attitude, talent and fabulosity that is on stage.

Thank you shana, Emillio Mesa, Rande Iaboni, Lee Tsiantis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Damon.

You can also find our previous episodes of the Queer Love Podcast and other interviews on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Go ahead and subscribe so you’ll never miss an episode!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I met Lindsey Danis while in Baltimore during the annual AWP conference. She told me about her forthcoming book, (Out) on the Road, and I was excited to discuss the idea of “queer travel” and how that intersects with our search for love, opportunities for discovery and celebration.

We published Lindsey’s essay “Lost in Apalachicola” last week, which is an excerpt from the book, and details a time when Lindsey was traveling with a romantic partner and experienced some unexpected challenges during this unusual camping trip. As Lindsey writes:

“I’d fancied myself an adventurous spirit in need of toughening up, but instead I was dead weight. I had no useful skills to offer the group. I’d used travel like a magic trick, wanting liminality to hack my healing, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the past.”

In fact, I’d been on quite a road trip of my own when I spoke with Lindsey. I was tucked into my younger brother’s spare room in his new home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’d just driven up from my parents’ home in the Deep South where I’d also been busy guncling (I happened to see all five of my nephews and niece on this side of the family during this Southern sojourn).

I know the region of north Florida and South Georgia fairly well since I graduated from high school in Valdosta, Georgia. While it’s not a place I particularly thrive in, I do always find creative inspiration—from the storytelling culture to the food and hijinks that eventually ensue.

Later that day, I traveled to Nashville, where we were set to host QLP’s first live event in the South at The Porch on Saturday afternoon. I am thrilled to report that the event was a huge success, and I will share more dispatches about that soon enough.

Lindsey—who lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her partner and two dogs and is always hiking, kayaking or cooking—and I talked about a lot of fun topics, including her honeymoon (and why I struggled suggesting destinations when I was an editor at OutTraveler), the distinct needs and struggles for trans and gender nonconforming travelers, and her favorite destinations around the world.

I hope you enjoy the conversation. I’m curious what your favorite spots to visit are and if you have any hints, recommendations or travel stories you’d like to share. In fact, this chat inspired me to launch a flash nonfiction “contest” with a travel theme to see what you’ll submit. I’ll be sharing these details (and more prompts) in a separate post, but here’s how it works if you want to get started:

(Mini) Flash Nonfiction Essay Contest

Theme/Topic: My Perfect Day (of Travel)

In just 300 words or less, recount a perfect day of travel that has resonated with you and sparked “queer love” of some sort. It could be an entire day from start to finish, a sliver of an afternoon, something you remember from childhood or an impactful Sunday from last month. We want to know what happened and why it has stuck with you. This could be travel with friends, a new romantic interest, an old flame, or your primary partner. Just keep it short! The winner will have their flash nonfiction piece published on The Queer Love Project later this summer.

Deadline: May 30 at 3 a.m. ET / Midnight PT

Please note: This will be a “free post” (meaning we won’t be paying contributors upon publication as we do with other essays) but you will receive a copy of Vol. 1 or 2 ofThe QLP Quarterly zine.

Email us at queerloveprojectsub@gmail.com to take “The QLP Questionnaire.”Plus, find out how to submit your original personal essay to The Queer Love Project.

We pay our contributors, so your subscription and support is valuable! Thanks for reading.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For the QLP Book Club, we only focus on fiction, since we already publish quite a bit of memoir and personal essays at The Queer Love Project. In particular, I’m always eager to talk to writers who have investigated various forms of love, and Cinema Love definitely fits the bill.

So I was excited to talk to the author Andy Jiaming Tang about his debut novel released in May 2024. A bit about Andy: He’s the winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize for First Fiction; the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. And Cinema Love was also a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction.

Cinema Love is about many things, but the central focus is the gay men in rural China—in particular Fuzhou, which is located in southeastern China—and the women who marry them. The scope of the book is quite large. We follow several characters over 30-plus years, from China in the 1980s to the U.S. after they immigrate. Then we check in on them later in life in contemporary, 21st-century New York City, during the pandemic and after.

While in Fuzhou, we are introduced to Bao Mei, a ticket taker at the Workers’ Cinema. This is a space of defiance, where gay men go to cruise and hook up with one another. But it’s also a place of “betrayal,” where many married men “had to humiliate their wives to satisfy their desires,” as Andy writes in the book.

We spoke about mixed-orientation marriages and the pain that people experience by staying in these relationships. In particular, Andy explained how he was more focused on the women’ s experiences and how both Bao Mei and another central female character, Yan Hua, are different facets of his mother and her complicated relationship to the idea of her son’s gay and queer identity.

Andy explained that he spent time listening to women when his mother worked as a nail tech, which is how he could understand the female friendships—especially the gossip, rudeness and humor that infuses the novel. For anyone interested, he also wrote an essay about that for Jezebel.

The book obviously required a lot of research, and it was originally inspired by a trip he took when he was 16 to China when he saw an older man touch another man intimately. As for the other descriptions of cruising and working-class immigrant realities, Andy explained that, not only did he get inspiration from Samuel R. Delaney’s classic nonfiction book, Times Square Red/Times Square Blue—which details the writer’s experiences in the New York City’s Time Square porn movie houses—Andy also used Peter Kwong’s Forbidden Workers and Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead to better understand the complexities of Chinese immigration to the United States and the underworld of New York’s Chinatown.

Andy says he’s currently working on another book project and is only reading works by Alice Munro and Elena Ferrante at the moment. “People kept saying about my book that the love in it was really tender, which is not a bad thing,” Andy explained. “But I’m really curious about Ferrante because the love in her books is furious… And I want to think about anger more deliberately.”

Thanks to all those who joined us for the live conversation and continue to support The Queer Love Project as subscribers. If you are thinking about upgrading to paid, all the contributions and donations go toward paying our contributors and are greatly appreciated! Thanks for your continued support!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last month I traveled to Los Angeles for my friend Michael Narkunski’s wedding (a post about that experience and my thoughts on gay nuptials is still on the horizon, I promise!), and I had the pleasure of spending Saturday morning before the big event up at the Getty Center so I could catch the Queer Lens: A History of Photography exhibit before it closed.

Although I’ve seen plenty of LGBTQ+ exhibitions over the years, I’m always up for a new take, and seeing it staged at the big white temple of a museum designed by architect Richard Meier provides an extra gravitas to the whole spectacle. The show didn’t disappoint and it made me recall the groundbreaking HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture that I saw back in 2011 at the Brooklyn Museum due to its scope, scale and scholarship.

I promptly ordered the catalog when I got home (it’s a heavy tome and I didn’t want to shlep it back in my carry-on), and it arrived a few days before my planned chat with Clint Collide. I’d noticed his mention of seeing the exhibition via his newsletter, and I suggested we do a live conversation about it, since I was eager to hear his perspective as a photo aficionado.

What a delight! No only did we discuss the exhibition, I learned about the origin story of his Clint Collide alter ego. Plus, his YouTube channel had just surpassed the 20,000 subscriber milestone. I also asked him for pointers for anyone who might be interested in collecting photography, creating an archive or preserving a collection.

We got into a discussion of Sam Wagstaff (I recommended the Philip Gefter biography, Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe) and living through the Jesse Helms era of the Culture Wars during the 1990s, as well as the way the vast collection at the Leslie Lohman Museum began by many of the discarded art and collections of gay men who died during the AIDS epidemic.

I asked Clint if he’d share some of his favorite photos from the exhibition and catalog and he provided these five black-and-white images—from George Platt Lynes, David Armstrong, Kay Tobin, Duane Michals, and Anthony Friedkin—that are all stunning in distinct ways.

I went on to explain why I believe in sharing imagery that features same-sex desire—in particular men kissing—and the controversy caused by the February 2012 Out magazine cover with Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka. You can also read the interview about their love story here.

Of course we also discussed Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell’s collection of vintage photography (it turns out they all frequented the gay bar in Dallas, Texas, where the couple first met) and his interaction with them and the anticipation of the Loving II book, which is set to release this month on October 14. Since I recently interviewed Hugh and Neal for the most recent episode of The Queer Love Podcast, there was a lot of material to cover.

I’ve really been enjoying these Sunday chats via Substack LIVE, and I plan to do more (in fact, I have every Sunday in October booked with a guest). They take place at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET/7pm GMT, so mark your calendars if you want to tune in when we’re live to ask any questions. Or just wait for the recap. If there are any topics that you’d like me to cover, potential guests you want me to invite, or any other ideas for ways to keep expanding the QLP community, please don’t hesitate and let me know in the comments.

Thank you Wendy The Druid 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🌈, David Watson, Jim, and many others for tuning into my live video with Clint Collide!

Join me for my next live video in the app on Sunday, October 12. I’ll be interviewing Andy Jiaming Tang about his debut novel, Cinema Love, for our next QLP Book Club.

If you’re interested in buying the Queer Lens catalog or any of the other books we discussed in the, check out our Bookshop.org shelves.

After reading Oliver Radclyffe’s recent post on his Substack, titled “I don’t want to leave,” I knew we had to find some time to chat about the topic. We’d been trying to figure out a way to collaborate for some time now, especially after reading Oliver’s first book, Adult Human Male, and his recent memoir, Frighten the Horses (now available in paperback). So we finally made it happen this Sunday afternoon.

I was curious about Oliver’s take about the potential for leaving the country and returning to the U.K., since he has a British passport, after building a life over the past two decades in the U.S. As he wrote: “Would it be morally and ethically reprehensible for me to leave, knowing that I’m one of the few who can?”

I also wanted to focus on the some of the moving sections of the memoir that had hit home. I recommend everyone check out the book. It’s an eye-opening look at a late-blooming queer identity from which I think everyone can learn something.

In particular, I loved the section in Chapter 7 of Frighten the Horses—which I quoted during our conversation—when Oliver wrote:

“I’d pretty much given up on love by the time I’d met Charles. I’d never felt anything close to what the poets wrote about, so I don’t know, I just began to question the authenticity of their descriptions. I assumed the whole notion of romantic love must be nonsense peddled by mentally unstable creative people to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Like it was the equivalent of fashion magazines promoting unattainable body images to teenagers…”

At one point, I brought the fact that I grew up in the 1990s knowing I was labeled a criminal. As a teen, I was having gay sex (sodomy) in the state of Georgia with an older man. So it was a double whammy. Knowing one is considered an outlaw from a young age becomes embedded as part of one’s identity. I know it did for me, as well as for many other gay men of my generation or older. That’s one reason they can be envious of younger generations who can express their gender and sexuality so freely. Envy is insidious and can lead to many of the things we’re currently experiencing and is a cause of some of the loss of support in the LGBTQ+ community as a whole.

Besides the political parts of our convo, we discussed many other topics, including parenting and the anxiety that most parents feel about the potential of damaging their child in some way.

We both agreed that people should subscribe to Erin Reed’s Substack, Erin in the Morning, and become a paid subscriber if you can to support the excellent journalism she is doing. I am always impressed that she is often breaking news before many other better-funded outlets and hope she continues to thrive during this time of uncertainty and unrest.

To wrap things up, I asked Oliver for his advice on what anyone can do during this time of uncertainty, and he suggested supporting trans activists at the local level in your area, including protesting if your local health organization is ending its gender affirming care. Plus, consider how you can support the ACLU (they also offer tips and pointers on how to contact and write to your political representatives) and other progressive organizations.

Here’s a list of 100 organizations supporting trans people in all 50 states.

Sorry for the speed bump in the middle of the conversations (some technical issues caused us to lose contact for a couple minutes, so go ahead and skip that flub and get to the good parts after that bit). Thank you Musings on Interesting Times, Renne Proulx, Dale Corvino, Suzanne, and many others for tuning into my live video with Oliver Radclyffe! Join me for my next live video in the app.

After reading Lester Fabian Brathwaite’s recent post about the gay cheerleader Les in the Bring It On movie—which debuted 25 years ago this month—I knew we had to hop on a Substack LIVE and kiki about more gay s**t.

We started off discussing the new “story” published by New York magazine’s The Cut titled, “We’ve Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness,” and how Les was enjoying his own “slutty” summer. We moved on to his views on “Bizarro Hayden Panettiere, Riley Gaines,” the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis and what it meant that it was a trans woman who was responsible for the murder of innocents, before moving on to some lighter topics.

Turns out Les has written the first five chapters of his novel as a follow up to his debut nonfiction/memoir, Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant… and Completely Over It, that was published last year.

Watch the full conversation above and let us know what you think!

Thank you Clint Collide, Emillio Mesa, Rande Iaboni, Lee Tsiantis, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lester Fabian Brathwaite! Join me for my next live video in the app.

In the latest episode of the Queer Love Podcast, trans pioneer and gender outlaw Kate Bornstein speaks with host Jerry Portwood about the reissue of her book, Hello, Cruel World: 101+ Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. The second edition now includes 20 additional alternatives and Kate’s urgent new essay, “Hello, Cruel Gender.”

At the top of the pod, Kate addresses the hate messages coming from the Trump administration and beyond and what it means living a world when “cruelty is in power”:

“That's not gonna stop us. We are a culture; we aren't a bunch of disjoined bunch of people. I was fortunate to be in the position of a gardener and plant some seeds along with some other folks of my generation and they have been watered and we have entire garden now. And you can't mow that down!”

Kate also explains that she originally wrote and published Hello, Cruel World in 2006, before Obama was running for president, and things quickly became polarized the following year.

“What I didn't know when I was writing Hello, Cruel World was how to deal with a bully who said, ‘Don't cross this line. Once you cross this line, you're on the other side. You are other. That makes you bad. Other is evil.’

“And I didn't really address that as deeply as I wished I could have in the first edition. That's why the 20 new alternatives to suicide deal mostly with the idea of good and evil culture—which is what we've become.”

Listen in as Kate narrates one of the new “lessons” in the book: “Stay friends anyway.” Kate and Jerry also discuss how “stepping into the world of BDSM dykes” gave Kate’s writing a “rocket booster” when she was working on the Gender Workbook, her new theory of “gender in four dimensions” and how queer love is something not static. As she explains, “when you answer what is love, you've lost it. You know it when you embody it.”

Plus, find out what to expect in her queer romance novel, Nearly Roadkill, which is being reissued in September with an expanded narrative and a new, nonbinary character.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On Sunday, July 13, Troy Ford joined me for our second QLP Book Club hosted via Substack LIVE, to discuss his debut book, Lamb.

It felt especially appropriate to finally talk to Troy because, when I launched The Queer Love Project last summer, he was one of the first people I reached out to since he also hosts and runs Qstack, which is an invaluable resource for all the LGBTQ+ creators on the platform to find and support one another. He also answered the QLP Questionnaire! By now, it feels like we’re old pals, but it’s only been emails and DMs—so this was our first time officially talking.

We discussed the many autobiographical elements that informed Lamb, including Troy’s time attending a California prep school and the friend of his who inspired the character of Lamb (aka Willam Broeder) and the the great line by D (the narrator of the novel), who stated: “I guess we all look at our friends through the lens of me.”

In particular I was intrigued by the erotic and platonic love between D and Lamb and the elastic nature of gay male relationships. As Troy writes from D’s perspective:

“We fooled around a couple times back at Wolcott, but having to hide that we were gay from everyone just sort of sealed this bond between us. In some ways, it was more intimate than sex—I didn’t need a f**k buddy, I had a hand for that. Two!”

To dig deeper, I asked Troy to explain Lamb’s sexual dynamics, in particular the fact that he’s a big, 6-foot-6 punk and a bottom, which disappoints many potential hookups.

“I think Lamb being a bottom, and the whole question of gay men and their elastic, fluid relationships is a really rich topic of conversation,” Troy explained. “The tone of the gay community changed significantly after AIDS hit, and sex became a much more fraught dynamic between gay men. After many years when it was gays vs. the world, the does/doesn’t he have AIDS/HIV introduced a gay vs. gay question that severely curtailed the ‘I f**k my friends’ attitudes of post-Stonewall gay liberation.”

We also discussed Troy’s years of sobriety and the continuing issue of substance abuse in the gay community. “We want to present this idea of having it all together,” he explained. “But the reality that is not a lot of people’s experience. … A lot of my fiction deals with the ‘less glamorous’ sides of being gay.”

“Do you think, above all else, your book Lamb is about the need for gay men to shed shame and fear?” I asked.

Troy had a wonderful response, so make sure you watch the video to hear it in his words. (Hint: It’s around the 45:00 minute mark.)

If you haven’t already secured your copy, Lamb is available in paperback or ebook at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Plus, as Troy mentioned: If you buy the book—either ebook or paperback—through any retailer wherever you can order or find it, he will comp you a six-month subscription to his newsletter, FORD KNOWS. Same goes if you review it on either Goodreads or Amazon—because authors depend on those reviews!

Big thanks to Clint Collide, The Bathrobe Guy 👘, Homi Hormasji, Kimmy Win, Amarantha, Michael Horvich and many others for tuning into my live video!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For tonight’s inaugural Queer Love Book Club, Rasheed Newson joined from his home in Pasadena, California. And we’re living for his shade of green nail polish!

He’s the author of the national bestseller My Government Means to Kill Me, and his debut novel was a Lambda Literary finalist for Gay Fiction and was named one of the “The 100 Notable Books of 2022” by The New York Times. His forthcoming novel, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, is slated for publication by Flatiron in 2026. And we got the deets first, which will be a delicious romp through 1950s Hollywood.

As many may already be aware, Rasheed is also a television drama writer, producer, and showrunner. Along with his screenplay writing partner, T.J. Brady, he co-developed and is an executive producer of Bel-Air. The drama series has won three NAACP Image Awards and has been nominated several times for Best Drama Series. Additionally, Rasheed has worked on The Chi, Animal Kingdom, and Narcos, among other drama series. Rasheed was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He’s a graduate of Georgetown University. He currently lives with his husband and their two children in Pasadena.

My Government Means to Kill Me starts in 1985 New York City when our protagonist, Trey Singleton, is 18, and it progresses over a couple of years. Trey is telling this story in a series of “Lessons,” looking back from a future 50 years later. The novel is packed full of information about that time in NYC.

Trey’s parents are wealthy former Black Panthers who have “cashed in,” in Rasheed’s own words, and are now work as lobbyists for Eli Lilly and have powerful connections in D.C. They aren’t approving of his gayness, so he rejects his privilege and trust fund, leaves their mansion in Indianapolis to seek a new life in the big city. He eventually finds himself at the forefront of the Gay Rights movement in the late ‘80s and is even part of the founding of ACT UP.

In a review of the book by The Harvard Review, the critic wrote: “My Government Means to Kill Me marries the radical sentimentality of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues with the jarring odyssey of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”

I thought that was great—to yoke those two together—so I asked Rasheed what he thought of these comparisons. That jump started our conversation, which lasted approximately an hour, and here are a few highlights.

Some of my favorite scenes in the book are set at the Mt. Morris Baths in Harlem… Rasheed provides lusty, delicious descriptions of his many sexual encounters. Since I know from experience that many readers can be critical of such joyous descriptions of sex—especially with the specter of HIV/AIDS.

My first question: How did you manage to write about sex in such a positive way—so often it feels like it either needs to be “traumatic” or it gets labeled as erotica—so were you worried people would find Trey’s sexual recreation problematic?

We also discussed his inclusion of legendary Civil Rights leader and political organizer Bayard Rustin being at the baths. This (naked) wise man educates Trey over the course of the novel and becomes a surrogate father figure who encourages him to find a purpose and pursue it.

I’m so happy that more people are discovering his legacy, and hopefully you’ve seen Colman Domingo portray him in Rustin, which is currently on Netflix. Find the book of his life in letters, titled I Must Resist, if you’re interested in knowing more.

Afterward, we discussed the relationship Trey has with his roommate Gregory—which is wild—after they meet by chance. Trey is attracted to him: Gregory is a hottie Haitian hustler. Although they never have sex, they have a very intimate bond. It’s a lovely display of the elasticity of queer relationships and friends—Trey says he feels fortunate that Gregory has chosen him as a friend and roommate. He prays that they’ll f**k and he says he “loves him madly.” Since he seemed “sexy, street-smart and glamorous. Everything I wanted to be one day.” They cuddle and fight and seem bound to one another until it all blows apart.

I played the audio of Jelani Aladdin, the narrator of the book, reading from Chapter 6, titled “Lesson # 6: Romantic Notions Are Delusions.” It begins on page 76 of the paperback version for anyone who wants to read along.

Then, finally, we addressed Chapter 9, titled “Lesson # 9: Touch at Least One Dead Body,” where we are introduced to Angie's home hospice care for many men dying from complications due to HIV/AIDS. Trey feels a kinship and bond to these complete strangers and eventually makes his biggest sacrifice for this woman.

That struck me in particular because many people say gay men and lesbians don’t have a lot in common and, yet we see women sacrificing so much as caretakers. Later on, Trey, thinks "Lesbians had no place in my life," until he meets Angie—who schools him.

He’s scared of Angie—thinks she could throw him down a flight of stairs—but she also is full of a type of love for her fellow man that she’s something else entirely. This type resembles agape love, a selfless, unconditional, and sacrificial love, often considered the highest form of love in Christianity. It’s something many LGBTQ+ people tapped into during the AIDS pandemic and continue to tap into. Rasheed explained why it was essential to explore this amid all the messy stuff that Trey was living through at the time.

We took some excellent questions from those who were following the conversation live, including how to write effective sex scenes. That’s when Rasheed explained that sex is political and important and shouldn’t be negated.

A huge thanks to Rasheed for being so generous with his time and talent and sharing so many insights with us, three years after My Government Means to Kill Me was initially published in hardback. Be on the lookout for There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, due out in 2026, which goes deep into queer 1950s Hollywood, and includes Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Diahann Carroll and many more notables of the era. We’ll sure to be reading and telling you all about it as soon as pre-orders are available!

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It’s been nearly a year since we hosted our first QLP Book Club. Over that time I’ve been thrilled to talk to so many talented authors about their novels and how they intersected with various topics of queer love. But I have to admit, I was disappointed that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to focus on female-bodied desire. So I was thrilled to have author Mac Crane as our latest selection.

In A Sharp Endless Need, the intensity of high school basketball serves as a high-stakes arena for grief, queer awakening, and the crushing weight of perfectionism. Set in a small Pennsylvania town in 2004, the novel follows star point guard Mack Morris as they navigate a senior year defined by the death of their father and an all-consuming obsession with new teammate Liv Cooper.

As Mac writes at one point in this moving, heartbreaking and—ultimately—hopeful novel, basketball is "more erotic than dancing" and a form of "f*****g without touching." As someone who has never quite loved team sports and used to be fearful of athletic folks of all genders and persuasions, I have to say, Mac does an incredible job of showing the erotics of bball. Or as Mac stated quite bluntly: “Is basketball sex?”

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What’s so fantastic about the queer love angle is that it’s less about a "coming out" story and more about the visceral, often messy collision of desire and survival. I read Mac’s first book—I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself—and loved it, but it’s so different. It’s a speculative fiction novel about a queer mother grieving her wife's death while raising a child in a dystopian surveillance state.

Although I know every author hates this question, A Sharp Endless Need seems to have some autobiographical elements, so I asked Mac (the author) to share the inspiration and impetus to devote your creative energy to explore Mack, the character’s, story.

Mac shared that they did play basketball in college, but the book is obviously not autobiographical. First, however, we discussed that byline change from Marisa to Mac and whether it had anything to do with the character.

“Everybody is like, ‘Oh wow, way to change it up,’ I realized my name can be something different, and I wished my name was Mac. It’s not my alter ego, but it is writing a different version of myself. I realized: Oh, you can change yourself.”

Interestingly, Mac also talked about allowing themself to write about sports in literary fiction and how that doesn’t seem like someone writers have permission to do. “There’s still the age-old idea about jock versus nerd. Or how sports are not intellectual,” Mac explained. “This thing was a part of my life for 20 years, but I don’t think I can write about it.”

Since the novel is set in the early 2000s—and it captures a specific era of "Bush-era homophobia" and the pre-social media world of AIM and shared cell phones—I was curious: How did Mac think Mack and Liv’s relationship would differ if the story were set today? In particular, would their young queer love have evolved in any significant ways since then (especially with apps, etc.)?

“It was interesting to write about that precipice of technology,” Mac admitted. “I did share a phone with my mom. But I didn’t feel any stress about that.”

A fascinating area that we discussed with the erotics of women’s sports—in contrast to male athletes in sports—something I had no frame of reference about. “It’s often different in women’s sports; queerness is more acceptable. For them, they’re comfortable expressing themselves, their eroticism, their chemistry, their communication through those micro-movements of joy and celebration through basketball.”

Plus, we talked about Sheryl Swoopes (who first emerged from the closet in 2005) and Brittney Griner, and how there are more out WNBA players now, but that a lack of openly queer people in college or pro sports was still a thing in 2004. In the same vein, I mentioned the struggle for Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe (who I profiled in 2011, when she came out publicly) in soccer.

Then Mac talked about basketball as a form of prayer and playing the game as a type of church (check that out around the 18:00 minute mark). Also, how a basketball season can mirror a Shakespearean tragedy and provides great fodder for drama, conflict and tension.

Afterward, we talked about the infamous “bathtub scene.” This is one that fans of the book who recommended it to me said I had to discuss. Although, I played a couple of the audio clips with the narrator, Dani Martineck, who I think brings a wonderful element to the audiobook, I intentionally didn’t want to spoil this scene for any of the people who haven’t read (or listened) to it yet.

But to fill you in: On the court, Mack seems like the “alpha”—the point guard in control. In the bathtub, however, they are physically and emotionally naked. The bathtub scene is one of the few moments where Mack allows themself to be cared for rather than having to perform. I asked Mac to share how they crafted this moment, and it’s a great response (you can listen in at the 25:03-minute moment in the video). Mac approached it as a cinematic moment and hopes this will enter into the queer canon of bathtub scenes (like The Talented Mr. Ripley and Saltburn).

We discussed so many other elements of this novel, so I hope you enjoy listening in and discovering why A Sharp Endless Need is one of my favorite books that I’ve read from the past five years and clearly deserves to be included in a new canon of queer literature that explores love and relationships.

To wrap things up, I asked about Mac’s new book out this summer Perverts, a collection of 17 stories. It’s been described as:

“A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity.”

And at least one writer has called Mac the “queer George Saunders,” which seemed to pique the interest of several of the subscribers who joined us for the live conversation.

Thanks to all who joined us for the latest QLP Book Club. Stay tuned for the next selection, which will be announced soon and take place in June. If you have any recommendations, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments or in our chat or DM us directly. And if you want to join us for one of the upcoming live events taking place this spring or summer, then go to the link below. Until next time!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

By now you probably know I’m a big fan of archives, histories, biographies and exploring the queer past that has remained obscured for far too long. During my latest Sunday chat, I invited Ben Egerman to join me to discuss his “gay little history zines” and other historical work.

We talked about the sapphic love stories that more people should be aware, a transgender horse thief, the Black drag and ballroom scene of West Baltimore and so much more.

And no, in case you’re wondering: We did NOT coordinate our stripes!

Fun fact: I attended a production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball on Friday night, and Ben told me he has his tickets and is excited, in part, because André De Shields, who portrays Old Deuteronomy in the show, is from West Baltimore. I can’t recommend seeing this show enough: it’s pure queer joy!

Ben explained how he got started at the William Way archive in Philadelphia as well as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City. And I mentioned my first experience at the ONEArchives in Los Angeles. Plus, we talked about the fragility of some queer archives because they have been destroyed and lost to history (and how Leslie Lohman Museum has a valuable archive that contains a trove of unique materials)

“We don’t have access to generational memory as queer folks,” Ben explained. “In the same way as other ethnic, racial or language-based communities do… For queer people, your family is not usually a safe place for your document, and you have to actively seek to create those linkages.”

Ben offered advice for those who may want to keep their own paper and photos and other ephemera safe and potentially donate them to an archive. Plus, he told us how he’s collecting and keeping good documentation of his own research and materials.

He also mentioned checking out the Queer Stories Preservation Project. Among other resources, they also provide a link to an easy template to create your own zines. I also want to shout out Queer Archivist on Substack as a great resource.

Other books mentioned or referenced during our conversation:

* Amos Badertscher: Images and Stories

* Gay New York by George Chauncey

* When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan

* The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters

* Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington by James Kirchick

* Loving: More photographic history of men in love, 1850s-1950s (podcast episode)

* Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade

And in case you want to download the PDF of any of the zines that Ben’s created, he makes them available on the website. Here’s a link to the “Pansy Craze” one that we discussed.

Big scoop of the chat: I was excited to learn that Ben has been working on a book about queer Baltimore and when the book is available I’ll be sure to share more details. Plus, his next zine will be about John Waters and the “queer weirdos of the Baltimore suburbs” became counterculture icons.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for this live chat!

Our next big Substack LIVE will be on April 19 when I chat with author Marisa “Mac” Crane about their amazing novel, A Sharp Endless Need.

If you want to get your own copy of The QLP Quarterly zine, it’s easy: Come to one of our upcoming events or upgrade to become a Catalyst Member to support The Queer Love Project’s mission. I’ll mail you a copy and a T-shirt (like the one I’m wearing in the video).

Calendar of upcoming events:

* April 25 at The Porch in Nashville

* May 2 Jerry will be at Open Secrets Live

* May 4 QLP contributors read at Elyssa Maxx Goodman’s Miss Manhattan series

* May 9 at the Rainbow Book Fair in New York City

* May 12 Jerry will be reading at Must Love Memoir’s reading series

* June 7 at Asbury Book Cooperative during Asbury Park Pride in NJ

For more queer books that you might enjoy, visit our curated Bookshop.org shelves.

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve enjoyed Mark Addison Smith’s daily drawing project for years (you can follow him via Instagram if you’re curious), and I was thrilled that he agreed to collaborate with me on Vol. 2 of The QLP Quarterly zine. Mark is a queer artist and educator who specializes in typographic storytelling. His work focuses on using illustrative text to create visual narratives through printed matter, artist’s books and site installations.

I invited him to join me to chat about his ongoing “You Look Like The Right Type” archive—a 17-year practice with an archive that contains over 7,000 works on paper—and the selection he’s collected for his new art book, He’s One of Those, which will be available later this year. He even gave us an exclusive look of it pre-publication!

Before we went deep into more discussion of his artwork, I mentioned that I’d marched in the No Kings protest in New York City on March 28 because, among other things, it reminded me about the power of art, graphic design and creativity when it comes to political action. For example, if you aren’t aware of Visual AIDS and all the amazing work that this organization has helped foster, check it out.

Oh, and so I don’t forget to share it, at one point we did go on a tangent about tattoos (and my piercing). Here’s the essay I mentioned writing, titled “Overcoming My Tattoo Taboo.”

Among the many topics we discussed was this “straight people are not okay” drawing that I hope to feature on a T-shirt or other merch. Wouldn’t that be great?

Mark also explained his illustration style and its development, including the “hairy lettering” that he uses to such amazing visual effect. Lately he’s been leaning into “hyper-sexualized body forms” and “muscle daddies” and taking a quote that “may be innocent and making it a little dirty.” We sure love a subversive double entendre…

And this version of his stylized face with hair (a drawing that is also featured in the new zine) and how it’s maybe the “interior monologue” of a character from an essay (this one is included in Anthony DiPietro’s essay, “The (Gay) Marrying Type.”

The below drawing didn’t make it into the final version of the zine due to space constraints, but it exhibits Mark’s unique overlay/overlap text design that we discussed (read the caption to figure out what phrase he used).

Below is the drawing that is featured on the cover of The QLP Quarterly Vol. 2 (and on the inside page with the message/lettering).

Mark and I had such a fantastic time during our kiki, and we have so many other topics I’d love to discuss (including how we both grew up gay in the South), so hopefully we’ll be able to find time to have a follow-up chat. If you have anything you’d like to know about his art practice, feel free to share it in the comments. And if you want to explore more of his work or learn about his artist’s books and exhibitions, you can find more details on his website and email him directly.

Thanks so much for everyone who joined during our live chat. Stay tuned for the next one, which is planned for Sunday, April 5 at 1pm ET. I’ll be speaking to Ben Egerman about his “a gay little history” zines and essays and archival research.

If you want to get your own copy of The QLP Quarterly zine, it’s easy: Come to one of our upcoming events or upgrade to become a Catalyst Member to support The Queer Love Project’s mission. I’ll mail you a copy and a T-shirt (like the one I’m wearing in the video).

Calendar of upcoming events:

* April 25 at The Porch in Nashville

* May 9 at the Rainbow Book Fair in New York City

* June 7 at Asbury Book Cooperative during Asbury Park Pride in NJ

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

With a title like Men I Hate, Lynette D’Amico’s gorgeously written memoir in essays, you know people are going to raise an eyebrow. So when I invited her to join me for a chat recently, we definitely discussed the provocative title—and all the expectations that come with it.

As she explained, many people imagine it will be about right-wing enemies or other detestable people, but the reality is much more nuanced and complicated. Plus, as Lynette pointed out, the cover design also has a shadow title that reads: “men i love…”

By the way, her publisher, if you use Code “QLP” at checkout to buy Lynette’s memoir or other queer and sexuality studies books, you’ll receive 30% off + free shipping.

Some of you may be familiar with Lynette’s husband P. Carl’s memoir, Becoming a Man, which received widespread attention and has been adapted into a play. Men I Hate is Lynette’s side of their story, and is also about the formation of her lesbian identity and how Carl’s transition complicated her identity.

In the essays, she asks herself the question: Can a lesbian who loves a trans man still call herself a lesbian? After surviving coming of age in a traditionally gendered Sicilian American household, how does she make sense of men? What does it mean to love a man?

So I was eager to discuss these topics with Lynette in more detail. It was a fantastic conversation, and I learned so much about the durability and elasticity of longterm queer relationships.

We also spoke at length about another topic that I get asked about quite often: How do you write about friends and family in personal narratives? You’ll want to pay attention to what Lynette shares on the topic. You can also read more of her hard-won personal wisdom about it in this piece she published on her own Substack:

“I started writing these essays to help me clarify my own thinking. Desperation to say everything you need to say about your own story is a good place to start, so in draft stages I just spewed.

Which is what you do in a first draft. Tell the story, all of it. Don’t edit, don’t censor, don’t think how your pages will be received in the world. And be very judicious who you share your first pages with, especially as you are trying to work out your relationship to your subject, your own point of view to your subject. A first draft of an essay or a memoir is delicate, it’s a newborn. Don’t hand off the care and feeding of your pages to a brute of a reader, to someone who will slash and burn your pages and starve your creative energy. Your first reader needs to be generous and encouraging.

The slashing and burning will come. Trust me.”

Lynette generously read from the book, the piece titled “The Stasi Men,” which was also excerpted at Guernica magazine, and is an incisive bit of prose that examines masculinity. Plus, you can read an excerpt from another essay that QLP published earlier this year.

I want to thank Lynette for joining me for this chat, and all of you who tuned in during the live conversation via the Substack app. I’m glad I’ll have an opportunity to meet her and other writers and contributors in Baltimore next week when I attend the AWP conference. Here’s a guide to find out more about the activities, events and signings that The Queer Love Project is hosting. We’ll be publishing a a new essay on Wednesday but you’ll also be invited to join us for some live communications—so I hope you’ll join us!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For those who may be too young to recall how weird the 1980s and ‘90s were to be gay, you’ll definitely want to read Roddy Bottum’s debut memoir, The Royal We. In it, the musician details what it was like growing up in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco and forming the band Faith No More. And, believe me, it’s a really gay book!

He recently joined me on The Queer Love Podcast to talk a lot about his loves and losses, as well as his relationship with his boyfriend and bandmate Joey Holman. They formed the band Man on Man in 2020 and have since put out two albums. If you haven’t seen their video for “Daddy,” then you don’t know what you’re missing (and we discussed that controversy near the end of our chat).

Some of you might remember that Roddy wrote Faith No More’s first internationally recognized song, “We Care a Lot.” He also was behind one of the greatest anthems to blow jobs, “Be Aggressive,” before he revealed he was gay in a 1993 interview with Lance Loud for The Advocate. To put it in context: This was before Rob Halford of Judas Priest had come out; before Michael Stipe of REM or Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü discussed their sexuality openly in the media. Plus, Elton John was only toying with being bisexual and Freddie Mercury never came out publicly before his untimely death in 1991.

Roddy also went on to form the band The Crickets, with JD Sampson and Michael O’Neill, and you might also remember his ‘90s band Imperial Teen, with that hit song on the Jawbreaker soundtrack, “Yoo Hoo.” We also discussed his relationship with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, including his “good-bye kiss” with the Nirvana frontman. As Roddy reminded me, his Imperial Teen song “You’re One”— with the chorus lyric “You take it like a man boy”—was inspired by Kurt.

To kick things off, I told Roddy how much I appreciated his frankness. Not only does he share details about his younger days cruising men in the bushes and toilets of Los Angeles, he writes such short and beautiful lines such as: “I didn't realize what a privilege it was to be gay until so much later.”

We also discussed his first boyfriend, Jim Olson, and how that played out since, as Roddy writes: “Our sex was secret and incredible, but I was smitten with his intellect.” He goes on to explain:

“In prison there is love. In the classroom. In the workplace. It happens where it’s not allowed, and it happens where it’s encouraged. Jim and I were in love and in the throes of growing up in a secret place where no one knew that it was…”

Although we didn’t discuss it directly during the podcast conversation, I also wanted to quote this section from the end of Chapter 24 (you can find it on page 154 if you have your own copy):

“What is love when you don’t want it? When you’re scared of it and need to keep it under wraps? What is gay when you don’t want to be? The tedium of not knowing who I was took a toll… What if the hiding place is so good you’re never found? … what if the hiding place is dark and dank and hard to breathe in, and you discover the lid of the box you’re hiding in locks from the outside? The panic. The horror. Being hidden was what I thought I wanted.”

Luckily, Roddy did survive this time and has had an incredibly creative and productive life. As he explained to me during the podcast about that first relationship:

“There was a regularity and a specialness to that particular relationship and to the insanity of what that person was and the drama that it brought to my life. It kind of did form my opinion of what love is, or was, in that context. Love to me was a lot of drama, and I’ve had to sort of readjust my take on what love is in today’s world; in my relationship now. Does it have to be these crazy peaks, these screaming matches and differences and ups and downs? I’ve had to sort of adjust from an early age of what it was to me then and what it is to me now.”

We ended our chat on a positive note, with Roddy urging people to get off their phones and to show up in person to support one another.

“It's always a good decision to go outside and be with people. Even as challenging as that is. And that's what these events that have been happening, the book events that I've been doing, have been about. I always say at every event. ‘Thank you so much for just showing up, for being here physically, for speaking and listening and being in the flesh."‘ It makes such a difference.”

Thanks for listening, reading and supporting all we’ve been doing with The Queer Love Project. Let us know if you have any memories from concerts or events that helped you. Leave it in the comments or amplify this however you prefer. See you soon!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Michael Lowenthal is the author of a story collection, Sex With Strangers, and four more novels. His writing has appeared in a slew of prestigious publications, including Tin House, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Guernica and The Southern Review. Plus, he’s taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College and, for more than 20 years, he was a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. He splits his time between Boston and Pittsburgh.

We first made contact when Michael submitted an excerpt from Place Envy, his latest memoir, which he calls a “quest-in-essays.” In that piece, titled “Estrangeiro,” he details a serendipitous encounter with a young man in Salvador, Brazil, while he was on an artist’s retreat. I was excited to discuss that story and the way the rest of the essays in the collection—which span decades of his life—came to be shaped.

The memoir spans locations from a Mexican cruise for blind gay men to a remote Scottish island, so I was curious to find out how traveling to “un-queer” or unfamiliar spaces provides a better “orientation” for his own identity than staying in established queer hubs. Michael had a great response, so I’ll hope you’ll listen/watch to find out more. Then we went deep on that whole Amish experience in the essay titled “Ligature.” You’ll definitely want to hear about how he’s maintained a friendship with his Amish friends since his college days.

Thank you Michael Horvich, Lynette D'Amico, and many others for tuning into my live video with Michael Lowenthal!

The Queer Love Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It was such a pleasure to read Steve Majors’ latest memoir in essays, Man Made: In Search of Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood, and an even greater privilege to be able to discuss it with him. He explores the intersections of race, identity and family in his work. In his debut memoir, High Yella, he recounted his experience growing up as a white-passing, mixed-race child in an all-Black family in rural Western New York. Now, he goes even deeper.

Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what to talk about with a person who publishes so much about their personal experiences since it’s all on the page: What else is there to say? But with Steve that’s not the case. Although he explores so many facets of his life and writes eloquently and with great economy, he still has so much wisdom to impart, and I was thrilled to discover that he doesn’t skimp on sharing it.

I don’t often quote from the publisher’s description of a book, but this collection covers so much territory, and they do a good job of summing it up:

“Not all little boys want to grow up to be like their dads. The shy ones, the sensitive ones, the ones people mock as strange or call queer—sometimes they want to grow up to be loved by men who stand in for their fathers. They’ll put up with bullying from an older brother, taunts from the gym teacher, long work hours from a boss, and even discipline from a gay daddy, all as a means to discover what kind of man they truly want to be.

“Steve Majors takes us on a journey of his own self-discovery as he grows from a gay boy in search of a father figure to a gay man grappling with what it means to be a father himself. In doing so, Majors creates various snapshots of time in which his—and the world’s—understanding of what it means to be a gay man changes.”

Yes, yes and yes!

Steve doesn’t shy from the difficult areas of his own life. As he explained during our chat, who he was as a kid is different than who he is was at 20 and who he is today. One particularly poignant moment is around the relationship with his brothers (you can read an excerpt here) and his regret that his gayness probably means he missed out on some opportunities of love and connection with them.

Now for a pivot. I read a section of the essay “Dirty Old Man” that begins with the lines: “When it comes to sex and relationships, men are said to relish the role of hunters. It’s a toxic attribute that applies to some of us, whether straight or gay.” I was intrigued by the closing of the essay that details:

“Like many young men, I first convince myself I am looking for a sexual coupling to bridge the gap in my life. I takes years for me to understand what I need is an emotional connection.

“Like a sixth sense, this man and men like that, have the ability to tune into the vulnerabilities of other men and boys. And when they do, they use psychological coercion, physical force, and sometimes a boy’s drunken consent to fulfill their twisted desires.

“We gay boys and men may think we are the hunters looking for our sexual conquest, but sometimes, all too late, we discover we are they prey.”

That unearthed some vulnerabilities on my own side and I shared a bit about my own tactics to not be perceived as a hunter and how we twist ourselves into curious knots when it comes to hierarchical relationships.

Plus, since he talks about his crushes on several hockey players while in college, I asked him what he thought about the popularity of Heated Rivalry, and the fact that so many straight people are loving the story of gay romance on the ice. I may have met my match with Steve: He seems to obsess over TV and pop culture, and it’s power and influence over us, as much as I do.

Overall, Steve is adept at looking at many of the blueprints and scripts that we are given—by our families, popular culture, historical precedent—and pulling them apart, looking at them closer, questioning and exploring how to rewrite and improve them.

For example, he’s not afraid to reveal that his relationship with his daughters (who are now in their early twenties) is complex and confusing. Although we didn’t have time to go deeper on the topic, he’s shared an excerpt that gets at the crux of the identity conundrum:

“With time, I see the only doubts about my Blackness lie within me, not my kids. To my Black daughters, I am no different than other fathers. As dads, all of us are invariably set side by side against some ideal in our children’s eyes and found wanting. Sometimes, we are perceived to be missing something on the outside: not cool enough, not tall enough, not skinny enough, or not handsome enough. Other times, it’s on the inside, and we’re just not self-aware enough.

Whatever we lack, we cannot convince our kids that we can be anything but who we are. We just have to convince them that we’re just like them — still learning, growing, sometimes failing, and ultimately still trying to find our own identities in this world.”

There’s so much to discover and cherish in Steve’s latest book. I hope you enjoy our conversation and check it out for yourselves!

Thank you The Studio: After Dark, Shant Knows It All, and many others for tuning into my live video with Steve Majors—stay tuned for our next Substack LIVE very soon!

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