By day Terry Dolan coordinated the fusion of free-market radicalism and evangelical fundamentalism known as the New Right. By night he cruised DC's steamrooms and gay bars. In 1982, his face appeared on the cover of Christopher Street with an article about his radical, norm-breaking politics and his hookup with a federal employee.

DANIEL LEFFERTS(author of the novel Ways & Means) joins David and Blake to talk about the contradictions of right-wing gays past and present. We discuss the pleasures both of being an insider and of hating insiders, and why the right-wing homosexual stirs the gay imagination to fascination, disgust, and sympathy.

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Chapters

00:00 - Our first threesome

06:27 - The important question: Was Terry Dolan hot?

09:55 - The “Rich and Powerful Queens” of the Reagan right

12:03 - Gay hustlers, strippers, and spies

16:25 - What type of gay was Terry Dolan?

21:35 - Why it gets harder to be gay in the GOP

27:04 - Who was screwing who in the New Right?

32:25 - Dolan as a pioneer of norm-breaking

40:54 - Why do we want to confront closeted gays?

48:04 - Right-wing gays and the pleasures of power

50:22 - Dolan’s hookup with a federal employee

54:32 - Daniel’s descent into the world of gay MAGA

57:42 - The petty-bourgeois class position of OnlyFans boys

1:03:08 - The good boys who love Red Scare

1:09:20 - Gay attractions to transgression and order

1:13:50 - The weird homoeroticism of MAGA

SOURCES

Perry Deane Young, “God’s Bullies,” Christopher Street, August 1982.

Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976-1980 (2021).

Neil J. Young, Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (2024).

James Kirchick, “The Secret Life of a Gay Political Strategist in Reagan’s Washington,” Rolling Stone, July 28, 2022.

Shawn McCreesh, “Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government,” New York Times, August 26, 2025.

Shawn McCreesh, “In South Dakota, Neighbors Feel Sorry for Kristi Noem’s Husband,” New York Times, March 31, 2026.

Daniel Lefferts, “My Afternoon With the ‘Normal Gay Guys’ Who Voted for Trump,” GQ, February 10, 2025.

Jack Crosbie, “Hasan Piker: A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body,” New York Times, April 27, 2025.

Gays being masc has been making people mad for half a century now, and in this episode, we read Seymour Kleinberg’s 1978 Christopher Street essay, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?” to find out why. We discuss the rise of “gay macho” in the 1970s, exemplified by the clone, the leather bar, BDSM, and urban gay male promiscuity. We talk about different gay male stances toward feminism, the enduring belief that effeminacy is inherently radical, and the tendency of gays of all styles to declare that “all” gays are being gay in a way that excludes them. We talk about the origins of our erotic fascination with masculinity and the importance of being able to revel in what we find hot without overthinking it.

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Sources

Seymour Kleinberg, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?,” Christopher Street, March 1978.

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Society, Culture, and Politics (2002)

Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975.

Edmund White, “Fantasia on the Seventies,” Christopher Street, September 1977.

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 1970s (2009)

Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

Seymour Kleinberg, Alienated Affections: Being Gay in America (1980)

Midge Decter, “The Boys on the Beach,” Commentary, September 1980.

Larry Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (2005)

Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (1990)

Amia Srinivasan, “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?,” London Review of Books, March 22, 2018.

Anastasia Berg, “Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu Responds to Amia Srinivasan,” The Point, July 18, 2018.

Leo Bersani, Homos (1995)

We read Michael Musto’s 1978 Christopher Street cover story “Every Night Fever,” about the gays who go to the disco every night of the week, an example of a journalism genre that fascinates us—cultural trend stories that simultaneously report and constitute a social phenomenon. We discuss the pleasures of displaying oneself in the gay social world, the way gays moralize about and evaluate each other based on how much they go out, clubbing as bookish people, divorces during COVID, why incels should go out, why we hate Hinge, whether Gen Z is bad at going out, and more.

Sources

Michael Musto, “Every Night Fever,” Christopher Street, May 1978.

Nik Cohn, “Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night,” New York, June 7, 1976.

Stephen Phillips-Horst, “Have We Reached Peak Gay Sluttiness?” New York, August 29, 2025.

Kyle Munzenrieder, “Michael Musto Shares His Life in Parties,” W, May 12, 2023.

Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (2008)

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978)

We read George Stambolian's "Interview With a Hot Man" from the February 1983 issue of Christopher Street and talk about the central, yet perennially controversial, role that physical beauty plays in gay culture. We compare notes on our own experiences of feeling hot and wanting hot people, and about the competing – but perhaps not ultimately opposed – tendencies in gay life toward competitive elitism and democratic collectivity.

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Sources

• Joe Bernstein, “Handsome at Any Cost,” New York Times, February 13, 2026.
• Jordan Castro, “Getting the Pump,” Harper’s, February 2024.
• Blake's Substack posts about George Stambolian's interviews and his archival diary
• George Stambolian, “Interview With a Hot and Handsome Man,” Christopher Street, 1983.
• George Stambolian, Gay Fantasies / Male Realities (1984).
• David's Substack post about looksmaxxing and contemporary anti-beauty discourse.