David Sessions

historian, cohost of @OffCSPod. i've written for @newrepublic, @the_point_mag, @chronicle, @dailybeast, @slate & others.

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

I just love the idea that after presumably coming out to her community, doing IVF and raising two children with her non-Muslim, tattooed, lesbian life-partner, the woman in question remains committed to full Islamic modesty dress

[Vincent Bevins @Vinncent]

I can't wait for the world to realize that stadiums in the USA are called like the Doritos CryptoScam Raytheon Thunderdome

[John Handel @_John_Handel]

An underrated Derrida text

[David Sessions @davidsess]

@_John_Handel I wrote my MA thesis on it! It’s so good

[David Sessions @davidsess]

My conclusion from Boston Pride weekend is that roughly 2003-2013 is the music era everyone from 21-45 right now universally knows and loves

[Gay Interrupted @TwinkTheory]

Edmund white was the good kind of pervert, Santa Claus of perverts, I miss him. Once John waters goes this brand is lost to society forever.

[David Sessions @davidsess]

Republicans never explained why they suddenly stopped opposing gay marriage/rights, and their voters adapted to the cultural consensus without any profound shift in beliefs. So it's not much of a surprise that their support evaporated when the right picked up the culture war again.

[David Sessions @davidsess]

My take on the drop in LGBT support (especially among GOP voters) is that what people tell pollsters follows what they hear from partisan leaders/feel the cultural consensus to be. GOP voter support surged when Republican pols and Fox News stopped talking about gay rights.

[David Sessions @davidsess]

@thomashobohm A more likely reason is that digital communication has given us more connections than any person can actually manage. People are afraid to hurt other people's feelings and don't have the emotional bandwidth to communicate sensitively with a bunch of people they barely know.

[Off Christopher Street Podcast @OffCSPod]

In 1979, the gay novelist Andrew Holleran heard tell of a gay man in New York who made someone go on 19 dates before he would even kiss them. 

“How marvelous that in 1979 someone would still refuse his person to another!” Holleran wrote. “For people aren’t refusing their persons much anymore. In fact, grabbing a body is about as easy as going downstairs and buying a hamburger—which is why in San Francisco they call it “fast-food sex.”

The “man who dated 19 times,” as Holleran goes on to call him, becomes an avatar for his ambivalence about gay promiscuity and yearning for domesticity. Cheap and abundantly available, sex has supposedly lost its power to thrill or even to signify. Already at the peak of post-Stonewall gay life, we see the outlines of discourses that persist today in the perpetual rants against @Grindr, “hookup culture,” and open relationships, as well in revived reactionary critiques of the sexual revolution and a yearning for a type of eroticism imagined to be lost. Promiscuity is held to blame for an alleged shallowness of gay relationality, for preventing the establishment of deeper intimacy and coupling, and on and on.

We love Holleran and his witty, queeny columns in Christopher Street, but we’re not having it. In this episode of @OffCSPod, we talk about how promiscuity is made into yet another questionable binary: casual sex vs. intimacy and coupling, for example, instead of seeing sex as something that signifies differently in different contexts, part of different modes we move between in different spaces and seasons of life.
https://t.co/jk7SIJ0WGO

[Ben Dreyfuss @bendreyfuss]

LLMs love to add filler introductory nonsense like “here’s where it gets complicated,” “the thing most people miss is,” or “this is what so many folks forget”

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Just answer my question, you stupid robot! Where are the best whore houses in Providence, RI?

[Off Christopher Street Podcast @OffCSPod]

Did gay men invent cancel culture?

Even before it was filmed, William Friedkin’s gay serial-killer thriller Cruising (1980) attracted massive publicity and protests from gay writers in New York, who feared it depicted the gay men of the city’s leather bars as sex degenerates in a moment of rising homophobia and right-wing politics.

In EPISODE SIX, we talk about Christopher Street editor Charles Ortleb’s strange screed against the film, which also served as a political statement for the magazine’s desire for gay men to become a “people” with a collective identity. We talk about how the controversy over a film now seen as a cult classic foreshadowed contemporary debates about representation and cultural appropriation, the long history of gay men analogizing homophobia to fascism and the Holocaust, and whether there’s a kind of identity politics that might be less dumb than what we experience on social media today.

https://t.co/hzZdgwedPo

[David Sessions @davidsess]

@areyousurebruv OK girl lol

[David Sessions @davidsess]

It is kind of wild to be an ex-fundamentalist in 2026 and see all the fringe ideas you fought to escape from just become mainstream secular culture

[kofi anon @poemPilled]

No one wants to jack off anymore they want to endlessly critique jacking off

[Brooks Otterlake @i_zzzzzz]

Found a novelization of Precious based on the novel Push by Sapphire

[Amanda Killian @eroscestlavie_x]

It's extremely worthwhile to look into America's overall cultural relationship to the concept of sobriety, temperance, and self-denial when trying to parse cultural trends related to those ideas or their opposite. Many don't realize how specific the US substance neurosis is.

[Dan Walden @dwaldenwrites]

The transformation of “autodidact” from “person without a college degree who reads widely and talks with other people” into “person who watches hours of YouTube essays and talks about conspiracy theories on Discord” is among the great intellectual tragedies of our era.

[David Sessions @davidsess]

Move over calling all books "novels," here comes calling any type of content consumption, including reading and listening, "watching"