We read gay novelist Andrew Holleran’s 1979 column “Fast-Food Sex,” in which he performs a playful exhaustion with gay promiscuity. Now cheap and abundantly available, gay 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.

In this episode, we talk about how gays often make promiscuity into a questionable binary: casual sex vs. intimacy and coupling, for example, instead of seeing sex as something that means different things in different contexts, and is part of different modes we move between in different spaces and seasons of life.

Chapters

00:00 Andrew Holleran and "fast-food sex"

17:56 Fast-food sex vs. home-cooked sex

27:00 Growing up with evangelical ideas about sex

28:45 Romanticism is a threat to domesticity, too!

31:58 Is democratic abundance less hot?

37:58 The myth of hypersexual-but-lonely gays

40:02 The uniqueness of gay intimacy

43:04 Why straight romance ideas are bad for gays

48:25 The manosphere and sex-negative feminists

50:31 Sex is both amazing and boring

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Sources

Andrew Holleran, “Fast-Food Sex,” Christopher Street, April 1979.

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance (1978).

Andrew Holleran, “Dark Disco: A Lament,” Christopher Street, December 1978.

Priya Krishna, “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery is Reshaping Mealtime,” New York Times, January 30, 2026.

Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (2009).

Tim Dean and Oliver Davis, Hatred of Sex (2022).