I'm in New York looking at George Stambolian’s papers (if you don't know who this is—ignorant! homophobe! anti-Armenian!—check out my earlier posts on him, one of which includes some Woman-of-Letters seethe in the comments).
In the late 70s and early 80s, Stambolian was moving from academic studies of Proust and homosexuality in French literature/theory into a new kind of role as critic, anthologizing (and writing) new gay male fiction, interviewing representative gay male ‘types’ and starting a column in the New York Native in which he tried to become Carrie from SATC (the joke is ofc it's the other way around). The first ones, which I'm posting below, are still a bit academic in tone, and already tinged with AIDS dread, but they get at some of the fun vitality I find in this passage (which isn't not also my own) between the scholarly and the sleazy…
And ok speaking of sleaze…a teaser for a future post featuring Stambolian’s rejoinder to Sontag, “Notes on Sleaze”:
