12 Questions for Steven Phillips-Horst

The writer and podcaster on the current state of the gay world, the line between art and propaganda, whether or not there's any value in cliché, Gore Vidal, desperation, and more.

Photo: Thomas Dozol

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I’m texting with the Armenian/American writer Ani Tatintsyan. There’s been a list on a literary message board of hot Substack writers. She’s on it. Miraculously I’ve been listed too. I wonder if a male or female put me on. Then I realize, based on the wording, that it doesn’t necessarily mean hot in terms of appearance, but rather in terms of trends, of readership and interest. There was a heart next to my name, but hearts can be used to describe appreciation toward the writing, not necessarily a sexy thing. Everything is propaganda, some of it is just embarrassing, Phillips-Horst writes in our interview. By corollary I begin to think which I’d prefer, to be a hot dude, or a hot writer, an ugly hot writer. And the truth is I’m not sure. I love to write, it’s what I’ve devoted my life to, painfully. But who doesn’t want, more than anything in the world, to just be hot, admired in the immediate? Either way, it’s better than complete indifference, so for a moment or two, lying on my couch, I feel at ease. This quickly goes away when I receive an email receipt for something I’d never purchased. My card information has been stolen once again. I no longer care if I’m hot in either the literary trend or physical way. Someone’s about to steal whatever’s left in my bank account.

For some deranged reason I put off the phone call to the bank and continue to text Ani. She has this gorgeous private office in Brooklyn where she tutors young children. I ask her how the office is holding up.

‘They tried to take it away from me in the summer and I didn’t let them, made some enemies because of it but yes I still have it… LOL.’

‘I’m glad.’ I reply. ‘This is one of those circumstances in life where making enemies is worth it. That and calling it off with a fiancé [shrug emoji].’

‘Oh yes I have some experience with that too.’ Ani replies. I know she does, because I’ve heard her story before, from her and from others.

Breaking up with your fiancé aside, the concept of making enemies is something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately, what with this interview series and the simple act of writing fiction, nonfiction. Everyone who knows you sees themselves in your work, in your criticisms; the resulting rebuke is endless. I don’t know if the word enemy is hyperbolic (definition: a person who is actively hostile to someone) but it’s an indisputable truth that many people have become quite angry with me. This is something I have to accept. And again, it’s better than indifference, than to be screaming into the void with nothing received in return. People will become angry with me in life, I’m not one of those people who have the gift of avoiding antagonism. Those people are rare and good for them. My gifts lie elsewhere, I hope. My former fiancé’s family got quite angry with me when we split, as did Ani’s with her.

‘Do you ever think of it as a “defining moment”?’ She asks, before adding. ‘I do.’

I suspect by defining moment she’s referring to something like, but not quite, an epiphany, a crossroads or climax, perhaps a decisive instance of no return. I do, I do, I do, I do, I repeat in my head, mimicking Ani’s slightly drawn out California girl-voice. I get another notification that someone is booking a hotel room with my debit card at the Hilton Doubletree in Midtown; $400. What a choice.

‘Of course,’ I finally say to Ani. ‘But I worry about making the same mistake again, and then finding myself in this absurd reality of having had so many defining moments, a life of endless defining moments that lead to a definition that’s never near conclusive, only disasters causing new insights, disasters stacking up on top of one another and then all that’s left are perspectives and moments but nothing practical that’s worthwhile, or spiritually meaningful in the present. Something like that.’

‘The chasing of some special moment is what makes it this way I think, like for example I’m always waiting for the perfect thing and I often pretty much ignore everything else and that kinda ends up breaking my heart.’

‘Yes, I know the feeling.’

‘[wounded heart emoji]’

And then we stop talking, and I call the bank and cancel my card, I call the Hilton to say it wasn’t me, and they say, ‘oh yes it was,’ and then I hang up hoping the bank will end up dealing with it. I return to what I was doing before all these futile distractions had begun, reminiscences of defining moments and all the failures and the enemies and the heartbreak and the disaster which eventually lead us to the present, a present of having someone steal your bank info to book a two star hotel in Times Square and buy four smoothies and six sandwiches from a local Joe & the Juice (sic). I pick up my iPad and continue reading over Steven Phillips-Horst’s interview responses (eloquent ones) about gay life (eloquent too), the way it used to be more exciting, the pivotal moments when it began to grow stale and become humdrum, monotonous (why do those two words always go together so nicely?), like everything else our commodifying culture has chewed up and spit out. Gay life, straight life, marital life and work; all the same, a product of mass consumption and distribution. Turns out getting fucked in the ass hasn’t been so niche or special in quite a while. Reminder that it’s okay to cry. It’s okay not to respond to that email. It’s okay not to tell your sexual partners you tested positive for chlamydia. It’s okay to masturbate at your desk in full view of your coworkers. It’s okay to dismantle your neighbor’s Ring camera — one of Horst's tweets after the recent election results, arriving right after a defining moment® for the United States.

Phillips-Horst is quick to remind me that defining moments in time where paradigms shift and the culture changes are nothing new, yet rather something cyclical. In relation to the aforementioned question and answer on the supposed banality of contemporary gay life, he digresses: You can go back to the 2000’s and find plenty of acrimonious GSA meetings at liberal high schools where fights were breaking out over vegan representation. You can go back to the 70’s and find plenty of anxious killjoys who just couldn’t let gays have fun sucking dick on the pier… There was only a brief period in modern history when being gay was allowed and fun—and then AIDS destroyed all that. That put the dampers on gay joy for about 15 years. A damper on joy is an adequate, universal turn of phrase, one to describe the momentary nature of happiness and its inevitable decline. Someone who understands this concept has a firm grasp on nature, and therefore the world. Everything is fleeting, nothing should be taken all too seriously. This perspective gives way to a skeptical sense of humor, and it’s true that one of Phillips-Horst’s strongest qualities as an artist, a multidisciplinary artist, is that he’s incredibly funny. ‘A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.’ Clive James once wrote. The only really pure way to be gay without all the pressure is to suck dick, which is still incredibly fun!

Along with the famous lesbian Lily Marotta, Phillips-Horst hosts a semi-popular podcast on the iHeartRadio network called Celebrity Book Club, where Marotta and Phillips-Horst read oft-cheesy, ghostwritten memoirs (Prince Harry, Anthony Kiedis) before breaking them down with their own brand of unstructured, conversational acerbic wit. It exists as a wonderful parasocial experience. I’ve experienced this firsthand. It goes back to that period of calling it off with my fiancé. I was living with her in Montreal at the tail-end of the pandemic, feeling, in minus-twenty-degree weather, far more isolated than ever before. It wasn’t directly anyone’s fault, not even the pandemic’s, but I’d never felt completely comfortable in the city, neither socially or professionally; it didn't come to feel like home. While my ex would be on sales calls I was either copywriting for some second-rate brand or (and this was more often the case) perpetually unemployed, and I’d take my dog for long walks in St. Henri along the Lachine canal. I’d put on my headphones and tune in to Marotta and Phillips-Horst and, with them, in their sardonic disdain for everything that appeared disingenuous and tacky, I felt more at home, back at my dinner table in lower-Manhattan with my equally snarky parents, the incessantly dissatisfied art and theater environment I was unfortunate enough to have grown up around. The podcast’s discursive form annoyed me from time to time, and I’d regularly skip through episodes without finishing them, but the product in and of itself was both a panacea and retreat from an environment where I felt hopelessly out of place.

The situation was bizarre, something I wasn’t used to. Feeling out of place is not common for a native New Yorker; every kind of freak or niche milieu can be found dwelling in each corner of this city, even in this day and age of our tech’d out conformity; New York’s sustaining ability, no matter how unlivable and expensive, to host all the world’s myopic weirdos is remarkable. But in that moment of time, living in the surprisingly provincial city of Montreal, I identified and felt compassion for the gay teenager in Iowa, or some shit place like that, who needs figures like Marotta and Phillips-Horst to understand and viscerally feel that they’re not alone in the world. The whole experience gave living in Montreal a certain perspective, the elements outside myself that I’d never previously empathized with or perceived. In this regard, Philips-Horst is an important cultural figure. He allows people, whether purposely or inadvertently, to feel part of something larger than themselves, thus allowing them to feel, perhaps, more free.

This interview series has given me the ability to reach out to figures like Phillips-Horst and build a dialogue with them. He came to a reading