In this episode we talk about gay men and women: friendships, commonalities, and the often overlooked sexual tensions. We’re joined by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who deals with some of these issues in her book, The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men, from bachelorettes at gays bars to straight girls on Grindr to the women who fall in love with their gay besties. We talk about how some of these themes appeared in the past, in Christopher Street, and also how Phoebe uses them in her book to think about our cultural understandings of gender and desire. We talk about some famous intellectual straight women who were problematically horny for gay men and some gay men who were oblivious to the fact that their women friends were horny for them. We recover the core commonality that gay men and straight women have—being horny for men—and note how new cultural ideas about sexual fluidity and queerness mistakenly suggest that gender doesn’t matter in who we desire, leading to discourses that are strangely detached from reality.

Chapters

(00:00) Introducing the last straight woman

(08:40) Being bloggers and bad grad students

(12:39) Gay men and straight women in Christopher Street

(20:55) The fake lesbian straight woman who got Me Tooed

(24:18) Are straight women and gay men really platonic friends?

(31:39) How we came to think all women are queer

(37:34) Phoebe’s concept of “frumpy but horny”

(43:02) Are that many people really bisexual?

(59:38) You can’t figure out your identity online

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Phoebe Maltz Bovy is an editor at the Canadian Jewish News and a columnist for the Globe and Mail. She co-hosts the podcast Feminine Chaos with Kat Rosenfield and writes on Substack. Her new book, The Last Straight Woman, was released in May 2026.

Mentioned

• Seymour Kleiberg, “Friendship: Gay Men and Women,” Christopher Street, October-November 1979.
• Phoebe Maltz Bovy, The Perils of “Privilege”: Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage (2017).
• Blake Smith, “The Ethics of Self-Interpretation,” Tablet, November 18, 2024.
• Melissa de la Cruz and Tom Dolby, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: True Tales of Love, Lust, and Friendship Between Straight Women and Gay Men (2007).
• Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954).
• Zoe Greenberg, “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist is the Accused?” New York Times, August 13, 2018.
• Rachel Aviv, “Martha Nussbaum’s Moral Philosophies,” The New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
• Rachel Aviv, “Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds,” The New Yorker, March 6, 2023.
• Cartoons Hate Her, “I Dress for My Personality, and My Personality is Annoying,” June 16, 2026.
• Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (1989)
• Phoebe Maltz Bovy, “Lena Dunham’s Frumpiest-Horniest Scandal, Revisited,” May 13, 2026.