Many of the pieces are pop culture oriented, exploring the ways in which certain pop figures may have saved many a queer kid's life, whether that figure is a woman singer or a porn star. To read the letters of two people to each other is an invasion of privacy. Perhaps not as much so as reading a diary. A journal is also filled with writing that cannot be understood by others, private messages uninterpretable, but requiring no explication, because the reader is the writer. A correspondence may also have a coded aspect to it, but it is a code shard by two people, with more keys, since two correspondents may share information from past letters or from interaction outside of the correspondence.
Prose written with an audience in mind is even more explicit, less coded.
Within its text, it's said that they mostly met each other at parties and only got together alone once. But I am playing this wrong if it's all intellectual, since this is very emotional, loss coming at us as Sam slips away with AIDS, and five years later Dodie writes a last letter to his ghost and SX's that still haunt. Toward the New Degeneracy by Bruce Benderson. This essay makes the argument that the literary avant-garde is bankrupt because it has lost touch with the underclass. Benderson traces the way that gay liberation has gone from being a countercultural phenomenon to one that upholds middle class values.