Benoit Denizet-Lewis.

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Writer // 33 // Boston

FORTY YEARS AGO it would not have been possible for a young journalist to make a name and a career for himself by writing about gay life for a mainstream news publication. But Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a contemporary journalist and author, has done just that, writing seminal articles for The New York Times Magazine like "Double Lives on the Down Low."

"Being openly gay certainly didn't hurt my career," says Denizet-Lewis, who grew up in San Francisco not five minutes away from the Castro. As a young man in denial about his sexuality, he says he might as well have been 500 miles away. "As a kid I changed buses on the corner of Castro and Market, oddly enough, and I looked around and it was a lot of leather, and in my mind I didn't relate to that." Nevertheless, it makes him angry when he hears young people acknowledge that they're gay but then say that they don't relate to gay culture. "Their knee-jerk reaction [is to say] 'I am gay, but I am not like those girly guys,'" he says. "I always try to get people to understand that those drag queens were a lot braver than those [straight-acting] guys who are often too chickenshit to come out." Denizet-Lewis's book America Anonyrnous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life came out earlier this year, and early next year he will publish a collection of his writing about gay and youth culture titled American Voyeur: Dispatches From the Far Reaches of Modern Life.