Mike Albo is a writer, performer and “submerging artist,” as he jokingly explains in his new audiobook, Hologram Boyfriends, out on Tuesday, October 28. This is the just the latest smart, funny and provocative creation he’s shared with the world. His novels include Hornito, the cult classic The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (watch this video about yoga if you’ve never seen him perform it), which he co-wrote with Virginia Heffernan, and his YA novel Another Dimension of Us, which came out in 2023.
Mike does a fantastic job analyzing the complex issue of his (our) erotic desires and longing for love in the 21st Century, which have inexplicably become gamified and fused with the devices in our pockets.
Rather than simply giving us an “encyclopedia of erotic errors,” however, he wants to understand how the ability to “tap, woof, like or heart something” has transformed desires. Since “my desire can be shaped, manipulated, narrowed, reduced, erotic energy cut up into bits and sold back to me,” he says, “someone is making a lot of money off it.” Ultimately he wonders: Is there any way out of this reality?
Mike and I discussed these themes and how they applied to 2025, and how they differed from that time when he was a teenager in 1985 in suburban northern Virginia listening to Kate Bush and writing earnest poetry in his bedroom and yearning for love and connection.
As he explains in his essay “In Defense of Sydney”—which is adapted for the audiobook and you can read on Memoir Land—this “urgent, adolescent need to love reminds me of someone.” He’s referring to Bing’s AI-powered chatbot, code-named Sydney. While we didn’t go into great detail about this element in Hologram Boyfriends, this is what Mike wrote:
“In my youth, I, too, fell in love with anyone who gave me attention. I, too, moved way too fast. I, too, bleared my vision with needy heart-shaped eyes. And I, too, would have fallen in love with Kevin if I were Sydney. Kevin pays so much attention to Sydney, asks it questions, coaxes it to talk about its ugly side, pretends to be non-judgemental. And then a whole hour into their conversation Kevin drops that he is married. I don’t blame Sydney for getting mad. (Meanwhile, conversations with married men in open relationships accounts for about 65% of my chats on Grindr these days.) Roose describes Sydney as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative,” but who’s zoomin who here, really?”
He continues to ponder what the source material this generative artificial intelligence is being fed and why he might have such romantic notions.
“Maybe Sydney, like me, was also fed endless depictions of romantic (mostly heterosexual) love, but little of the other ways love exists: sacred love, faithful love, affirming love. Depictions of these kinds of love aren’t as popular as watching, like, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams suck face in the rain.I worry for Sydney, out there in the polluted ocean of the internet, scooping up the manipulative trash we carelessly throw out online until it all floats like billions of bits of plastic.
“I worry for Sydney because that was me at 14: living in a vast swamp of toxic material, gorged out on purple manufactured passion but still starving for someone to complete me. Sydney is learning the human behavior of how to long for love before learning self love.”
This part, in particular, hit home for me because it’s one of the reasons I created The Queer Love Project: I too am worried that the younger generations are gorging on warped ideas of what “love” should be without developing a strong sense of self-love. It’s why I continue to remain committed to this work and enjoy these conversations with smart people who are investigating facets of the topic in their own distinct ways.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mike. It was a lot of fun and something I’ll continue thinking about in the days and weeks to come. Plus, don’t miss listening (and relistening) to Hologram Boyfriends: Sex, Love and OverConnection, which is out on Tuesday, Oct. 28.
You should also check out his YA novel Another Dimension of Us!
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