1960S Gay Pulp Fiction: the Misplaced Heritage
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༁ Gunn ༁ ༁ and ༁ As a result of a series of court cases, by the mid-1960s the U.S. post office Harker could no longer interdict books that contained homosexuality. Gay writers were eager to take advantage of this new freedom, but the only houses poised to capitalize on the outpouring of manuscripts were “adult” paper- 1960 1960s back publishers who marketed their products with salacious covers. Gay critics, unlike their lesbian counterparts, have for the most part declined to take these works seriously, even though they cover an enormous range of genres: adventures, blue-collar and gray-flannel novels, coming-out stories, Gay PulP detective fiction, gothic novels, historical romances, military stories, political s novels, prison fiction, romances, satires, sports stories, and spy thrillers— Pul Gay with far more short story collections than is generally realized. Twelve schol- Fiction ars have now banded together to begin a recovery of this largely forgotten explosion of gay writing that occurred in the 1960s. “These essays in toto are exciting, informative, comprehensive, and sexy in their thinking, moving beyond standard paratextual analysis of paperback covers and into the nitty-gritty of the pulp texts and the queer worlds that they imagined on the page and off.” P —Scott Herring, author of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Fiction Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History DREWEY WAYNE GUNN is professor emeritus of English at Texas A&M University–Kingsville and author of The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film. JAIME HARKER is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is author of Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America and America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). A VOLUME IN THE SERIES ༁ ༁ Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book Massachusetts Cover photo by C. Downs, Texas A&M University-Kingsville The Misplaced Heritage Cover design by Sally Nichols Edited by ༁ University of Massachusetts Press ༁ Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker Amherst and Boston www.umass.edu/umpress Gunn_cover.indd 1 10/18/13 10:49 AM “This page intentionally left blank” 1960s GAY PULP FICTION A volume in the series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book Editorial Advisory Board Greg Barnhisel Robert A. Gross Joan Shelley Rubin Michael Winship 1960s GAY PULP FICTION The Misplaced Heritage Edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn Jaime Harker University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston Copyright © 2013 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-62534-045-0 (paper); 044-3 (hardcover) Designed by Sally Nichols Set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed and bound by IBT/Hamilton, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction : the Misplaced Heritage / edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn, Jaime Harker. pages cm. — (Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62534-045-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62534-044-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gays’ writings, American—History and criticism. 2. Pulp literature, American—History and criticism. 3. American fiction— 20th century—History and criticism. 4. Homosexuality and literature—History— 20th century. 5. Gays in literature. I. Gunn, Drewey Wayne, 1939– editor of compilation. II. Harker, Jaime, editor of compilation. PS153.G38A25 2013 810.9´920664—dc23 2013031735 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker 1 Proem How to Read Gay Pulp Fiction James J. Gifford 29 Historicizing Pulp Gay Male Pulp and the Narrativization of Queer Cultural History Whitney Strub 43 “Accept Your Essential Self” The Guild Press, Identity Formation, and Gay Male Community Philip Clark 78 “Menus for Men . or What Have You” Consuming Gay Male Culture in Lou Rand Hogan’s The Gay Detective and The Gay Cookbook Pamela Robertson Wojcik 120 “Moonlight and Bosh and Bullshit” Phil Andros’s $tud and the Creation of a “New Gay Ethic” Ann Marie Schott 143 Carnal Matters The Alexander Goodman Story Reed Massengill 167 Guerilla Literature The Many Worlds of Victor J. Banis Randall Ivey 190 – v – vi – Contents Shepherds Redressed Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon and the Reinvigoration of the Spanish Pastoral Novel Beth M. Bouloukos 212 “A Life Entirely without Fear” Hindus, Homos, and Gay Pulp Fiction in Christopher Isherwood’s A Meeting by the River Jaime Harker 229 Transcendent Submission Resistance to Oppression in Jay Greene’s Behind These Walls Nicholas Alexander Hayes 248 The Heroic Quest Dirk Vanden’s All Trilogy Drewey Wayne Gunn 268 An End to the Way Pulp Becomes Classic Down-Under Jeremy Fisher 292 Appendix A Sampling of 1960s Gay Pulp Authors 313 Notes on Contributors 319 Index 323 Acknowledgments Though only two names appear on the title page, the present collection is, of course, the collaborative effort of twelve scholars. In various ways each has aided the others, and has been aided individually by yet other colleagues and friends. We wish collectively to acknowledge these people, with apologies to anyone we may have inadvertently forgotten: Mohamed Abdelrahman, Alex Almador, Doug Armato, Don Bachardy, Kasey D. Baker, Victor J. Banis, Jason Baumann, Delinda Stephens Buie, Lloyd Christison, John W. Crowley, Tyler Curtain, Helena Davies, S. C. Delaney, C. Downs, Martin Duberman, Wayne R. Dynes, Jan Ewing, Richard Fullmer, Pip Gordon, Elisa Guerra, Peter Harvey, Rocky Heck, Scott Herring, Sue Hodson, John Howard, Ivo Kamps, Maree Kelly, Charles Leslie, Glenn Loney, Ruth Machalias, Brenda J. Marston, Elizabeth McClelland, Laura Micham, Scott Morelock, Will Parish, Brooks Peters, Darryl Poulsen, Richard Reitsma, John Sherlock, Erin Smith, Paul D. Stern, Christina Strasburger, John B. Thomas III, Carol Tipton, Ann Weldy, Gill Willis, Tim Wilson, Kelly Wooten, Ian Young, Eli Zal, and Abbey Zink. We appreciate the staff and their help at the following libraries and archives: Ekstom Library at University of Louisville, Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, Huntington Library, Jernigan Library at Texas A&M University– Kingsville, Kroch Library at Cornell University, Leather Archives and Museum, Mitchell Library of the State Library of New South Wales, New York Public Library, ONE Institute and Archives, San Francisco Public Library – vii – viii – Acknowledgments History Center and Gay & Lesbian Center, Shields Library at University of California–Davis and J. D. Williams Library of the University of Mississippi. We would be remiss not to thank all those anonymous readers who pre- served their gay pulps, which became the source for the holdings in these public archives and for our individual private collections. The editors thank the Department of English at the University of Missis- sippi and the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University– Kingsville for providing financial support for this project. The twelve of us thank Brian Halley, Mary Bellino, and the staff at University of Massa- chusetts Press for their care in overseeing the publication of this book. 1960s GAY PULP FICTION “This page intentionally left blank” Introduction Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker During the last half of the 1960s, American publishers brought out over seven hundred works of fiction written by mostly gay men about gay men and marketed predominantly to a gay readership. Only a tenth of that num- ber had appeared in the first half of the 1960s (see table), and the two pre- vious decades had been similarly barren. Before 1965 publishers gener- ally adopted the guise of advertising their few gay works as exposés aimed at enlightening heterosexual audiences (though they used code words— “shame,” “twilight,” “strange”—to indicate the content for potential homo- sexual readers). These new books from the second half of the 1960s were mostly paperback originals. They usually (but not always) measured a uni- form 7" by 4¼", and they were printed on cheap stock—hence the name commonly ascribed them, gay pulps. In common with other paperbacks at the time, their come-hither covers promised sex, but with the difference that these had provocatively posed men rather than provocatively posed women. And their blurbs were fairly blatant. Potential readers found them everywhere, even in rural areas, stuffed into metal bookracks at supermar- kets, convenience stores, drugstores, five-and-tens, tobacconists, news- stands, bus stations, railway stations, and airline terminals—everywhere save in regular bookstores. It is with these books that the gay literary revo- lution began in earnest. – 1 – 2 – Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker Gay Fiction Published in the United States, 1960–1969 YEAR Hardbacks PAPERBACKS Reprints Originals 1960 5 2 1 1961 9 3 3 1962 5 7 2 1963 7 1 3 1964 10 9 8 1965 15 19 26 1966 14 14 53 1967 14 13 71 1968 9 13 176 1969 9 9 250 Note: “Gay Fiction” is, of course, a subjective label. Thus someone else may arrive at a slightly different count; still, the general outline remains quite clear. This literary heritage, however, has become misplaced in at least two senses of the word. If not quite altogether, it largely has been lost, for- gotten, disregarded—one might even say discarded. And it has become mislabeled, viewed as subgenre pornography by cultural historians, who seem to assume that the contemporary examples they encountered after Stonewall had to be typical of pulps throughout their history, or viewed solely as a source for campy illustrations from their covers. At the same time, many critics also seem to assume that the 1960s pulps, since they are pre-Stonewall fiction after all, must have continued the postwar strategy of depicting what miserable lives gays lead.1 None of these assumptions could be further from the truth.