Gay pulp fiction - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Gay pulp fiction, or gay pulps, refers to printed works, primarily fiction, that include references to male homosexuality

Homosexuality

Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...

, specifically male gay sex, and that are cheaply produced, typically in paperback books made of wood pulp paper; lesbian pulp fiction

Lesbian pulp fiction

Lesbian pulp fiction refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel with overtly lesbian themes and content. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 60s by many of the same paperback publishing houses that other genres of fiction including Westerns, Romances, and Detective Fiction...

is similar work about women. Michael Bronski, the editor of an anthology of gay pulp writing, notes in his introduction, "Gay pulp is not an exact term, and it is used somewhat loosely to refer to a variety of books that had very different origins and markets" People often use the term to refer to the "classic" gay pulps that were produced before about 1970, but it may also be used to refer to the gay erotica or pornography in paperback book or digest magazine form produced since that date.

Beginning of gay pulps

Gay pulps are part of the expansion of cheap paperback books that began in the 1930s and "reached its full force in the early 1950s." Mainstream publishers packaged the cheap paperbacks to be sold in train and bus stations, dimestores, drugstores

Pharmacy

Pharmacy is the health profession that links the health sciences with the chemical sciences and it is charged with ensuring the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical drugs...

, grocery stores, and newsstands

Newsagent

A newsagent's shop , newsagency or newsstand is a business that sells newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, snacks and often items of local interest. In Britain and Australia, these businesses are termed newsagents...

, to reach the market that had bought pulp magazines in the first half of the twentieth century. Designed to catch the eye, the paperback books featured vivid cover art and often dealt with taboo subjects: prostitution

Prostitution

Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...

, rape

Rape

Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...

, interracial romances

Miscegenation

Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....

, lesbianism, and male homosexuality

Homosexuality

. Michael Bronski has noted that lesbian pulp fiction

Lesbian pulp fiction

were far more numerous and popular than those that dealt with male homosexuality; he attributes this difference to the fact that while both lesbian and heterosexual women read the lesbian pulps, a major part of the market for these novels was heterosexual men. According to Bronski, "The trajectory of the gay male pulps is very different. There was no burgeoning market for gay male novels in the 1950s because they apparently had little crossover appeal for a substantial heterosexual readership."

Still, some gay pulps were published by mainstream publishers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. These were often reprints of literary novels that involved references to homosexuality, such as Charles Jackson's

Charles R. Jackson

Charles Reginald Jackson was an American author, best known for his 1944 novel The Lost Weekend.-Career:Jackson's first published story, "Palm Sunday", appeared in the Partisan Review in 1939...

1946 novel, The Fall of Valor, and Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...

's 1948 novel, The City and the Pillar
The City and the Pillar
The City and the Pillar is the third published novel by American writer and essayist Gore Vidal, written in 1946 and published on January 10, 1948...

, which first appeared in paperback in 1950. Likewise, Blair Niles

Blair Niles

Blair Niles was an American novelist and travel writer. She was a founding member of the Society of Woman Geographers. Blair Niles is a pen name of Mary Blair Rice, adopted from her late second husband's name, Robert Niles, Jr.- History :...

' 1931 novel Strange Brother
Strange Brother
Strange Brother is a gay novel written by Blair Niles published in 1931. The story is about a platonic relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man and takes place in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s....

appeared in paperback in 1952.

First original gay pulp paperback

The first paperback original to deal with homosexuality was 1952's Men into Beasts, a nonfiction work by George Viereck

George Sylvester Viereck

George Sylvester Viereck was a German-American poet, writer, and propagandist.-Biography:...

. Viereck, a poet, was sent to prison during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

for his work as a paid propaganda agent of Nazi Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. Men into Beasts is a general memoir of the indignities and brutalities of life in prison, but a significant part of it deals with situational homosexuality and male rape in prison. The cover of the book features a discreetly-posed nude man, on his knees in a prison cell, being beaten by two prison guards. The text on the back of the book blames prison riots on "homosexual slavery--inmates being forced to practice abnormal acts with sex deviates who roamed the prisons at will."

Beginnings of sexually explicit gay pulp

Beginning around 1964, the more than a decade of challenges to U.S. censorship

Censorship

thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...

laws applied to literary novels such as Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...

, Portnoy's Complaint
Portnoy's Complaint
Portnoy's Complaint is the American novel that turned its author Philip Roth into a major celebrity, sparking a storm of controversy over its explicit and candid treatment of sexuality, including detailed depictions of masturbation using various props including a piece of liver...

, and Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...

had redefined legal standards for obscenity. Susan Stryker cites Tom Norman's bibliography of American gay erotic paperbacks to note that thirty gay paperback books were published in 1965, and that over a hundred were in 1966. Many of these publishers had their roots in publishing beefcake

Beefcake

Beefcake is a term denoting the use of nude or semi-nude male bodies. It can refer to a genre or a person. It often is used to denote male sexual attractiveness stemming from physical build but the definition has expanded to include anyone interested in physical fitness, bodybuilding and weight...

, or "male physique" magazines in the 1950s, precursors to explicit gay pornographic magazines.

Most of the new gay paperbacks were explicitly pornographic, writing designed to provoke sexual responses, rather than literary writing, and they came from small, gay presses, such as the Guild Press, Greenleaf Classics, and the Publisher's Export Company, rather than from mainstream national publishers. For example, Greenleaf (under editor Earl Kemp

Earl Kemp

Earl Kemp is an American science fiction editor, critic, and fan who won a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine in 1961 for Who Killed Science Fiction, a collection of questions and answers with top writers in the field. In 2011 a book edition of Who Killed Science Fiction was published by The Merry...

) published a series of erotic spy

SPY

SPY is a three-letter acronym that may refer to:* SPY , ticker symbol for Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts* SPY , a satirical monthly, trademarked all-caps* SPY , airport code for San Pédro, Côte d'Ivoire...

parodies called The Man from C.A.M.P.
The Man from C.A.M.P.
The Man from C.A.M.P. is a series of ten gay pulp fiction novels published under the pseudonym of Don Holliday. The original nine were written by Victor J. Banis between 1966 and 1968; a tenth by an uncertain author appeared in 1971. The series first emerged during a period when gay paperback...

, written by Victor J. Banis

Victor J. Banis

Victor J. Banis is an American author, often associated with the first wave of west coast gay writing. For his contributions he has been called "the godfather of modern popular gay fiction." He is openly gay.-Life:...

. Banis says once Kemp and Greenleaf proved how much of a market there was for this type of fiction, other publishers soon joined in.

Among "the more provocative titles and noms de plume" published in this decade include: Summer in Sodom, by Edwin Fey; Gay Whore, by Jack Love; Hollywood Homo, by Michael Starr; The Short Happy Sex Life of Stud Sorell, by Orlando Paris; It's a Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay World, by Guy Faulk; Gay on the Range, by Dick Dale; Queer Belles, by Percy Queen; and Gay Pals, by Peter Grande.Howard, John. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Sometimes, these past ephemera can become useful community history resources. As Susan Stryker and Michael Meeker note in a new preface to Lou Rand's The Gay Detective (1965), San Francisco area LGBT historians found that the paperback in question turned out to be a valuable document in describing past prominent if closeted social figures, ethnic conflicts over police corruption

Police corruption

Police corruption is a specific form of police misconduct designed to obtain financial benefits, other personal gain, or career advancement for a police officer or officers in exchange for not pursuing, or selectively pursuing, an investigation or arrest....

and the emergence of a narcotics underworld

Underworld

The Underworld is a region which is thought to be under the surface of the earth in some religions and in mythologies. It could be a place where the souls of the recently departed go, and in some traditions it is identified with Hell or the realm of death...

in their city, as well as referring to bygone LGBT venues.

Major writers

Some of the titles issued by these presses in the late 1960s blurred the lines between literary gay fiction and pornography. While all of them include more explicit sexual content than literary novels or mainstream, non-sexual paperback fiction (Westerns, romances, etc.) of the time, some aspired to higher literary merit and include attempts at more careful characterizations, settings, and plots. Susan Stryker cites in this category Chris Davidson and Richard Amory, who both wrote for Greenleaf Classics. Davidson put gay porn twists on familiar genres: A Different Drum features sex between Yankee and Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

, Go Down, Aaron has a Jew subjected to sex sadism in the Third Reich, and Caves of Iron is about prison sex. Richard Amory, meanwhile, in the Song of the Loon has a Last of the Mohicans-type story, but with the lone frontiersman and the Indians having sex. Gay historian John Howard has identified Carl Corley

Carl Corley

Carl V. Corley is an author and illustrator. Beginning in the 1950s, he drew physique art for male beefcake magazines and for sale as posters. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote twenty-two novels of gay pulp fiction. From the 1970s into the early 1990s, Corley continued to write stories for gay...

as a similar writer of pulp pornography that was "more sober, more earnest," and that was usually set in Corley's native American South. Victor J. Banis

Victor J. Banis

wrote a gay detective series, The Man From C.A.M.P.

The Man from C.A.M.P.

The Man from C.A.M.P. is a series of ten gay pulp fiction novels published under the pseudonym of Don Holliday. The original nine were written by Victor J. Banis between 1966 and 1968; a tenth by an uncertain author appeared in 1971. The series first emerged during a period when gay paperback...

, whose novels features Jackie Holmes as a gay international superspy. This series turns the popular, conventional spy-genre novel on its head.

External links

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Beginning of gay pulps

First original gay pulp paperback

Beginnings of sexually explicit gay pulp

Major writers

Further reading

External links