Michael Bronski - Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps

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CONTENTS

Harrison Dowd

Dial Press, 1950

Lonnie Coleman

David McKay, 1959

James Barr

Greenberg, 1951

Jay Little

Pageant Press, 1952

Michael De Forrest

Woodford Press, 1949

Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker)

Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1954

Ben Travis

Beacon Book, 1959

James Colton (Joseph Hansen)

National Library, 1964

Jeff X

Zil, 1968

Guild Press, 1969 (reprint from the 1950s)

Richard Amory

Greenleaf Classics, 1966

Carl Corley

PEC French Line, 1966

Jack Love

PEC French Line, 1967

Chris Davidson

Ember Library/Greenleaf Classics, 1967

Marcus Miller

Pleasure Reader, 1969

Bruce Benderson

Crusier Classics, 1975

Victor Jay

Travellers Companion, 1970

John Ironstone

El Dorado Editions, 1978

To Victor J. Banis, Bruce Benderson,

Joseph Hansen, Marijane Meaker,

and all of the other authors, living and dead,

who for decades before Stonewall pioneered

what we now call gay and lesbian literature

And to Joseph Canarelli

for thirty-five years of friendship and love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have happened without the patience and encouragement of my editor, Keith Kahla (whose idea it was), and his assistant, Teresa Theophano. Thanks also to my agent, Jed Mattes, who was always available, understanding, and supportive.

Linda Schlossberg not only read the manuscript and offered expert advice but continually reassured me that, indeed, pulps were not only literature but great reads as well. Patrick Merla also offered his sage counsel and encouragement on the introduction and the entire project. Chris Bram, as always, heartened and inspired me with his persistent love of literature; a well-needed salve whenever I felt that these books, which I had come to love, were less than worthy of rediscovery.

Enormous thanks as well to John Howard, Lawrence Schimel, Katherine Forrest, William K. Dobbs, Larry Townsend, Richard Kasak, Bill Andriette, Brenda Marston, and Hubert Kennedy for their enormous help in tracking down the authors of some of these selections. And to John Mitzel, who over the years has supported my passion for collecting gay male pulps. Stephen Brophy and Brian Gale were incredibly helpful in the preparation of the manuscript. David Bergman was kind enough to share with me some of his own writings on pulp novels, which were invaluable. As invaluable were my friendships with Richard Voos, Carolyn Stack, Paul Van de Carr, and others who tolerated my reading them passages from these books and insisting that they look at book covers whenever they were at my home. And special thanks to production editor Robert Cloud, whose work has made this a better book.

Much of this work could not have been done were it not for the kindness of Linda Schlossberg and Alice Jardine in securing me access to Harvards Widener Library.

And thanks to all of the men who over the years collected and preserved their pulp novels. Without these books in archives, used bookstores, libraries, and personal collections, we would have lost a history that is invaluable as it is fascinating.

Introduction

Gay pulps: everyone knows the covers. With their fabulously garish colors, their cartoonish, mock-heroic studs, and tempting titles such as The Butt Boy, Dirt Road Cousins, Three on a Broomstick, and Up Your Pleasure, they are old-time gay male iconography for a new, younger generation of homosexuals. Falling somewhere between kitsch and kitchen decorations, these images, no longer on book jackets, now grace refrigerator magnets, postcards, and address books. Often they straddle clear-cut categories: they can be both hot and humorous, nostalgic and trendy, historic and emblematic of a contemporary sensibility. They are artifacts from the past that have acquired new, ironic meanings for the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. But these book coversand the novels they luridly trumpetare more than camp or a curious slice of gay life past. They are integral aspects of gay male culture and gay history that are as vital asindeed, inseparable fromour fight for equality under the law and the freedom to live our lives the way we choose. They are recordsalbeit fictional and reflecting and refracting the tenor and biases of their timesof how gay men lived, thought, desired, loved, and survived. Even with their exaggerations, high-queen dramatics, silly (even nave) eroticism, and sometimes internalized homophobia, they give us a glimpse of what it meant to be a gay man in the tumultuous years before Stonewall.

This book began as an anthology of paperback pulps that were published before the Stonewall riots in June of 1969. I had intended to draw upon themin all of their wildly varied manifestations and idiosyncraciesto sketch a picture of what gay male life was like before the enormous changes that the Gay Liberation Movement brought into the everyday social and political life of our culture. But as I read through the books, I discovered that what I had imagined and demarcated as a genre, distinct and discrete unto itself, was actually part of a far broader, older, and more complicated history and culture. The more extensively I read, the more I realized that gay male pulps were simply one of the more visible manifestations of a gay publishing, literary, and public culture that existed before Stonewall.

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. By the 1950s the publishing industry in the United States had reached a new level of production. The printing and distribution of cheaply produced and cheaply priced paperback novels, which had begun in the late 1930s, steadily grew until it reached its full force in the early 1950s. Their eye-catching, provocative covers created and defined a new artistic and marketing genre; screaming damsels in distress represented a favorite motif, as did risqu clothing for both women and men. While mystery, crime, romance, and action stories benefited enormously from these graphic designs, authors from Shakespeare to Aldous Huxley to Edna Ferber also found a new readership. From joke and cartoon books (Out of My Trunk: Miltons Berles Joke Book) to informational guides (Bantam Books 1,000 Facts Worth Knowing) to current events (1945s The Atomic Age Opens ) the burgeoning paperback industry created new books and new markets.

This advance in the publishing world, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, also included huge numbers of original novels focusing on illegal or taboo sexadultery, prostitution, rape, interracial relationships, lesbianism, male homosexualitytopics that were, in the words of the cover-copy writers, controversial, explosive, shocking, and ready to reveal the sordid truth in a way you have never read before. Often these books traded on current social obsessions and headline newsjuvenile delinquency, motorcycle gangs, wife-swapping, teen drug use, college scandals, mob racketeering, suburban malaise, and the erotic dangers of psychoanalysis. They represent, beneath a veneer of enticing exploitation, a compendium of the not-so-hidden preoccupations and fears of the tempestuous and socially unstable postwar years.