WITH JOHN Cleve in official retirement, Turk Winter surged forth as my father’s last persona, publishing more than 250 titles. Dad referred to him as “a perverse, kinky devil born for one book; reinpsychelated in 1975.” Before his final trip to New York, Dad had written a fan letter to Eric Stanton, an underground fetish artist who drew On a Kinky Hook. Dad thought he’d recognized the artistic influence of Steve Ditko, the mysterious genius who created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Stanton responded with an appreciative phone call. Impressed by Dad’s visual sense, he explained that Ditko had been his studio mate for several years. They talked for an hour, and Stanton invited Dad to visit on his business trip to Manhattan.
Expecting the worst sort of rudeness from a native New Yorker, Dad was shocked by Stanton’s hospitality: private sleeping quarters stocked with whiskey and porn. Though they were from drastically different backgrounds—Stanton was a Brooklyn native who’d served in the navy—they had much in common. Dad used pseudonyms and Stanton had legally changed his name from Ernest Stanzoni. As boys, they’d both copied pages from Kaanga, a comic book that featured light bondage. They loved the 1940s matinee serial Perils of Nyoka. Their initial meeting was similar to a pair of immigrants from the Old Country discovering each other, assuaging loneliness by speaking the same language: corset and heels, rope and strap, whip and cane.
Stanton’s art and Dad’s prose were heavily influenced by a particular type of comic called a “bondage serial,” consisting of a narrative with words and art, sold through the mail a single page at a time. According to Dad’s papers, in 1952 he encountered an ad in the back of a men’s magazine for Princess Elaine’s Terrible Fate, drawn by Gene Bilbrew. Dad bought a full set, his first exposure to bondage art. He then contracted with Bizarre Inc. to create his own serial, corresponding with an editor who signed letters as “Sado Mazie.” Dad wrote and drew ten chapters. It was rejected for amateurish art, but the writing was good enough that Sado Mazie offered to swap merchandise for scripts. Insulted, Dad refused. Seven years later he tried again, submitting work to publisher Irving Klaw, and again he was rejected.
My father was astounded that Stanton knew Bilbrew and Klaw personally. Stanton was equally amazed by Dad’s encyclopedic knowledge of the fetish field. They decided to collaborate. There was no business arrangement, no legal contract, no formal division of profits and labor. They operated under an old-fashioned gentlemen’s agreement. This was partly to avoid prosecution but was also a product of their generation—they simply decided to trust each other. Stanton paid for printing and distribution in exchange for retaining all copyrights. Dad’s payment came in the form of free porn. They collaborated for twenty-five years, the longest time either man had a business partner.
There existed a sense of play in their collaboration, that of teenagers engaged in naughty behavior, delighting in the other’s contributions. Their methodology was simple. Stanton mailed Dad a sheaf of drawings photocopied from his sketchbook. After shuffling the sequence of art, Dad inserted dialogue, blocks of text, and ideas for trimming or lengthening the story. He mailed the pages back to Stanton, who called Dad to discuss. They talked as often as twice a week, both men drinking and laughing, telling stories and planning their future work.
The concept of warrior women appealed to them, which led to the creation of their popular series Blunder Broad, a parody of Wonder Woman. She battled aliens and supervillains such as Count Dastardly, Pussygirl, and Doktor Weerde. Every story ended with her capture, often bound by her own lasso. They also created a series about “princkazons,” Amazonian women with penises—essentially large-breasted transsexuals who dominated males and females alike. Dad used the name Turk Winter for all their collaborative work.
Their few nonprofessional letters had a jocular tone, filled with juvenile sex jokes and humorous comments. They made fun of each other’s accents, where they lived, and fetish preferences. If one didn’t respond in a timely manner, he was accused of “cock-teasing” the other. Reading these letters made me glad that my father had someone with whom he could loosen up and relinquish his martinet qualities. Despite having spent very little time with Stanton, Dad always referred to Eric as his best friend. I wondered if it was true until I found a note from one of Stanton’s adult children referring to Dad as Eric’s best friend.
Dad wrote faster than Stanton drew, and began his own self-publishing imprint called Winterbooks. Stanton promoted the material to his mail-order clients. Customers initially went through Stanton, which delayed fulfillment of the orders. As the volume increased, Dad began dealing directly with repeat clients. He developed a list of offerings and charged sixty dollars per book, payable in advance. In this way, both men made money by selling the same material to different customers.
By 1999 Stanton had endured a series of strokes that rendered him unable to work. He gave Dad an extensive list of American and international clients. Eric Stanton died on April 17, 1999. That same day, Dad suffered a massive heart attack, requiring emergency bypass surgery. The death of his only friend left him alone with his obsessions.
Two years after heart surgery, my father expanded Winterbooks, referring to it as “Turk’s cottage industry.” Dad sent personal letters to big spenders, alluding to porn he custom-wrote for special clients. A slow-going epistolary relationship developed in which Dad gave them gifts, confided personal details, and hinted at his actual name. Like a clandestine agent operating under a cloak of secrecy, he revealed himself to men he could exploit financially. Over time several customers specified their sadomasochistic interests and ordered their own private pornography. The price was three thousand dollars, but each customer was offered a “special discount” that dropped the rate to $2,600. If a customer paid cash in advance, Dad wrote the tailor-made porn.
He fed the prose into a computer template he’d invented for a seventy-page book—two vertical columns of text. The final product was a manuscript with a special cover page personally inscribed, dated, and signed by Turk Winter. Dad later changed the cover page and added the commissioned work to his catalog, reselling each one for seventy dollars, unsigned. This had the unexpected effect of pleasing the original clients, who enjoyed the notion of like-minded strangers reading a professional depiction of their personal fantasies. Within ten years Dad had a large catalog of books for sale, eking out a living while proudly continuing the underground tradition of mail-order bondage begun in the 1940s.
Customers in the UK, Germany, and Italy routinely requested swifter ordering, suggesting fax or email, and a method of payment other than cash. One went so far as providing his credit card number. Dad refused, trusting nobody, especially the Internet. Obscenity laws were relegated to local standards, and he lived deep in the Bible Belt. Using the postal system to defraud the IRS was a felony, and Dad received bundles of cash in the mail on a regular basis. As protection, he mailed Winterbooks from the post office in Morehead, which sent packages to Lexington for a postmark, placing a hundred-mile layer of discretion between him and their official source. He used false return addresses, including mine. While living in Montana, I received a tattered envelope from Italy that contained a manuscript the customer didn’t want, along with a letter in stilted English explaining its return.
Dad maintained steady correspondence with repeat customers. He saved their letters but not his own. This resulted in files going back over a decade that contained one side of a continuous conversation. I read hundreds, slowly seeing a pattern emerge of characteristics shared by most of the men: over forty, middle-class to wealthy, many with a Catholic childhood. They worked as civil servants, lawyers, and middle managers in corporate offices. American clients often had backgrounds in the military or engineering. All were incredibly lonely, having carried around their secret obsession without a chance to share it. The letters reminded me of film buffs or musicologists who established credentials by displaying the depth of their knowledge. Most hobbyists have meeting places such as a record store, a gun show, or a philatelist’s event. There they are free to bask in a shared interest. But a bird-watcher doesn’t have to hide his binoculars the way bondage enthusiasts conceal everything related to their hobby.
Clients treated Turk Winter with great respect. The more money they spent, the longer Turk’s letters were. With men of his own generation, Dad discussed health issues between paragraphs concerned with bondage and discipline. They exchanged VHS tapes, magazines, and photocopies of underground art.
Long-term pen pals included information about new cars, broken appliances, the weather, and popular movies. At least two thanked my father for photographs of his children and grandchildren. Instead of communicating with his family, Dad preferred an ongoing correspondence with people he never met. The mutual interest in bondage material was a powerful link, ingrained with sympathy and understanding. After carrying his secret throughout his life, he could be himself with strangers.
Since childhood, Dad had felt ashamed of his sexual proclivities. He knew they were unusual, possible evidence of something fundamentally flawed with his mind. This sense of difference resulted in an extreme degree of loneliness that was reduced by writing letters. One fan letter closed with a few lines that echoed a long-held belief of Dad’s: “Your stories allow our minds to be satiated without committing unspeakable acts. They keep us ‘civilized’ and sane. Maybe you have not heard it from others but it’s true.”
In the course of his fifty-year career as a writer, my father explored every sexual permutation except pedophilia. At the end of his life, still seeking a frontier, he wrote an intricate portrayal of cannibalism. His sole foray into bestiality was combined with the medical cloning of goats. In 2011 Turk Winter completed his final two serials. Gurlz encompassed nine installments for a total of 675 pages. Barbi’s World was over a thousand pages long. Stacked beside his chair were sheets of paper that contained his last writings: a list of real and invented nouns, and a succinct summary for a new book. My father was a workhorse in the field of written pornography. After five decades he died in harness.