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 covers—and the novels they luridly trumpet—are 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 as—indeed, inseparable from—our fight for equality under the law and the freedom to live our lives the way we choose. They are records—albeit fictional and reflecting and refracting the tenor and biases of their times—of how gay men lived, thought, desired, loved, and survived. Even with their exaggerations, high-queen dramatics, silly (even naïve) 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 them—in all of their wildly varied manifestations and idiosyncracies—to 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 risqué 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: Milton’s Berle’s Joke Book) to informational guides (Bantam Books’ 1,000 Facts Worth Knowing) to current events (1945’s 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 sex—adultery, prostitution, rape, interracial relationships, lesbianism, male homosexuality—topics 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 news”—juvenile 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.

A prominent and bestselling subgenre of these exploitation paperback originals were those that dealt with male and female homosexuality. With cover copy that spoke in easily decipherable code about “The World of Twilight Lovers,” “The Love Society Forbids,” and “The Hidden Shame of … Secret Love,” these books promised to expose the “Hidden World of the Third Sex.” From the very beginning of their publishing history, however, clear distinctions were drawn between paperbacks and pulps that dealt with lesbianism and those that portrayed male homosexuality.

Lesbian-themed books were more numerous and popular than those that dealt with male homosexuality. This was undoubtedly because a huge percentage of their readership was made up of heterosexual men (and probably heterosexual women as well). Lesbians, of course, also read these books; those by Ann Bannon, Valerie Taylor, Paula Christian, Ann Aldrich, and Vin Packer (the last two were pseudonyms of Marijane Meaker) have become classics of modern lesbian literature. The earliest lesbian pulps were written by these authors (all of whom worked for Fawcett Gold Medal), and they present an honest, even positive view of lesbian life. Even when the dictates of the genre demanded an unhappy ending (often in response to the very real possibility of censorship), the details and textures of the narrative resonated with truth. As a genre, lesbian pulps were extraordinarily successful: Vin Packer’s 1952 Spring Fire sold millions of copies at twenty-five cents, outselling a new edition of Erskine Caldwell’s ever-popular God’s Little Acre. Their popularity was so great that, along with these paperback “original” novels, it was common for publishers to reissue older works—often serious novels by respected writers—in pulp formats. Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s The Scorpion (1932), Gale Wilhelm’s We Too Are Drifting (1935), Elisabeth Craigin’s Either Is Love (1937), Claire Morgan/Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952), and even Radclyffe Hall’s ur-lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), were all pulped up in new editions.

While these writers, both old and new, were notable for their nuanced, “insider” views of lesbian life, the great majority of pulps portrayed a homophobic, overly sordid vision of lesbian culture rife with self-hatred, misery, and violence. These books were usually written by men using female pseudonyms. Ironically, these books were always the mainstay of the lesbian pulp market, and their numbers only multiplied as the increasingly relaxed censorship standards of the early 1960s permitted more explicitly erotic content. The Golden Age of lesbian pulps was over, and the market was now essentially produced by and directed at heterosexual males. By the late 1960s most censorship laws had been abolished, and lesbian content moved from “romantic” pulps to the more overtly pornographic books (all written by and for men) that had now become legal.

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. The titillating nature of lesbian sexuality seemed to outweigh any potential threat it might present to the social order. Thus, while the lesbian pulp genre thrived on original works that sold well, gay-male-themed paperbacks were generally made up of reprints of previously published novels from established, respected houses. Titles such as Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (Rinehart, 1946), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (Dutton, 1948), Michael De Forrest’s The Gay Year (Woodford Press, 1949), Fritz Peters’s Finistère (Farrar, Straus, 1951), Douglas Sanderson’s Dark Passions Subdue (Dodd, Mead, 1952), and Gerald Tesch’s Never the Same Again (Putnam, 1956) were quickly issued in inexpensive paperback editions that sported predictable pulp images and cover copy. These reprints were augmented by a few paperback originals such as Vin Packer’s 1954 Whisper His Sin and the 1964 Lost on Twilight Road by James Colton (the pseudonym of Joseph Hansen). While it is difficult to ascertain exact sales figures, it is reasonable to assume that no gay male titles sold the tremendous quantities attained by the most successful of the lesbian pulps. A curious paradox thus emerges. On the one hand, books with male homosexual themes had a better chance than lesbian titles of being published in cloth by mainstream presses; on the other, once they were issued as paperback pulps, they didn’t sell as well as their lesbian counterparts. They were considered to be more literary, yet less commercial.

Gay male and lesbian literature of the fifties and sixties thus came to operate in very different cultural and social contexts. The first, as suggested above, was that gay-male-themed books received greater critical recognition than lesbian ones. Writers such as Gore Vidal, Lonnie Coleman, John Horne Burns, and Charles Jackson were accepted as important American writers, even when they received attacks from homophobic critics. This recognition placed them in a literary and cultural tradition denied to most women writers. The mantle of “literary quality” also granted some protection against censorship.

Secondly, most of the novels dealing with gay male life and culture were written by gay men drawing upon their own experience. This was a very different situation from what was found in lesbianthemed pulps, which were overwhelmingly written by outsiders from a voyeuristic, “pornographic” perspective. Most of the gay male pulps from the 1950s and early 1960s—regardless of their questionable literary quality—have an emotional veracity and truthfulness that is missing from the bulk of lesbian pulps. Because there was a modest but moderately lucrative market for this gay-male-themed fiction, there were more publishing opportunities for gay books by gay men than there were for lesbian books by lesbians.

The third major difference between the lesbian and gay male pulps occurs in the mid-to-late 1960s. More than a decade of challenges to U.S. censorship laws—mostly by book publishers and film distributors—were yielding results. It was now possible to publish work with more explicit sexual content as well as to portray homosexual (and other erotic) themes outside the realm of “literary” publishing. In many ways, the history of gay publishing is also the history of the ongoing battle against censorship in this country. A Supreme Court decision in 1958 reversed a 1956 ruling by a federal district court that U.S. postal authorities were correct in prohibiting the mailing of the Mattachine Society’s ONE magazine. The lower court had ruled that ONE was not protected by the First Amendment because the magazine’s contents “may be vulgar, offensive, and indecent even though not regarded as such by a particular group … because their own social or moral standards are far below those of the general community.… Social standards are fixed by and for the great majority and not by and for a hardened or weakened minority.” Thus defined, any writing that promoted or even presented homosexuality in neutral terms was ipso facto pornographic. Such standards were, of course, applied selectively, and while prominent publishing companies had less to fear than small, gay-oriented magazines, the possibility of censorship was always present.

It is a commonplace assumption that in the fifties and sixties “homosexuality” was a taboo topic, that it was never spoken about, or only in hushed tones. This is completely untrue: As the excerpts from these books attest, homosexuality was very much in the public consciousness. If anything, it was more integrated into popular culture than it would be in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This is not to say that the public discourse about homosexuality in the 1950s was more enlightened or tolerant—although many of the writings included in this collection will surprise you with their frankness and their level of acceptance—but it was understood and discussed in very different ways.

When assembling Pulp Friction, I was repeatedly pushed to reconsider my preconceptions about the material. I had to rethink how I, and other scholars of gay history and culture, have long viewed the position of homosexuality in the two decades before Stonewall. In a startling reversal in my thinking, I realized that thinking of all gay fiction written after the war up to the Stonewall riots as a separate literary category was a mistake. I would now argue that the very concept of “gay fiction” is most usefully understood as a post-Stonewall invention, one that serves a specific political function. This concept enabled the newly emergent homosexual community to label and identify books that spoke to or about it. (It also became a marketing tool, as the new community was seen by publishers to be a lucrative niche market.)

The opening section of this anthology shows that many postwar novels featured explicitly gay male characters. These novels were published by respected publishing houses whose books regularly received critical attention from mainstream critics. Some of the novels were written by men who were (with varying degrees of openness) gay, and some were not. While they were certainly read by gay people, they were never labeled “gay novels” or marginalized with accusations of special pleading. While some publishers did market their novels to a more distinctly homosexual readership, even these novels were advertised and reviewed in conventional, mainstream newspapers and magazines.

My second major preconception going into this project was that the majority of novels published before Stonewall, with the possible exception of some of the more explicitly pornographic works, had tragic endings. This is one of the most deeply inscribed myths of the last three decades—the gay novel or film in which the long-suffering, usually self-hating hero or heroine is doomed to die at his or her own hands, thus enacting the inevitable, implicitly deserved fate of all homosexuals. Critical studies such as Roger Austen’s Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America and Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies—as well as endless offhanded references to the phenomenon in popular fiction and nonfiction—promote this myth. But I discovered that many preStonewall novels end (if not completely happily) with optimism, understanding, or a degree of self-knowledge. Even novels that do end “badly” are not necessarily promoting antihomosexual sentiments or themes. Take, for instance, Fritz Peters’s exquisite 1951 Finistère, a book that has repeatedly been classified as a “tragic gay novel.” Here, Matthew, a sixteen-year-old American schoolboy, has an affair with Michel, a young male teacher at his French school. Matthew does drown himself in the book’s final pages, but it is clear that his suicide is the direct result of the attitudes of his uncaring and self-involved parents, the sexual harassment of his stepfather, and the temporary unkindness of his lover.

The third preconception about pulp novels that I had to overcome concerned sex. I presumed that in some of the bolder pulps, gay male sexual activity would be mentioned, even described in some vague detail, and that it would be more explicit in the later, “pornographic” novels of the mid-1960s onward. But I was completely startled by how much sex was described in the earlier novels. While none of it is anatomically explicit, the sexual references, the indications of erotic interest, the importance of sexuality to the characters’ lives, and the sexualization of the male body are equal to—and in some cases go further than—what we find in comparable heterosexual novels of the period. This is particularly astonishing in the novels from mainstream publishers in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The reader has full access to the erotic imagination of the main character in Stuart Engstrand’s 1947 The Sling and the Arrow as he negotiates his overt sexual fantasies of sailors with his tendencies to transvestism and transgenderism. In Thomas Hal Phillips’s

1949 The Bitterweed Path, the main character goes to bed with both his best friend and his best friend’s father, and the author stops just short of describing, but certainly leads us to imagine, what happens next.

While pulp novels functioned as validation for gay male sexual desires, they performed other functions as well. Without denying the enjoyment—sexual or otherwise—that came from reading them, these books also functioned pedagogically. Hidden within their plots and their characters’ lives were maps, hints, and clues that told gay men how they might live their lives. All literature has an element of tutelage—we are being told something, are learning something, whether it is how people dressed at grand balls for the Russian nobility in Tolstoy’s War and Peace or what it was like to work in an abattoir in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Because so many of the novels that dealt with homosexuality were written by gay men who drew, to some degree, on their own experience, they are filled with glimpses into how gay men of this period lived. This is not to say that they are documentary in intent and effect, but rather that they provided windows into a half-hidden gay world that was not completely accessible to those who were not members. Reading through these books, we see how gay men dressed, what their homes looked like, where they lived, and how they spoke. Certainly most of this knowledge is filtered through the lens of art and storytelling—bounded also by the pressures of the marketplace and the limits of good taste—but it is present and useful to those who needed to know.

What is it exactly that gay men might learn from these books? Sometimes it is just finding out in which neighborhoods and communities gay men lived. In book after book—from Michael De Forrest’s 1949 The Gay Year to Lonnie Coleman’s 1959 Sam—we are treated to scenes set in apartments in Greenwich Village. The decor and the furnishings of the rooms are described as are the characters’ clothing and colloquial speech. We learn what the inside of a gay bar and a gay bathhouse look like, and how people behave in them. In Jay Little’s 1952 Maybe—Tomorrow, we see gay life in the French Quarter of New Orleans. In “Spur Piece” from James Barr’s 1951 Derricks, we see what life is like for gay men in small towns in the Midwest.

The importance of these novels as educational, self-help, and how-to manuals cannot be underestimated. No one is brought up to be gay, hardly anyone (even now) comes from a “gay family.” Having sexual desires is one thing, finding people with whom to act on them is another, and finding a community is yet another step that is as liberating as it is fraught with peril and often confusion. These books were the maps and the signposts, the etiquette manuals and the foreign-phrase books, for gay men entering the half-hidden world of homosexuality. The fancifully lurid language of pulp covers was not altogether wrong: Homosexual culture was a shadowy and obscure world whose social presence was becoming increasingly prominent, but whose inner workings and interior life were only barely visible to the mainstream world. These novels often present us with a lovely through-the-looking-glass effect, for just as the fictional characters find their way through the emotional and psychological labyrinth of coming out and discover what their gay life and world might be like, so did the homosexual readers of these books turn to them for guidance.

As important as the social function of these books was—not only for helping homosexuals discover new worlds, but in securing and maintaining for those worlds a place in the heterosexual imagination and the material world—it is vital not to lose sight of them as literature as well. First and foremost, they are works of imagination, written primarily by gay men, that commit to the hard reality of paper the passions and longings of same-sex desire. They vary in form and tone, and certainly their literary quality ranges from high to idiosyncratically low, but each of them exhibits a rebellious, radical urge as they bring the possibility, and pleasure, of same-sex eroticism to a world that is both fascinated by and fearful of it.

After reading just over 225 novels (and some nonfiction) in preparing this anthology, I came to the inescapable conclusion that one of the traditional, post-Stonewall measures that we have been using to judge fiction with gay characters or themes is not particularly helpful, but ahistorical and quite useless in judging literature of any quality. This is the perennial question of “positive” and “negative” images in gay and lesbian literature, film, and theater. Echoing the age-old “Is it good for the Jews?” query, “Is it good for the gays?” has been a staple of how gay men and lesbians have evaluated the enormous variety of cultural products that have been produced over the past century. The question itself is the product of a survivalist impulse. Given the overwhelming prevalence of queer hatred in the world (not to mention general confusion and ambivalence over homosexuality), worrying about whether a book or movie was “good for the gays”—whether it would engender more dislike or even suspicion of homosexuality—is, in many ways, a reasonable response. Thus, in evaluating a work, we tend to ask: Are gay men or lesbians represented in such a way as to make them appear heroic, likable, or even neutral? Or are they presented in ways that draw upon injurious and untrue stereotypes that reinforce preexisting prejudices?

One problem of using the “Is it good for the gays?” argument is that it is not equipped to account for nuance, shading, or even irony and literary seriousness. To take the extreme obvious: Is Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—which is fundamental to contemporary lesbian literature—“good for the gays”? On one hand, it is a dour, unrelenting study of unhappiness (hence its title) and unfulfillment populated by confused and stereotypical characters. With its doom-and-gloom plot, its arguably unlikable protagonist, and its unending emphasis on the sheer unmitigated pain of female homoeroticism, it is hardly an advertisement for joyful lesbian passion.

Yet it was written as an impassioned plea for tolerance and understanding. And while only the most stalwart “good for the gays” advocate would give a thumbs-down on Hall’s novel, it is true that it has fixed in the popular imagination—through its myriad editions from high literary to decidedly pulp—an image of lesbianism that confirms the worst preconceptions about lesbians. The same arguments might also be used against James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Another Country as well as against John Rechy’s City of Night. Yet each of these books was an enormous breakthrough in bringing the topic of homosexuality to a broader public discourse, as well as presenting—through their empathy and artistry—complex images of homosexuality and same-sex desire to a reading public. To judge them as “not good for the gays” is not simply to misunderstand their place in history, but to misread them as literature as well.

The idea that some books were not “good for the gays” is closely tied to why they are not better known today and why they were lost to gay history. What created the myth that there were few (or no) books about homosexuality before Stonewall? Or the contradictory, but equally strong, myth that all of the pre-Stonewall novels about homosexuality had tragic endings? Part of the reason is that only a few of these books were actually read by many people in the gay generations after Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Movement. While Finistère, Quatrefoil, and The Gaudy Image were rereleased in the 1980s, most of these titles were out of print and available only in secondhand bookstores and the occasional library. Often writers who had once had acclaimed or productive careers such as Charles Gorman or Fritz Peters had faded to obscurity. Even a writer who continued to publish and thrive, such as Lonnie Coleman—who achieved considerable popularity, and a smaller degree of critical acclaim, with his Beulah Land series in the 1970s and 1980s—found his earlier work, with and without homosexual themes, ignored.

This historical literary amnesia is curious. Certainly the advent of the black civil rights movement led to the desire to uncover an obscured and hidden African-American culture, from the political writings of W. E. B. DuBois (which were rereleased in mass market paperbacks) to the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley and the novels and other writings of Harlem Renaissance writers. The same was also true of the second wave of feminism, which engendered and encouraged the massive cultural project of uncovering centuries of women’s thought and literature. Writers as diverse as Aphra Behn, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Jean Rhys were rediscovered and republished in popular editions. Within this great recovery of feminist culture was included the revival of lesbian writers from the 1930s such as Gale Wilhelm and from the 1950s such as Claire Morgan (Patricia Highsmith), Ann Bannon, and Valerie Taylor. So why wasn’t there a similar rush of rediscovery for gay male writers?

A great deal of this was, I believe, due to the need to believe in the myth that the Stonewall riots and the emergence of a Gay Liberation Movement was a decisive break with the past and a radical beginning for a new future. This attitude was apparent in the dismissive attitude that many gay liberationists took toward the older homophile groups such as Mattachine, SIR, and Daughters of Bilitis and their publications. Certainly these pulp paperbacks with their cover illustrations of unhappy men wandering uncertain in a lavender fog and the tag lines “Lost in a Twilight World of Loneliness” or “The Shocking Story of Unnatural Love Between Men” were the nightmare embodiment of everything that the post-Stonewall world imagined past gay life to have been. They were the sad, sorry, and sordid manifestations of life before liberation. There was no need to celebrate this past and no emotional or psychic possibility for nostalgia or even camp enjoyment.

One of the great projects of the Gay Liberation Movement was to create a new gay culture that was both to replace the older oppressive gay culture and to salve the wounds and scars that had been inflicted on homosexuals. There was no doubt in the minds of gay liberationists that the progenitor of queer hatred was what Christopher Isherwood labeled “the heterosexual dictatorship,” but that did not prevent gay activists from mounting a similar—and at times even more forceful and ferocious—attack on pre-Stonewall gay culture as well. It would be overdetermined (as well as vulgar Freudianizing) to view this impulse as a scenario of oedipal fury and a mistake to call this cultural rejection a form of “political correctness.” The rejection of pre-Stonewall gay culture by the gay liberationists had none of the censure and moral condemnation that is usually associated with how “political correctness” is used today; nor was its rhetoric (as is true today) that used by the right to attack progressive or left-leaning causes. Like most of the social movements of the 1960s—the antiwar movement, the music and drug counterculture, hippies and yippies, environmentalism, black power, radical and separatist feminism—gay liberation was a youth movement whose sense of history was defined to a large degree by a rejection of the past. Not surprisingly, the works of some earlier gay writers, such as Allen Ginsberg and other beats who carried their antiestablishment 1950s political agenda to the antiwar and counterculture movements, were accepted as post-Stonewall literature. After witnessing the Stonewall riots, Ginsberg was said to have commented to a friend that “the fags have lost that wounded look.” But with a few exceptions the liberationist rejection of the gay culture of the 1950s and 1960s was decisive and was, in many ways, a frightened response to the pain and the suffering that had visibly stalked gay life in the decades before Stonewall. In the excitement of reinvention we had missed the comfort of continuity. The richness of the literature in this anthology is an example of the wide array of visions and possibilities of gay male life and culture that were available in U.S. culture, particularly after World War II. Most of this was created by gay men in a variety of venues, from the mainstream to the alternative. It was created not only in opposition to a culture that frequently condemned homosexual behavior, but also in concert with that same culture, which was simultaneously fascinated by, even obsessed with, it.

Midcentury America was a unique historical moment for homosexuality. The Second World War had generated profound dislocations and disruptions of traditional ideas of sexuality and gender. As Allan Bérubé documents in Coming Out Under Fire, traditional ideas about masculinity, maleness, and male sexuality were profoundly altered by men’s experiences during the war. The tremors from these cultural and psychological events continued to reverberate deeply through U.S. culture for at least the next twenty years. The revolutions of the 1960s were, in many ways, the logical and karmic aftershocks of the cultural eruptions of the postwar years. America in the 1950s was a society eager and extraordinarily anxious to redefine itself, to hold on to the securities of the past as desperately as it was attempting to understand its possible futures. Two of the major preoccupations within this cultural flux were sexuality and gender, which, in combination with one another, produced a cultural fixation on homosexuality.

This cultural fixation on homosexuality was already in progress by 1948, the year Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published. The Kinsey report was a massive, dense, compendium—804 pages of tables, charts, and statistics based on interviews with 5,940 men about their sexual histories and activities. Kinsey, a scientist whose expertise was in the study of gall wasps, had enormous faith in the simple collecting of raw data. When Kinsey’s figures disclosed an enormous prevalence of sex between men, the country was shocked: “37 per cent of the total male population has at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age”; “50 per cent of the males who remain single until age 35 have had overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm, since the onset of adolescence”; “13 per cent of the males (approximately) react erotically to other males without having overt homosexual contacts after the onset of adolescence”; “18 per cent of the males have at least as much of the homosexual as the heterosexual in their histories for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55”; “10 per cent of the males are more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55”; “8 per cent of the males are exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55”; “4 per cent of the white males are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives, after the onset of adolescence.” One of the immediate results of Kinsey’s report was a cultural shift that brought such enormous cultural and media attention to male homosexuality that it amounted to a fixation.

The contradictions generated by and embedded within this fixation were tremendous. Here was a country obsessed with ridding its government of “subversive” homosexuals, yet it idolized performers like Liberace and Little Richard and refused to acknowledge their—rather evident to many—homosexuality. The country enshrined motherhood and the domesticated female while at the same time buying millions and millions of lesbian pulp novels and making Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield stars. The country both savored and ignored rumors about Rock Hudson’s “hidden life” while accepting him as Hollywood’s leading symbol of manly heterosexual romanticism. This same country embraced the new masculinities presented by James Dean and Montgomery Clift while promoting a revival of patriotic, individualist masculinism to backbone the ongoing cold war against Soviet and Chinese communism. It lionized Marlon Brando in black leather while it editorialized against the national outrage of youth motorcycle gangs. It was the country, finally, that promoted an apotheosis of the healthy male body in slyly homoerotic (and antiqueer) Charles Atlas ads in comics that were sold on drugstore magazine shelves only inches away from copies of Physique Pictorial and Grecian Guild Quarterly.

The dichotomized thinking of the period not only appeared in thinking about sexuality and gender, but was reflected in attitudes toward other social issues. This was the era that suspected all Jews of being untrustworthy foreigners and possibly communists but made Bess Myerson the first (and still the only) Jewish Miss America; that accepted television’s Molly Goldberg as the loving Jewish mother but sent Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair despite the pleas of Pope Pius XII. It was the country that continued to perpetuate the most horrendous, programmatic, state-sponsored racism against African-Americans while listening and dancing to the seductive (and, to mainstream culture, highly eroticized) sounds of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.

It is tempting to conjure the 1950s and the early 1960s through Dickens’s binary—it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But the era is far more complicated than that. Neither best nor worst, it was simply the times as they were, and they were complicated, contradictory, confusing, and—to our modern and postmodern contemporary sensibilities—often confounding and unnerving when focused on sexuality, sexual identity, and gender presentation. Gay male literature—as well as gay male culture and politics—grew and thrived through this time. It is a mistake to see it, in any of its manifestations, as moving on a separate track parallel to what was happening in the rest of the world. And certainly a mistake to ignore the very real hostility and oppression—censorships raids on private homes, repeated harassment of gay bars, police entrapment—that the readers of gay pulps faced. Since Stonewall it has been a truism that gay male and lesbian culture of this period was a fundamental contradiction to the established social structures that promoted highly inflexible norms of gender and sexuality. But the mainstream culture of the 1950s and ’60s—like all cultures—was constructed of a series of contradictions of which gay culture was one more strand. There is a definite historical and social progression of gay male literature during this time. Just because a culture is riddled with contradictions doesn’t mean that there are no means to organize, codify, and discuss them—and they, not surprisingly, both follow and influence the patterns we find in the broader culture.

*   *   *

An enormous and cohesive literature by and for gay men existed before Stonewall. From bestselling popular novels to drugstore book-rack pulps to pornography, these books emanated from, reflected, and shaped gay men’s lives for perhaps the most crucial thirty years of this century, from the beginning of World War II to the advent and blossoming of the enormous changes of the 1960s, years that saw the emergence of what we now understand to be the modern homosexual and gay life. These books are crucial to an understanding of this history as well as of the way we are here today. Why have so many of these pulp novels not found a place in the gay and lesbian literary tradition? Their short shelf life is partially attributable to their often controversial content, but it is important to remember that popular American culture as a whole is fleeting. With a few exceptions—The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Valley of the Dolls—books designated as popular literature have a brief hold on the American imagination. A quick look through the bestseller lists or the Pulitzer Prizes of the past decades demonstrates that enormously popular works, and even books critically praised as “great literature,” have vanished from our cultural consciousness. Many novels with homosexual themes published by respectable houses have simply vanished like their mainstream contemporaries.

Another reason why so many of these books are absent from contemporary culture and consciousness is that they have physically disappeared. One of the primary features of the paperback revolution was that the books were, in essence, disposable. Inexpensively produced and priced, paperbacks were not marketed as books to be kept. They were, not unlike characters in a pulp novel, easy, handy, available, and cheap. While paperback copies of novels such as Harrison Dowd’s The Night Air, Vin Packer’s Whisper His Sin, Jay Little’s Maybe—Tomorrow were plentiful when they were published in the 1950s and 1960s, they are scarce now, fetching high prices on the collectibles market. The problem of accessibility is compounded because libraries do not have space, funds, or in some cases the vision to sustain large collections of popular literature. While it might still be possible to find copies of Lonnie Coleman’s popular 1970s Beulah Land series on library shelves, locating a copy of his 1959 Sam is nearly impossible. The novels of Vin Packer, which were issued only in mass market paperback editions, and James Barr’s Derricks simply never made it into libraries. The gay-themed books that did were at high risk of being stolen by gay readers too embarrassed to borrow them legally, or by self-appointed censors who felt that such works had no place on library shelves.

Finally, many of these books—particularly those with more explicit sexual content—enjoyed large, but relatively clandestine, circulations. As paperback originals they were generally not sold in general-interest bookstores. Once bought, they may not have been judged as material many gay men would want to display on the open bookshelves in their living rooms or even bedrooms. Often enough, they were stored under the bed or in closets. Unfortunately, while many books were donated to libraries, charity rummage sales, or lawn sales, these titles stood a far greater chance of being thrown away or destroyed so that they would not reveal too much about their owners and their lives.

How, then, did I find the selections included in this anthology? Many of them I knew because I had come across them in my reading over the last thirty-five years. Gay people—whether they are children, teenagers, or adults—often have keen instincts for discovering obscured or hidden information about sexuality. As a teen in the 1960s, I was able to ferret out veiled and shrouded books that mentioned or had principal content about gay men or homosexuality. I was also lucky to grow up during a time before Internet sales when used books were cheap and used-book stores were plentiful, so buying and collecting books with queer content was not only an adventure, but a moderately inexpensive one.

Three sources for this project were invaluable. Roger Austen’s 1977 study, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America, is a book so groundbreaking that even when I disagreed with some of its assertions or conclusions, it served as an inspiration and a priceless resource. Ian Young’s 1982 The Male Homosexual in Literature: A Bibliography is an outstanding work of careful research and dedication. Tom Norman’s American Gay Erotic Paperbacks: A Bibliography—a massive undertaking performed with obvious love—was indispensable. Another key source was Georges-Michel Sarotte’s 1978 Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin, which was helpful in identifying novels and providing new ways of thinking about the material. Barbara Grier’s Lesbiana: Book Reviews from “The Ladder,” 1966–1972, while primarily discussing materials relating to lesbianism, provides a superb overview of “variant literature” of the period.

One of the great joys of putting together this book was the need for literary and historical sleuthing. Because of the half-public nature of homosexuality, many of these books were only semivisible and partially identifiable. Often I would find other titles by looking at the advertisements in book jackets or on the backs of paperback covers (“Other books you might enjoy are…”). Pertinent books might be identified through code words: the twilight world and men who live in the shadows were clear and obvious tip-offs. But less “leading” words were also fruitful: strange, curious, and unusual generally meant I’d stumbled upon an appropriate find. Needless to say, when the novels were set in Greenwich Village or featured a “bohemian life,” the payoff was usually quick and decisive.

Reading through bibliographies and surveys of modern American literature was often useful—particularly when phrases like “unhappy marriage” or “unconventional life” appeared in capsule biographies. Another invaluable bibliographic source was the catalogs from Elysian Fields, a now defunct mail-order company run by the late Ed Drucker that specialized in gay and lesbian literature. While these sales catalogs were not complete bibliographic records but simply lists of what was currently available, they are a gold mine not only of titles and authors but of publishers and publication dates. The latter is an enormous boon for research, as many of these titles have gone through several editions, often from now obscure or nontraditional publishing houses. Copies of the Guild Press mailorder catalog—published in the mid-1960s—were also a tremendous help. Because Guild Press marketed to a primarily gay male audience, their inventory provides a clear indication of what gay men were buying and reading at the time. Searching through old magazines from the 1940s to the 1960s turned up reviews of novels that have faded from cultural memory or passing references to authors who have never been overtly identified with “deviant themes” or “abnormal subject matter.” Sometimes, as was the case with Francis Cardinal Spellman’s homoerotically tinged writing, I just went on a logical hunch and it paid off.

It was also profitable to comb through used-book stores and see what was on the shelves. Many stores now have a “sexualities” section, or even a “gay and lesbian studies” category, and often odd titles from decades past will appear squeezed in between gay novels from the 1990s and works of gay sociology or lesbian self-help. I was tremendously lucky to have access to Harvard University’s libraries, which contained not only many specific titles that would have been nearly inaccessible otherwise, but also a plethora of ancillary works that, while not specifically gay-themed, were vital to understanding both the larger body of work of an author or the context in which she or he wrote. Finally, surfing the Internet provided idiosyncratic access to a wide range of information and connections that would have escaped me otherwise. How else might I have discovered that Stuart Engstrand, author of The Sling and the Arrow—an important, if decidedly odd psychoanalytic novel about homosexuality and gender variation—was also the author of the novel Beyond the Forest, which became a film with Bette Davis (featuring the famous line “What a dump!”)? On the Internet, too, I learned that Harrison Dowd (a writer about whom there is virtually nothing written) was a noted musician, actor, and a major player in the Village arts scene in the 1930s.

Lastly, I relied on the knowledge, goodwill, and generosity of so many fellow queer writers and thinkers who told me of new books, reminded me of books I had forgotten, suggested leads, and provided me with invaluable information. John Howard’s work on Thomas Hal Phillips and Carl Corley in Men like That: A Southern Queer History, as well as his introduction to the new edition of Phillips’s The Bitterweed Path, was inspirational, and his helping me secure the rights to Corley’s writing was a godsend. David Bergman’s thoughts and writings on many of these books and their social and political contexts were also incredibly informative and valuable. Chris Bram, as usual, was an endless source of information about all aspects of literary history.

In my readings, note takings, and collecting of all this material, I began to fear an unintended consequence. While the uncovering of this literature can only have positive effects on how we view our queer past, there is also a danger that these books could become part of what is often referred to as the gay canon. This would be a terrible, and I think, unhealthy fate. Indeed, I believe that the idea of a “gay canon” is not only unnecessary but unhelpful. In his essay “The Personal Is the Political,” Edmund White notes, “I myself am in favor of desacralizing literature, of dismantling the idea of a few essential books, of retiring the whole concept of a canon. A canon is for people who don’t like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded. Civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.”

It has become clear to me while working on this anthology that if the idea of “gay literature” is to have any relevance at all, any resonant meaning for us today and in the future, it must be a concept that is understood to be ever evolving. Some of the works in this volume—particularly in the first two sections—were not written as “gay literature.” They were not understood as such by their authors and often involve concepts of sexual identity and behavior that would not be considered “homosexual” or “gay”—although they would often be understood in contemporary parlance as “queer.” Through my research and reading I discovered an ever-unfolding world of writing that was connected to this project, and the idea of the “gay canon” became less and less supportable, less and less possible.

Since Stonewall there has been an ongoing project to uncover, recover, and unearth what is commonly called gay history. Thanks to the work of community and academic historians, to local history projects, to writers and editors, we have a far better—and more complex—understanding of the infinite variety of the lives and loves of all those women and men who came before us. Some of this information has been startling, surprising, or confounding, some of it has confirmed what we already knew (or thought we knew), and some of it has challenged and contradicted accepted wisdom. I hope that the selections in this anthology will do a little of all of these. Readers’ responses to these selections will not be the same as responses from readers in 1949 or 1956 or 1968. But the challenge of reading this literature is to think about how we live our lives today, and to imagine how people read and lived their lives thirty, forty, and fifty years ago—times that were very different from, yet not all that dissimilar to, today.