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The Book Nook Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, edited by Michael Bronski; St. Martin's Press; 370 pages; $14.95.
Though my own pulp collection is not as large as that of Fort Lauderdale's Stonewall Library and Archives (gay pulp heaven), I managed to assemble a sizeable library from years of browsing through book stores, rummage sales, mail-order catalogs and, more recently, the Internet. I even gave a lecture on what I considered to be the "golden age" of gay pulps (1966-1975). So when I heard that Michael Bronski was editing an anthology of gay pulp fiction, I could only jump for joy. I am a big fan of Mr. Bronski, having read his previous books (Culture Clash) as well as his book and movie reviews in The Guide. Those of us who came of age after Stonewall tend to dismiss gay pulp fiction as relics of a closeted, self-hating age. In Pulp Friction, Bronski acquits the pulps of this unfair indictment. The pulps, he tells us, "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 naive) 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. . . . 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." Unlike lesbian pulps, which (with due apologies to Ann Bannon, Paula Christian and Valerie Taylor) were mostly written by straight men to titillate other straight men, gay male pulps were written by and for gay men. This is perhaps why gay pulps only hit their stride during the late 1960's, a decade after the golden age of lesbian pulps. It is no coincidence that the rise of gay pulps coincided with the decline of government censorship of erotic literature. As Bronski put it, "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." Before adult cinemas, XXX videos and the Internet, gay pulps were there to excite and delight gay and bisexual men. In Pulp Friction, Bronski refutes several presumptions about gay pulps. A good example is the "commonplace assumption that in the fifties and sixties 'homosexuality' was a taboo topic" while, in fact, it "was very much in the public consciousness" and "was more integrated into popular culture than it would be in the late 1960s and the early 1970s." Pre-Stonewall "gay fiction" was not a separate literary category but was integrated into the pulp mainstream. The supposedly taboo topic of male sex was openly discussed, though not as explicitly as in later books. Even the belief that most pre-Stonewall gay fiction had inevitably tragic endings is a myth, though a "deeply inscribed" one. In fact, according to Bronski, "many pre-Stonewall 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," he adds. But Bronski's excellent Introduction is just the icing on the cake. The heart of Pulp Friction are the excerpts from 18 pulp novels or short story collections. They range from obviously literary works by James Barr, Lonnie Coleman and Michael De Forrest to delightful trifles by Ben Travis, Marcus Miller and John Ironstone. Most literary gays may have heard of, if not actually read, Song of the Loon by Richard Amory and Lost on Twilight Road by "James Colton" (Joseph Hansen's nom de plume). But only an expert or a collector would be familiar with Gay Whore (by Jack Love) the Memoirs of Jeff X orThe Boys of Muscle Beach. Some of the authors, like Bruce Benderson or Carl Corley, are still with us, while others, like Chris Davidson (A Different Drum), have since banished into the ether. These 18 volumes are but a small percentage of the 225 titles that Bronski read in preparation for Pulp Friction, not to mention the hundreds of gay pulps published between 1949 and 1978. Though Bronski could not excerpt most of the books on his reading list, he writes about virtually all of them in the Appendix, an essential tool for pulp collectors. In his Introduction to Pulp Friction, Bronski bemoans the "historical literary amnesia" that has enveloped gay pulps in obscurity. This he attributes to the post-Stonewall tendency to repudiate its predecessors and to the fact that pulp books are "disposable" material; cheaply published and meant to be read once and thrown away. In the early 1990's Masquerade Books issued new editions of classic pulps by Phil Andros, Clay Caldwell, William Carney, James Colton, Robert Scully and William Talsman, among others. But Masquerade went out of business, and except for the works of Larry Townsend (who owns the rights) virtually all gay pulps are out of print. Hopefully, the popularity of Pulp Friction will lead to renewed interest in these long-neglected classics. Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner. He can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com. |
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I collect gay pulps. Those disreputable, trashy, badly-written, often pornographic novels and stories were an essential tool in my coming out process, as it was for so many men of my generation. Even when I came out and went on to read, review and collect more mainstream material, pulps continued to hold a special place in my literary heart.