His Male Lover

by John Kimbro as Kym Allyson, Brandon Press/Lambda House, 1970

His Male Lover is an odd little book about two young men who meet through a pen-pal service, which makes me wonder why it wasn't titled His Mail Lover. In any event, pen pals, in the days of letter-writing via snail-mail, were generally strangers, usually with something in common like a hobby, who corresponded by mail. Often it was something schoolchildren did in conjunction with a school in another country, as a cultural exchange. Sometimes pen pals connected via addresses in magazine letter columns. And, as in the novel, there were services set up to connect like-minded letter-writers, for purposes ranging from amiable curiosity, as we might look at Facebook posts of friends in far-off lands, to romance.

Some might assume this makes His Male Lover a period piece whose primary charm lies in its antiquated premise. People writing letters to strangers — with stamps and envelopes and trips to the corner mailbox or the post office — and falling in love... just wow, they must have been bored out of their minds to spend that much time writing stuff to somebody they didn’t even know. But it was just the social media of its time. Times change; people don't.