Naked Launch, Book One

Neil J. Weston, Phenix Publishers, 1968

Gay adult novels of the 1960s and '70s were by and large not political manifestos but first and foremost erotic entertainments, aimed at a large but underserved audience of gay men looking for sexually explicit amusement. But these books' publishers did provide an outlet for writers who wanted to create genre fiction that used pulp conventions to explore the lives of gay men in full, despite the widespread societal hostility that eventually prompted the Stonewall uprising and launched an era of gay-rights activism. Simply by existing, novels like the swashbuckling (and unbuckling!) pirate adventure Naked Launch played a part in that revolution and managed to be enormously entertaining as well.

The presumably pseudonymous Neil J. Weston's lusty period epic Naked Launch, Book One (1968) and its equally concupiscent sequel, Naked Launch, Book Two (1969), go all in on the pirate tropes made familiar by decades of movies: Say what you will about the animated Peter Pan (1953), which unfortunately traffics in caricatures to which modern viewers may object, it nonetheless introduced generations of kids to the iconic Captain Hook. And some of those kids grew up to be gay men open to having their timbers shivered by tales of pirate ships that were hotbeds of manly man-love.