The Good Old Naughty Gays

OR HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THE SUBVERSIVE, TRANSGRESSIVE AND LIBERATED GAY-ADULT NOVELS OF THE 1970S: AN INTRODUCTION

This is how I discovered and fell in love with vintage gay adults-only paperbacks, and realized they were celebrating aspects of gay life then unseen in mainstream fiction. It’s a pretty brief story, really, though the route to understanding the significance of heroic gay doctors and detectives, secret agents and sea captains, cowboys and vampires and surfers back when gay characters in mainstream media were generally troubled and often self-loathing and suicidal might be circuitous but worth the effort.

My love of horror/thriller movies — especially European and most especially Italian gialli — led me to venture into 42nd Street movie theaters as a teen. Times Square’s reputation was always risqué, but in the 1970s it was downright bad. Hooking and hustling, drug dealing and using, panhandling and purse snatching and a significant number of mostly harmless crazies … it was filled with the kind of things that tourists found intimidating if not downright scary.

Its theaters, whether the always modest Harris and Selwyn or the once-grand New Amsterdam, whose grubby red carpet featured legendary showman Florenz Ziegfield’s initials woven in a repeating gold pattern, played double- and triple-bills. Here hookers dropped in to put their feet up for a few minutes before going back to work, and one once offered to introduce me to her man, Mellow Yellow (she was barely clad in daffodil-colored platform shoes, crocheted short-shorts and a tiny, matching halter top), as we washed our hands side by side in the ladies room. When I politely declined, she answered cheerfully, “Okay, maybe I’ll see you around!” These were fun times, chronicled in ‘zines like Bill Landis and Jimmy McDonough’s Sleazoid Express and defined by a feeling that if you were there in the theaters or in the bookstores or in the little diner on the north side of 42nd in the middle of the block, you belonged there.

It was in one of those bookstores — because it was there and so was I and of course I had to go in — that I saw my first gay adult book. I didn’t buy it, mostly because having seen inside of the place I really wanted to get out, but once I knew these books existed I bought others in slightly more respectable Greenwich Village shops. Fast-forward to the late ‘90s, when overlapping online marketplaces opened up a world of opportunities and I started seriously collecting gay-adult genre novels. I gravitated to thrillers, policiers, detective stories and horror, along with pirate epics, science fiction, bildungsromans, the occasional Western (never my favorite genre) and sundry titles that caught my eye — like Eric Todd’s Beachballer trilogy (1973-1974), each of which chronicles a single day in the life of Kerry Kennedy, a fit California beach bum living his best fun-in-the-sun life.

Through my eventual decade as publicity director for New York City Ballet, my baker’s-dozen years as Senior Movies Editor for TVGuide.com, and my time teaching college film courses and writing books including The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time ate up a good deal of my days, I remained hooked on these novels that told diverse, engaging stories and didn’t close the bedroom door decorously. I learned the pseudonyms and/or real names of such prolific writers as Victor Banis, Dirk Vanden and William Maltese, all of whom became friends, and the ubiquitous Don Holliday —a house pseudonym that masked the identities of a wide range of writers across all genres, including Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block, both future stars of critically acclaimed mass-market thrillers and crime stories. All were looking to make a quick buck churning out formulaic erotica: At least one sex scene per chapter, preferably at the beginning, with the rest of the pages filled up however you liked. And when no mainstream publishing house would accept a book starring a confident gay adventure hero, genre novelists turned to gay adult publishers.

I learned about the fragility of pulp paper, doomed to yellow and crumbe if treated carelessly, and about the unwillingness of many closeted gay men to keep collections sure to out them either during their lifetimes or when relatives came to clean out their effects. I suspect another reason relatively few copies of most gay-adult paperbacks survived is that dismayed relatives hauled them straight to the dump when they cleaned out the homes of deceased “bachelor uncles.'‘ A friend once told me that while still living at home in the ‘70s he’d borrow his grandmother’s car, drive to Times Square yo buy an adult novel he’d read while parked under the West Side Highway and then throw away before making the drive back.

The beauty of that story is in the mundane details: This is how much gay-adult novels meant at a time when gay men rarely saw themselves depicted in movies, magazines, novels or the occasional “daring” television show as anything other than misfits, miscreants, perverts or sad and lonely outcasts. Individually these novels vary wildly in quality, but en masse they are a part of history … and a great deal of fun as well.

If you want to know more, see my first three columns here, starting Thursday. The initial one gives an overview and the next two focus on a pair of what I consider some of the best and most representative titles. For now it’s all free — including when you subscribe to get a new column every two weeks.

And if you like what you read, and I think there’s a good chance you will, please