These scarce fifties’ and early sixties’ gay titles were often successful, commercially if not politically. By and large, in fact, they were dominated by the “sad young man” theme (as Richard Dyer labeled it in The Matter of Images, Routledge, 1993) or, as David Bergman puts it (in the mentioned Queer Sixties anthology), by the “boy meets boy, boy dies” pattern—the only appropriate pattern to a bleak and shadowy underworld peopled by deviant subjects indulging in sin, sex, alcohol, drugs, and crime. Those novels largely deployed classic, elegiac themes in male homosexual early writing; discovering one’s sexual orientation, facing a hostile environment, meandering to the fairy underworld or fighting for a passionate relationship, and finally meeting one’s doomed fate. That is to say, both an elegiac pattern, an acceptance of one’s negative self-image, and the best way to keep representation as “meant for the public benefit.” Given the allegedly “inherent” pornographic nature of homosexual representation, a gay man might be gay only if he and his (miserable) lover “Lived in Fear, Loved in Secret” (as the tagline to Tellier’s Twilight Men 1957 pulp cover eloquently stated), only if one of the two would eventually fade away, so as to restore the order of normality, bring the “redeeming social value” onstage, and call the censor dogs off. One could only be gay if, after all, he clearly wasn’t gay about it, and enjoying himself.
(Such troubled, fluid identity of gay characters and writing is reflected in the unstable generic nature of queer pulp. In the last thirty years, the very possibility of a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender writing has been defined, each with their specific history, features, issues and tradition, but the queer pulp scene did not provide such clarity. Usual elements invoked to characterize lesbian or gay writing—authorship and readership—do not easily apply to the fluid, industrial, obscene, queer scenario of pulp production and circulation, so that the only defining trait immediately available is subject-matter; lesbian-themed, gay-themed, S&M-themed pulps, etc. While most lesbian-themed pulps were in fact written by hets or gay men, gay pulps were largely written by gay authors under pen names shrouding their literary identity in order to avoid obscenity charges, and “polished” by editors, who severely intervened in their writing so as to keep it within legal standards—in some cases, by padding heterosexual scenes in, or by promoting a “sanitizing” cover; both strategies allowed you to be a gay author only if you did not look to be really gay about it.)
There is a story told that a lack of gay-positive images in queer pulp is no big surprise indeed; the fifties and early sixties were the age of McCarthyite culture and of Cold War paranoid homophobia (being homosexual entailed being a likely communist spy; un-American sexual identities might result in anti-American conduct). It is commonly said, in other words, that it took the legendary 1969 Stonewall uprising, and the birth of gay civil rights activism, to make possible the “gay is good” world-view, and reject the “social realism” and/or sensationalism presiding over stigmatized queer pulp images. And yet, unsurprisingly, such historiographic commonplace does not tell the whole story; Stonewall was not a self-generated event, and gay liberation was not born in the seventies, in fact, but in earlier homophile societies activity and magazines, and also, yes, in those “obscene,” contradictory representations made available in that very box we found in our cobwebbed garret, and in the forensic arena concerning alleged “pornography.”
Along with editors, who commissioned materials on the risky line of obscenity and made sure they might appear “socially valuable,” attorneys played a relevant role in pulp publishing houses, monitoring sentences in the field, assisting owners, editors and writers when indicted, inviting them to tone sexual content down, or authorizing them to boost it up as soon as verdicts started dropping charges. A series of sensational trials brought visibility to unorthodox sexualities, and their surprising verdicts entailed a change in legal standards both for heterosexual and homosexual representation. It was Grove Press, with their unexpurgated 1959 edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and 1961 edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, who won the first spectacular trials. While less resonant to the straight audience, a key role for gay pulps was played by the 1961 acquittal of H. Lynn Womack, the king of male erotic photo magazines. Having seen acknowledged the rights of his magazines to circulate in the United States, he would create Guild Press in 1962 and build what would later become a mail service porn empire. News was not always encouraging, though; in 1963 two California-based publishers, Sanford Aday and Wallace de Ortega Maxey, were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. But signs of a fresher wind blowing were all over the place. The sixties were the decade igniting a sexual revolution, after all; sex issues were treated in popular music, in factual reports and “Do-Your-Own-Thing” manuals, and increasingly at the movies, with censorship loosening its grip (the infamous Hays Code, in fact, was suspended in 1967). Youth rebellion and anti-war demonstrations, the Pill and rubber prophylactics, free love and flower power, the birth of Playboy and Cosmopolitan, drug experimentation, mass hedonism and androgyny, the mini-skirt, the camp craze and women’s liberation, all belong to a multifaceted and contradictory scenario of mass consumption, anti-authoritarianism, anti-conformism, and cultural change. When the Putnam edition of John Cleland’s classic erotic piece Fanny Hill got away with it in 1966, the forensic battlefield decreed—as Charles Rembar, the lawyer who defended Putnam and Grove Press in their causes célèbres, phrased it—the “end of obscenity.” It was not just heterosexual obscenity which was challenged, as a matter of fact; that very same year, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch got away with it too. The sixties sexual revolution was not just heterosexual revolution, as most social histories may lead us to think.
It is important to stress that it was not just a content issue at stake here; it was rather an issue of what, how and where did it circulate, and with what impact. As we’ve seen, obscenity is not simply an object; it is rather the display of some object that is required to be hidden, and its causing a reaction (at once pleasurable and “repelling”). Pornography had been available for centuries, in fact, to privileged cliques; copies of banned books such as Naked Lunch, Tropic of Cancer, and Fanny Hill were usually smuggled in the U.S., and did have some clandestine circulation. In the monitoring of its social effects, an unorthodox practice was something if represented in a hardcover novel of some literary complexity, because that limited and safeguarded its circulation. Such representation would merely reach, in fact, a highly literate and rather affluent readership having access to literary journals and upper-class newspapers (which, in case the book was too “dangerous,” might even refuse to run an ad for it, as it happened in 1948 to Vidal’s The City and the Pillar) and to metropolitan bookstores. The circulation of that unorthodox practice was, in some degree, safely kept off-scene enough, so as not to produce obscenity charges. That very same practice would be quite different, on the other hand, if represented in a paperback book, which was much cheaper, required a less literate readership, and was available next door. This is precisely what queer pulps represented in the sixties, enhanced as they were by the distribution that had been inaugurated in the late thirties by Penguin Books (who also won a trial that removed the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960) in the U.K., followed by presses like Popular Library, Fawcett Gold Medal, and Pocket Books in the U.S. All of a sudden, books staging “not for stage” identities and conducts were all over America. No more smuggling, or high cultural capital, was required; they could be found in sleazy newsstands, soda shops and grocery stores, sold “over the counter” or displayed in rack stacks, and with effective self-advertising covers and taglines. You could also carry them home discreetly, by slipping them into your pocket.
Significantly, the most pervasive censorship activities were conducted by Postal authorities, who might refuse to circulate books and exert surveillance on publishers and writers, so that the fight for queer visibility had courts as its battlefield, editors and writers on the one side, aided by their attorneys, obscenity laws—with Post Offices as their armed forces—on the other side. In such traffic warfare, pulps played a role indeed in changing the self-image of America. The readership for paperback novels had been boosted by military authorities, who promoted cheap editions of American classics—a huge number of books were published by Armed Services Editions—to benefit troops in World War II; cheap entertainment, role models and motivation for the heroes of American identity, freedom and constitutional rights. They served this end far beyond the first intentions of the military