Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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It was true as well that, thanks to the notoriety that I garnered from the trial, I was able to persuade a number of the West Coast publishing houses, who until then had no interest in the genre, to begin publishing gay material. My 1966 novel The Why Not was the first gay fiction published by Greenleaf Classics. As a result of its success—and my lobbying efforts—Greenleaf went on to become the biggest of the gay pulp publishers throughout the sixties and early seventies. And with their track record to bolster my arguments, I was able personally to convince other pulp publishers to “go gay.” My campaign succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and launched that entire boom in gay publishing that so changed the book and social landscape of the sixties, unloosing a heretofore unimaginable flood of gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction. Certainly, for gay people, that could be counted a contribution, couldn’t it?
Having broken the ice with The Why Not, I went on to write literally scores of gay novels and nonfiction works (and non-gay as well, I should probably point out) under my own name and as Victor Jay, Don Holliday, J. X. Williams, Jan Alexander and dozens of other names, in quantities that I am sure remain unequaled.
In addition to the American and British editions (hard and soft cover) of my books, I was eventually translated into German, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian—even foreign language audio editions.
It was said in the late sixties, and I have no reason to doubt it, that I was at that time the most widely read gay writer in the world—or, more correctly, the most widely read writer of gay material. I hasten to say that this was in part a matter of having written large numbers of different books and not because any single book racked up such spectacular sales figures, though certainly many of them did well. By the early seventies, by the most conservative estimates, there were more than three million copies of my gay books in circulation. Mere peanuts for writers like Danielle Steele or Stephen King, but not bad for a paperback writer whose name never graced a bestseller list. More importantly, not bad for a market that only a few years earlier was thought not to exist.
I am not altogether sure, you understand, that everyone would consider that contribution a welcome one.
There was no question, however, that I had been a major factor in creating the soon burgeoning demand for gay material. To help fill that demand, I went on to train other writers and even to represent many of them as an agent. For the next several years my writers and I supplied far and away the majority of gay fiction and nonfiction being published. There was a joke going around the industry in the late sixties, to the effect that the gay publishing revolution had mostly happened around my kitchen table. It wasn’t too far off the mark, actually.
At the same time, in book after book, we continued to break down the barriers to what could be said or described in print and so opened doors to alternative themes. I was among the first to write openly and in depth about a number of theretofore taboo subjects—Men & Their Boys (1966) looked at the relationships between adult males and teen boys, and Black and White Together dealt with interracial sexuality. In various books I cast light on bisexuality, incest and homosexual rape, subjects barely whispered about then and with which many people even today remain uncomfortable. I thought, and still think, that they ought to be looked at more openly.
I published straightforward male nude photography when it was still far from clear whether we could do so legally, and while I was at it launched the careers of underground photographers like Pat Rocco and Tom Di Simone. And along the way fought often and vigorously with those who thought male nudity obscene. I was convinced that it was not.
Indeed, I believed wholeheartedly that in a free society people should be free to write, photograph, print, publish or read what they choose. History has tended to agree with me but let it be said, history took some persuading.
I produced the first of the high quality, over the counter books containing sexually explicit photos, breaking one of the last remaining barriers to free expression. Perhaps a dubious contribution, but the jury is still out on that one, I think.
I helped launch the Groovy Guy Contest, the first of the male beauty pageants (as opposed to body-building competitions) and subsequently much imitated. Yes, a minor contribution at best. Nevertheless, Tinker Bell, if you like beautiful men strutting their stuff, this is the time to applaud.
Throughout the sixties and early seventies I brushed shoulders (and sometimes more) with many, perhaps most, of those leading the sexual revolution. I swapped gay porn and bisexual musings with Hugh Hefner, the bunny man himself, and discussed the legal niceties of sex-oriented publishing with Wardell Pomeroy, Kinsey’s one-time righthand man and ultimately his successor at the Kinsey Institute.
For twenty plus years I worked as writer, publisher, editor, agent, and writing instructor, and in all of those roles fought stubbornly (if not always wisely) for the rights of writers and publishers to say what they wanted to say, how they wanted to say it.
By the mid-seventies I doubt if there were many in the publishing world who didn’t at least know my name, though they may not always have spoken it with pleasure.
Alas, I should no doubt point out that at the same time all of this was going on I was endlessly harassed by the would-be guardians of our morals, particularly the U.S. Postal Authorities. Many of my books dealt in a positive way with homosexuals and homosexuality, which in itself made them—in the view of the Federal government—obscene and so placed me outside the law, a criminal. I was arrested twice on obscenity charges and lived for many years with the threat of arrest and prison confinement hanging over my head, and was nearly forced into exile to avoid prison. It was not altogether a glamorous profession.
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Well, I suppose those were contributions, if not all of them positive. When I turned my attention to that period in time, I was surprised to discover that so much of it, in particular the publishing revolution of the era, of which I had certainly been a part, was so poorly documented. Not that there had been nothing published on the subject. Indeed, there were some very fine books and articles available. But everything of consequence that had been written had been written by East Coast writers for East Coast publishers, and critiqued by East Coast critics—when in fact that publishing explosion had been primarily a West Coast phenomenon. I found nothing of consequence that did not share that bias; which is to say, nothing that told the whole story.
It began to seem to me that perhaps I ought to share my experiences with those others who were interested in the era. And quite frankly I realized that if I were going to do so, it needed to be sooner rather than later. Already names and dates were fading from my never-very-perfect memory.
I sat myself down before the word processor and began to type, with reluctance at first but with more enthusiasm as the pages went by. Not that I was any less concerned about my step-ins; but it was an exciting time that I was describing and reliving it turned out to be more fun than I had imagined. What began as a chore became in short order a labor of love.
When my friends at Bolerium Books of San Francisco, Mike Pincus and John Durham, originally asked me to do this for them, it was meant to be something in the nature of a pamphlet to be distributed through their mailing list and on their web site. It soon became evident that there would certainly be more than a pamphlet. Well, I couldn’t have written all that stuff if I hadn’t been wordy, could I? Anyway, I am particularly grateful for their generosity in letting me develop their idea for someone else.
I have written this more or less as it occurred to me, without strict allegiance to time sequences or any sort of logical structure—more as if I were sitting chatting with the reader. You may find it helpful to read it in a corresponding manner. So far as that goes you don’t have to read it at all. That’s the nice thing about freedom, it works both ways.
For the most part I have tried to tell the story of the revolution of the sixties and seventies, though for the sake of historical perspective I have written as well about the earlier years; the early sixties, the fifties and, to a lesser degree, the forties.
The story I have told, however, is a personal one; the era as I experienced it. Which is to say, it is not the history of the sexual revolution that occurred then, which it seems to me yet remains to be written, nor of