Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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turn into weird Self-Instruction Guides (or “Do,-If-You-Really-Insist,-That’s-The-Way” manuals), queering up the guide-style of straight books such as Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex; A Gourmet’s Guide to Love Making (1972). The cover blurb for L. Jay Barrow’s Hollywood…Gay Capitol of the World (Dominion, 1968), in fact, promised to chart safer roads to queer Hollywood (“Carefully, in great detail, the author leads over every path of the homosexual community. He names places and people…he reports what’s new in fashions and entertainment. The sex practices of the gay crowd are documented as never before. It’s exciting! It’s a new type of guidebook to homosexual life”). Clearly enough, the revelations on the shadowy underworld might turn out to be, yes, something like David Reuben’s 1969 handbook, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), or even like Helen Gurley Brown’s landmark 1962 manual, Sex and the Single Girl; The Unmarried Woman’s Guide to Men, Careers, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money, and Men. Hey, now that I think of it, there is another small, naughty book from that box; it’s Don Holliday’s Sex and the Single Gay (Leisure Books, 1967). No need to argue more on that issue.
Absolutely; it’s a scandalous, thrilling, threatening, exciting world indeed, the world of pulp paper passions we just discovered in America’s ghostly garret. Are you willing (and legal) to plunge into the world revealed in that half-concealed cardboard box, in a journey à la recherche du temps perdu, or du temps you just missed? If so, the book you are about to read will make an excellent travelogue—and chaperon. This book is in fact penned by a top protagonist of the queer pulp scene, Victor J. Banis, the ubiquitous author—under numerous bylines of both genders—of well over one hundred paperbacks (including eleven of the above mentioned titles, plus the introduction to a twelfth), making him a cult figure in early gay writing. His first gay novel—The Why Not (Greenleaf Classics, 1965)—promised a “Scorching Excursion Through the Gay World of the Lost and the Not-So-Sure…” as a matter of fact. And provided an exquisitely appropriate tagline for the memoirs he would publish forty years later; an excellent guide to books whose authors are “lost, or not-so-sure,” replete with “every path, places and people, fashions and entertainment” of the queer pulp scene.
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Just like its articulations and protagonists—however formulaic and stereotyped they were—offer an amazingly varied and complex scenario, sixties queer pulp is obscene in a compound way. It sports the whole intricacy of the word obscene, in fact, and it can be useful to delve into such intricacy in order to address the pulp scene. A word of doubtful etymology, obscene apparently derives—via French—from Latin, either from obcænum (a compound of ob, “on account of,” and cænum, “dirt,” “filth,” “foulness,” “vulgarity”) or from obscænus (ob, “tension,” and scæna, “scene,” “communal ritual space”). As the obscene is “dirt,” “filth,” it translates into what is “not for stage.”
The twofold lexical root mirrors the duplicity of obscenity, which refers either to an aesthetical offence induced by something disgusting, impure, abominable, filthy to the senses, or to a moral offence, obscenity being what incites unchaste and lustful ideas, or impure, indecent, lewd, detestable behavior. But also, it enacts the tension between object and social representation, between private and public (requiring that very separateness of spheres it necessarily subverts), presiding over the legal battlefield of obscenity. For the obscene is at one and the same time a descriptive and prescriptive issue, at once a “dirty” object (the privy parts, say) and an action of and on desire (the inducement of immodest thoughts or behavior that privy parts, say, may provoke) breaking the communal rules of what is appropriate to display. On top of that, the obscene is a cultural negotiation (the very idea of standards of acceptable thoughts and practices varies, diachronically and synchronically; it varies in time and space, and it is different as social communities are, so that what is offensive or prurient in rural America may not be so in metropolitan East or West Coasts). Let alone that an object or conduct disgusting to some may be quite appealing to others, whose judgment is silenced, and made itself to some extent obscene.
The obscene therefore belongs both to one’s privacy, and to the communal ritual space, and as such requires the very act of making one’s privacy public, in order to offend the accepted standards of decency, confront social judgment, emerge as a libel against public opinion, “natural decency” and the social order, and constitute itself as, well, obscenity. We may say it implies a double, contradictory normativity, and a dialectic tension between concealing and displaying. On the one side, the obscene is not simply what is “off-stage,” but rather what should be off-stage, the dirt swept under the rug of representation; on the other side, it requires the confrontation with the communal court. The obscene is what should be concealed, but is in fact exposed. (Nobody condemns us for having more or less appealing privy parts; the charge of obscenity would be plausible in case we showed them off in public, which is to say, in case we brought onto the social stage what is “not for stage.”) The obscene is thus inextricably entwined with its seeming opposite, the monster, as etymology (monster deriving from Latin monstrum, “prodigy,” “portent,” “marvelous,” “a divine portent or warning,” also the root for the Latin verb monstrare, “to display”), pulps and tv freak shows—those repertories of human obscenity, making starlets out of the weird, unbelievable, thrilling, threatening, and alluring—illustrate well enough, showing the enduring interest we nourish for what we are supposed to loathe, and the authorization we receive to indulge in illicit excitement by invoking shock and “disgust.”
Obscenity is not necessarily pornographic or sexual in nature, however (wealth and power are obscene, as most of us perfectly know, if arrogantly displayed). But the offence was assumed to be against the prevalent sexual morality within the legal arena, by laws policing and censoring sexual expression. As Martha Nussbaum records in her Hiding from Humanity; Disgust, Shame and the Law (Princeton University Press, 2003), lawyers have had a tough time dealing with such complex and unstable issue, making courts the crucial battleground for the definition of the right to pulp, “pornographic,” queer citizenship, as theoretically warranted by the U.S. constitutional protection for freedom of speech.
Since the thirties, the movies’ Hays Production Code had decreed the obscenity of brutal killings, nudity and homosexuality, along with all kinds of “sex perversion” (adultery, rape, etc.), ruling them out of Hollywood studios productions. As to printed matters, i.e., the pulp battlefield, the test of obscenity in the fifties and sixties was grounded in their representing prurient stuff, while being—in notorious words—“utterly without redeeming social value.”
Such test, along with material conditions of production and reception that we’ll address shortly, primarily accounts for the historical form and circulation of queer pulp fiction; the history of queer pulp is intertwined with the history of pornography, censorship regulations, and obscenity charges. In the mid-fifties, in fact, homosexual characters, friendships and settings left the spaces of indirection they had been relegated to in early twentieth-century queer writing, and made their way onstage, to the center of the novel scene. Still, the greater bulk of queer pulps from the forties and fifties had lesbianism or third-sex twilight stories as its subject matter, and as a rule it was “sociological”—read “pathologizing”—in nature. While lesbianism in these novels largely staged a heterosexual fantasy, and was in fact redeemed by the male gaze—Yvonne Keller, in a splendid essay from The Queer Sixties (edited by Patricia Juliana Smith, Routledge 1999), tags them “virile adventures,” one-handed male readers, written by men and for heterosexual men—both unchained female, freakish and proto-gay sexuality could be converted into “social value” by framing them either as stories that inevitably condemned eccentric (off-stage) sexual subjects to a doomed destiny, or as social psychology investigations in the urban lowlife of unorthodox sexualities (pathological or situational homosexuality, Kinsey-flavored bisexuality, transsexuality as scientific frontier, etc.).
Even in this sanitized context, there were very few titles specifically devoted to gay passions until the mid-sixties, if compared to lesbian, transvestite, transsexual and nympho-themed titles. Just some paperback reissues of homosexual classics, such as Forman Brown’s Better Angel (originally published in 1933), and a handful of novels, including some mainstream press hardcover releases—Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948),