Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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you may just sit down and enjoy. And of course, you can still wonder about your neighbor, if you fancy doing so.
These charming ghosts, restoring pulps to visibility and interest (both critical and commercial), did not therefore come back spontaneously; they are the result of cultural research that cannot firmly rely upon the institutional tools of historical analysis. Such research is best achieved as a fictional, pulp history, insofar as it can only be done by ransacking the trash bin of history; by skimming through that huge, virtual archive of tarnished pulpwood paper that lay half-forgotten across the country, reading about pulps in underground publications such as the journals published by early homophile organizations, and by looking for the protagonists of that era, enhancing the very possibility of telling a history though their stories, gossip, covers, and pulpwood.
The sex wars and revolution of the sixties and seventies had paper and images as their armies; a fierce cultural battle, we have seen, was fought in representations, and in the very legal possibility of “re-presentation” (i.e., mass-printing and distribution). A cultural history of the sixties, sated with icons and iconoclasts as they were, should therefore account not only for movie stars, fashion and political leaders, art and pop music stars. It should also account for the heroes of the pulp theatre of obscenity; authors, editors, attorneys, cover artists—and characters. It was in characters, in the obscenity of their plots and desires, in fact, that the pulp freak show was created. It is no accident that histories of pulp are told through these covers and characters, as the stars of a pop cult for the demi-monde that was, insomuch as it was obscene, at once underground and fully exposed, at once bordering on the illegal and evident in the pulp dazzling covers and “points of distribution.” Just like the pulp theatre once transformed weirdoes into starlets, time has turned them into vintage smut gems—or, if you are in a metaphorical mood, it turned these cultural sand-grains into oyster pearls.
Of all the starlets and heroes of the Golden Age of the queer paperback, one cover and character surely stand out as a recurrent presence in visual and critical overviews of the queer pulp era, so as to become the ultimate star of sixties queer pulp culture; it’s Jackie Holmes, the protagonist of Don Holliday’s legendary series opened in 1966 by The Man from C.A.M.P. (yes, the book sporting the Yoo Hoo! Lover Boy! tagline, remember?), followed by eight other titles in the next two years. There he was, on the foreground of an optical pink and blue vertigo pattern; stylish haircut, velvet jacket and waistcoat, embroidered pochette, silk shirt, leotard pants and gleaming leather boots—a flamboyant blond-haired queen indeed, posing in his sunglasses, winking looks, arm akimbo and cigarette holder, while keeping a white poodle on the leash. Quite the stereotype of a sixties homosexual and his pet, we would say; but in that duo there was evidently more than meets the eye. In fact, they were both undercover agents. Jackie Holmes was the queer outcome of the Bond mania that flooded the U.S. in late 1964, with James Bond and Napoleon Solo, that Man from U.N.C.L.E., raging in theatres, on tv and in magazines, fighting communist spies and deviate corporate capitalism worldwide—and, in their spare time, reasserting the male gaze and patriarchal order that were under threat. Yes, for the sake of the nation (nothing personal; just a means to a good end), they had to do their duty with that throng of blond and brunette playthings. Jackie is himself the top agent of an all-powerful secret Agency, but one that is far less banal than the Bond herd. His Agency is eloquently enough named C.A.M.P. (no, we don’t ever get to know what the acronym stands for, but that’s what camp is all about, isn’t it?), an Agency dedicated to “the protection and advancement of homosexuals” throughout the world. The luxurious offices of C.A.M.P. may be found in the back of rundown bars, via—of course—their toilets. A blond sex bombshell, a diamond expert and a vintage cars connoisseur, from such offices Jackie Holmes steps into the world; making all heads turn, he fights evil plots, wins over villains—and crushes hearts—of all sexual confessions. He inexorably brings Interpol straight agents into his bed, as a matter of fact, so as to make them into notches on his huge wooden, penis-shaped trophy totem. As to Sophie, the white poodle co-starring in that book cover, she is his appropriately undercover pet; while looking harmless, she reveals “razor sharp teeth” and is “trained to kill.” Wow, now that’s something different indeed.
The symbolic value of Jackie Holmes and his C.A.M.P. confreres in mid-sixties pop queer culture can hardly be overestimated. A few months before Susan Sontag had brought camp travesty, aestheticism and inverted hierarchies to mass consumption; her famous Notes on “Camp” essay, first published in Partisan Review in Fall 1964—right on the verge of the Bond mania outburst (Goldfinger premiered in New York in December 1964)—captured the Zeitgeist so much that the New York Times and Time magazine immediately reported on it, alongside instances of the Bond craze, and pushed throngs of Americans to flea markets, looking for that piece of endearingly “failed seriousness” Sontag had taught them to love. By “betraying” (her term) the camp secret code, by acting as an intellectual spy and divulging camp to the masses, Sontag herself—“Miss Camp,” as she was tagged at the time—would thus become a media celebrity, and an emblem for sixties mass “masked culture,” one that, by adopting camp as its catchphrase, offered intellectuals a way to reaffirm their aesthetic supremacy as taste-makers, precisely because they derided modernist aesthetic categories, laughed away paranoid homophobic McCarthyite culture, and exhilaratingly espoused queer popular culture. But Jackie the queer icon was more than just another mass icon, however extraordinarily significant Sontag and Bond were. Jackie staged a more elitist cult, both more exclusive and popular, for he was no icon to New York literati, but to thousands of obscure readers who bought his adventures in newsstands (hence, he was more “popular”), and had access to a deeper underground (hence, his more “exclusive” nature) deployment of the camp travesty. Jackie’s C.A.M.P. Agency was a celebration of camp as gay ‘survival strategy,” the strategy allowing generations of queers to cope with a gloomy reality—by letting them find thrilling spectacles, self-fashioning theatrics, identity and community in flamboyant parody, behind closed doors and in rundown bars, amidst human debris and desolation. But Jackie himself did more than that. He showed the very possibility, before Stonewall, to be gay and proud, to be both a committed social activist and a gay Don Juan. Of all queer pulp images, name one who better qualifies as spy queen.
As a secret agent, underground celebrity, icon and iconoclast, Jackie is an apt figure for sixties queer pulp culture; a paradoxical culture indeed, grounded in pop secrecy, in pseudonyms and sensation. He captures and embodies the sixties tension between paper agency, sub-cultural rebellion, survival strategies, and undercover self-recognition. He vanished in 1968, but he lived as a legend in the heart and mind of all those who had read his pulp adventures. Until he reappeared, in web pages and in critical studies, leading the ghosts from the Golden Age of the gay paperback. And eventually, this ultimate pulp star and hero made his comeback as a reissued classic in early 2004, when Harrington Park Press published three of his stories in one volume.
If the top agent of C.A.M.P. is the one star character of that era, the star author of pulps actually resembles Jackie in many ways, as far as some pictures from the sixties suggest; same hair and profile, in fact, same heartbreaking, classy, naughty looks. And in one picture, he can also be seen with a white poodle. Unsurprisingly so, for this is Jackie’s creator. No, his name is not Don Holliday, as the book cover stated. The author of an undercover star character and series was, most appropriately, an undercover star author. Yes, you are—I wonder how you can not be—on the right track. Just like Sontag, Bond, and Solo, the other media spy celebrities of those months, Victor J. Banis had himself made his appearance in the New York Times in late 1964; not so much in the Arts & Entertainment pages, though, but rather in the forensic news, for he was indicted in an obscenity trial in Sioux City, Iowa, on the ground of his first novel, The Affairs of Gloria (yes, you met that “free-loving, free-wheeling nympho” above), issued by Brandon House in 1964 and nominally authored by “Victor Jay.” Upon acquittal, Victor Banis did not orderly retreat to other, safer professions; as Don Holliday, Victor Jay, J. X. Williams, Jay Symon, Jay Vickery, Bob Michaels, Victor Samuels, Victor Dodson, Jay Dodd, Dodd V. Banson, or anonymously, he outpoured a huge amount of pulps, including Jackie’s adventures, so as to become the most prolific author of the Golden Age of gay pulps, the underground chief of writers like Richard Amory, James Cain, Phil Andros, Chris Davidson, Ed Wood Jr., and possibly the most read author of gay materials in the world—by the early seventies, Banis had