Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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nature (obscenity, confession and stardom are intertwined discourses, founding and reinforcing each other), talk shows and interviews are the sites in which star figures are expected to unfold their private side, “show” their real (to reel) soul and personality, open up their heart to America—and by doing so, they are supposed to bring us to the heart of America they epitomize, to the specters of emotional stories, longing and fears, they embody and direct for their fans.
This is precisely what Banis’ memoirs enact and provide, in fact, albeit on a minor/superior, “obscene” theatre. As with mainstream star autobiographies, Banis’ personal memories offer invaluable insider knowledge on the “super” stage he was a protagonist of, on the gay book market he actually contributed to create, and on queer pulp authorship. Part social history, part emotional history, these “remembrances of a paperback writer” bring us indeed to the heart of America, and to its most private fictions. In an extraordinary tale entwining personal and collective histories, a tale bringing us from fifties McCarthyite culture and naughty superhero comics to the sexual revolution and gay rights fights of the seventies, we are thus introduced to the early, pre-Stonewall gay scene of marginal lives and cravings, bars and friendships, to the celebrity cruising and Hollywood mystique that structured both straight and queer identities, to the role sex played in boosting at once the porn industry, the book market and social change, and to the spy-like, undercover, hit-and-run lives that pulp authors and editors led. New, bizarre chapters in American history are thus unfurled, chapters in a pulp, graphic, emotional and criminal history, one that interlaces public and private narratives, under the aegis of obscene superstardom, bringing to the centerfold the public/private, showing/hiding dialectic inherent to stardom. (A dialectic best figured, as a matter of fact, in the sunglasses sported against the paparazzi’s flashbulbs, representing the contradictions inscribed in the star identity, with both her need to publicize her work, passions, love affairs, and her opposite yearning for privacy.)
It is only appropriate that such chapters emerge from the anecdotes of a man that first reached the spotlight, and faced flashbulbs, as a “criminal star” indicted for conspiring to distribute obscene materials, the deeds of a free-wheeling, free-loving nympho. A figure that, Banis confesses in his opening remarks, is “a very private person,” embarrassed by the idea of making himself into a public show. That’s precisely how he managed to live, however, as an episode in Chapter 4 illustrates. When as a youth he faced the threat of an assault, he managed to escape violence not by facing the robber, but rather by adopting the ruse of intelligence; his self-defense was in making recourse to his talking talent. So, it was by means of a show, by staging his seductive wit and yarning flair, that he managed to keep the villain under control; he managed to escape physical violence and, metaphorically, to hide. By displaying himself, he concealed himself. That’s how the gay pulp author negotiated the very possibility of his speech and existence, in fact, before gay identities started acquiring the rights to full citizenship.
In this respect also mirroring his pop spy star Jackie, an undercover celebrity doubling the visibility/secrecy paradox of the James Bond star image, Victor Banis acts as a spy figure in writing his memoirs. His insider’s knowledge trades in obscene information about the U.S. culture industry and sexual revolution, about the who, when, where and how of the criminal history of pulp’s undercover agents—reading his “gossipy” history, naming places and people as it does, turns out to be an issue of intelligence, in fact. Such “intelligence” is precisely invoked in a confidential narrative, the star memoirs genre (one appropriately deploying the double, public/private dynamic of confession on the double, private/public star identity), especially when related to the confessional stage of pulp fiction. Another episode from Banis’ remembrances aptly illustrates this issue. In Chapter 12, while discussing his case-history books production, Banis tells us that he had to amass information on the infinite variety of human experience and sexual entertainment. The pulp sociologist thus had to interview wife swappers, fetish-lovers, and the queer likes. There we learn how Banis gained access to weird family albums indeed, and how he found himself acting as a non-judgmental “father confessor,” one willing to collect the tales of those sins and “abhorrent practices” that even the two major institutional confessors of modern society—the priest and the psycho-sexologist, who in different ways offered scolding and invitation to conform (be it in contrition or “treatment”) rather than validation, rather than the neutral acknowledgement intrinsic to just listening—were unlikely to be told in their respective confessional rooms. Just by noting down the funniest practices, the pulp author was providing them a legitimization, as social and discursive practices. In offering America’s Wicked Queens the validating reflection of mirrors (“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”), by offering a magic self-reflecting surface to untold desires and stigmatized selves, the pulp author was a confessor that enabled self-recognition and acceptance of unorthodox identities.
In reading a pulp star’s confessions, we are thus reading something like America Confidential—America’s heart and soul, did we say? Unsurprisingly so, as a matter of fact, if we link the pulp theatre of obscenity to the twofold confessional nature of stardom that cultural criticism has unfolded since the 1972 publication of Edgar Morin’s classic study, Les Stars. The private/public existence of stars implies a confessional nature, both on part of the star, who constantly confesses to her fans by means of interviews, appearances etc., and on the fan, whose identifying adoration, in addressing the star identity as guidance and role model, confesses and “writes” her/his own subjectivity. The pulp superstar author may thus be seen as the father confessor of America’s most recondite fantasies, made up of celebrity culture, sexploitation and Playboy empires, “Petunias,” “McDonalds” and bovine Salomes—names and institutions you’ll have a chance to get to know better, and fully appreciate, as you read Banis’ memoirs.
These pages are the legacy of a queer father confessor, and a queer role model. In them you’ll find many things that may sound rather loosely related, or utterly unrelated, to his pulp work. You’ll find some juicy gossip, of course, and a three-chapter writing manual, organizing the tips he imparted to many writers whose work he promoted, in the late sixties and seventies. You’ll find an evaluation of gay writing, discussing figures that have either emerged from the Golden Age of pulps, or established themselves as major authors in the newly legitimate gay market of the eighties and nineties; the role he played in gay pulp authorize him in fact to speak on gay writing—not from “above,” we may say, but from his insider’s privileged knowledge on the production line of the gay culture industry. But you’ll also find considerations on religion and the soul, on how to “live with a style,” from ethics to manners to drinks and food (yes, there are even some cooking recipes). Does this strike you as irrelevant? Hey, what did you expect from a superstar’s autobiography? Ever read Elizabeth Taylor’s or Barbara Cartland’s memoirs? While these may well be marginal issues in an author’s life story, they are technically part of the star mystique. In dispensing pills of wisdom on life, death and some details in between the two, the star offers her fans the guidance that is her duty to provide as a role model. Stars do live in passions, and in the following of fans, in the emotional energies of those who identify and believe in them. How can you be an emblem of modern subjectivity, and ideologically central to our existence as social subjects, if you don’t confess your most private feelings and experiences, how you dress and make up, how you cook, eat and prepare your drinks? Marginal issues have such value, and even more so on the “super” stage—one that parodies the identity formation value of mainstream stardom, and at the same time provides alternative role models. Banis’ superstar image may be less flashy than, say, John Waters’ Divine, and yet it provides a model that many would acknowledge, one inspiring the values of curiosity, tolerance, and understanding.
The heart and soul of America we can read in Banis’ confessional, as a matter of fact, is not only peopled by secreted passions, social struggles, and some extra dietary tips. In his entwining of personal and collective histories, you’ll also find the stories of small town provinces like Eaton, Ohio, where Banis was born, and the example of a “family without familism,” as French critic Roland Barthes tagged it in his autobiography, Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975); a family devoid of the tyranny inscribed in “Nature” and the common sense.
Banis’ was a quite large, poor family, and nonetheless such family scene