Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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by many gay people (those that, expelled from their own biological family, rebuild it in the social spaces acknowledging their right to exist), and a utopia of solidarity and integration. His large family, mother father and eleven kids, plus aunts and uncles, Banis remembers, was a community in which one would be accepted independently from one’s class, means or sexual orientation; the only reason for being rejected was one’s pretending to stand above others—or, in other words, one’s refusal to accept one’s place as a peer, sharing the little they had, and making room for diversity and difference. This model may not have been realized in Banis’ life, as we all know (even the gay social family is all too often reduced to a ghetto or a lobby), but it certainly stands as a model to look for, as an ultimate utopia of tolerance and understanding. A utopia, of course, that as such won’t be found in the real world—but that’s precisely the value of utopias, those ideal figurations that, Oscar Wilde said, make humans crave for something better, and achieve some progress. This is a much better American dream, I do think, than, say, the one bringing third-rate movie actors to become governors of California.
This is the heart and soul of America that Victor Banis shows us, and the dream of integration that, as a superstar, he stands for. For there is more to the obscenity of pulp than soft-porn and sensationalism, irony and parody. The history of pulp is an emotional history, after all. It was Barthes again, in Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977), who stated—in the seventies, when porn “came of age”—that there was a sphere, more than pornography, increasingly relegated to the status of obscenity; the sentimentality of love.
The most recondite aspect of pulp history, the ultimate obscenity to be found in Victor Banis’ memoirs, and what an intellectual may be embarrassed to confess to, is its emotional side. The love and affection, thinly disguised in irony, breathing though its pages.
* * * *
Let me close this introductory essay to a confessional narrative with a brief, highly personal note. I mentioned above my casually running into Victor, in early 1999. I knew very little on pulps, at the time; and I had just seen a number of movies whose pathos had kept lingering in my mind, and whose direct relevance to that serendipitous meeting, and to my later interest in pulps, took me some time to realize. P. T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), on the raunchy SoCal porn industry of the seventies, starred Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler, a remarkably “endowed” porn star recalling the idol of P. T. Anderson himself (along with endless movie-goers, I should add), John Holmes.
Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (1998) staged the glam rock scene of the same years and the David Bowie icon (in the character of Brian Slade, interpreted by Jonathan Rhys Meyers), as construed through the research of a journalist (Christian Bale) who was growing up at the time of Slade’s heyday; an inquiry which turns out to be a self-investigation and self-(re)discovery.
Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998) told the last days of Frankenstein queer director James Whale (superbly interpreted by Sir Ian McKellen), and his meeting with straight young gardener (Brendan Fraser), who models for him in sittings that turn out to be mutual self-confessional sessions, a queer legacy bequest on the naïve gardener, and the basis for a “scientist vs. creature” final understanding and redemption (“friend?”).
Tony Kaye’s American History X (also released in 1998) had Edward Norton as a neo-Nazi skinhead ending in jail for the brutal killing of an African American; his younger brother (Edward Furlong) idolizes him, until his teacher assigns him the task of writing an essay on his role model—fittingly entitled “American History X.” The essay appropriately turns into an epiphany, an essay in (auto)biography as well as in American history; by writing his brother’s biography, the Furlong character writes and understands himself, filling that “X” with himself, his brother, and his father’s ominous legacy of racism and hatred. All these pictures were elegiac movies about stars, in fact, and about fandom; they all made the biopic genre the site for the parallel writing of both the star’s biography and the fan’s (the journalist’s, gardener’s, film-maker’s, sibling’s) identity and self-understanding.
It was when I met Victor, and I started working on the C.A.M.P. reissues, on the interview and his memoirs, that these movies started acquiring a particular taste; the taste of self-recognition. These movies joined the detection script of the Bronski purloined author tale I reported above, to my own script of serendipity, my own story of unexpected friendship, and mutual (self-)knowledge. In these four movies, different generations meet, and biography spurs a double autobiographical process, in the older as well as in the younger generation, valuing the diversity and differences it establishes as mirroring images.
I love to think that this book, Spine Intact, Some Creases—a witty and exuberant tale of A Thousand and One Knights, flitting blithely from tale to tail, in one era and out the other, alternately hilarious and touching, instructive and impassioned—was born in a similar vein and spirit.
When I met Victor, he had retired to San Francisco, and he hadn’t written a book for fifteen years. In a way, it was when he realized that Jackie Holmes might be back to the bookshelves, that he started writing these memoirs, so that the undercover star author might join its undercover star character on the same shelves. In working with Victor, I myself was reading on the queer pulp scene, and I learnt about the chapter of American History, that was being written by cultural historians, and by pulp protagonists; a chapter in Victor’s history and increasingly, to some extent, in my own.
By collecting his tales and experiences, checking dates and names, tracing pictures and editorial information, we were staging a queer college (self-)writing course, one that might well be tagged “American History XXX,” dialectically engaging the pulp masters and ourselves, the children of the (sexual) revolution; a mutually self-definitional enterprise between generations, cultures, subjectivities, identity formations, sexual proclivities.
That early 1999 meeting in San Francisco opened my eyes to a whole historical treasure lying beyond the rigorous exactitude of historical documents and textbooks, a treasure made of numberless “obscene” personal stories. The imaginative wealth Victor introduced me to (“friend?”) is part of myself, now. Just as it is an endearing portion of American emotional history—the history I learnt to respect, and to love.
American History, xxx.
—Fabio Cleto, Bergamo, Italy
November 2004
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
When I first wrote this book of memoirs a few years ago, I had mostly been out of the publishing arena for several years. Since then, I have gotten more involved in it, and I have found that the business of getting published is far harder today than it was for me in the past, although that may be in part because I am less driven to do so, feeling as I do that I have little left to prove. That is not to say that I am any less motivated to write; indeed, I think that I am more so. Certainly I am enjoying writing now in a way that I never did before—and, again, that may be because I am less concerned with seeing anything published, and am content to write for no profit but my own pleasure—and I am inclined to think that, as a result, I am actually writing better.
I do see, however, that some of my remarks on the subject of getting published may seem a trifle ingenuous to today’s writers, who face different challenges, harder ones, I think, than I faced in the past.
Likewise, during this same period of time, I have had the opportunity to read a great deal of new gay and lesbian fiction. If, as I assert in the original edition, we have yet to see the Great Gay Novel or the Great Gay Novelist, I must say that, with writers of the caliber of Dorien Grey, Rick Reed, Lori Lake, Ruth Sims, Anthony Bidulka, Allen Hollinghurst, Gregg Herren, E. M. Kahn, Adam Berlin, Dean James, and Gregory Hinton plying their craft—and I am sure I have forgotten one or two others—and with old pros like James Purdy, William Maltese, and Ann Bannon still at it, I think that the future of gay and lesbian fiction is in very good hands indeed; and since I have not yet read everything by any of them, it may even be that one of them has already penned that great novel, and the more fool I.
So, the temptation was there, to revisit what I had written and to update it, but for the most part, I have resisted that temptation. This book was ever an imperfect one, more