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1960s Gay Pulp Fiction Edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker The Misplaced Heritage ༁ ༁ ༁ ༁ University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston www.umass.edu/umpress Gunn and Harker 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction Massachusetts Cover photo by C. Downs, Texas A&M University-Kingsville Cover design by Sally Nichols ༁ ༁ ༁ ༁ As a result of a series of court cases, by the mid-1960s the U.S. post office could no longer interdict books that contained homosexuality. Gay writers were eager to take advantage of this new freedom, but the only houses poised to capitalize on the outpouring of manuscripts were “adult” paperback publishers who marketed their products with salacious covers. Gay critics, unlike their lesbian counterparts, have for the most part declined to take these works seriously, even though they cover an enormous range of genres: adventures, blue-collar and gray-flannel novels, coming-out stories, detective fiction, gothic novels, historical romances, military stories, political novels, prison fiction, romances, satires, sports stories, and spy thrillers— with far more short story collections than is generally realized. Twelve scholars have now banded together to begin a recovery of this largely forgotten explosion of gay writing that occurred in the 1960s. “These essays in toto are exciting, informative, comprehensive, and sexy in their thinking, moving beyond standard paratextual analysis of paperback covers and into the nitty-gritty of the pulp texts and the queer worlds that they imagined on the page and off.” —Scott Herring, author of Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History Drewey Wayne Gunn is professor emeritus of English at Texas A&M University–Kingsville and author of The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film. Jaime Harker is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi. She is author of Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America and America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). A volume in the series Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book Gunn_cover.indd 1 10/18/13 10:49 AM “This page intentionally left blank” ...

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