1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

“Accept your Essential Self”: The Guild Press, Identity Formation, and Gay Male Community

– 78 – “Accept Your Essential Self” The Guild Press, Identity Formation, and Gay Male Community Philip Clark J. Edgar Hoover was troubled. There had been a steady increase in sex crimes in the United States, including forcible rape, which Hoover tied to what he saw as a concurrent increase in commercially available pornography . On January 1, 1960, the FBI director issued a letter to all law enforcement officials, instructing them to move against “unquestionable [sic] base individuals” who were spreading obscene literature, comic books, photographs , and “salacious magazines.” What, Hoover wanted to know, was being done to protect America’s youth “against the tainted temptations of muck merchants”?1 In less than two weeks’ time, on January 13, the first obscenity indictment —thirty-one counts—was handed down against Herman Lynn Womack for sending physique magazines through the US mail. A second indictment, another thirty-five counts, came on December 8, 1960, months after Womack had been convicted on the first set of charges but before the appeal of his conviction was heard.2 In bringing criminal charges against “Accept Your Essential Self” – 79 Womack, the director of Manual Enterprises and its subsidiaries, including Guild Press Ltd., postal inspectors were following the postal service’s standard enforcement procedures for U.S. Code Title 18, Section 1461, which provided for fines and imprisonment of anyone who knowingly used the mails to ship obscene materials. This was routine; in 1961 alone, there would be 377 convictions under the law.3 The legal fight H. Lynn Womack raised against his conviction and the gay media empire he subsequently launched upon winning his case, however, was anything but routine. The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Womack had earned a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and had taught, beginning in 1953, at universities and colleges in Washington, DC, andVirginia.4 In1958,hehadbeguntakingoverpublicationofthemagazines TRIM and Grecian Guild Pictorial from their founder, with the intention of cornering the field of physique magazines.5 These magazines, billing themselves as male strength and health periodicals, were finding an expanding market among gay men eager for photographs of the mostly undraped male body. Inaugurating more than a decade of fighting legal actions against him, Womack took his appeal in the case of Manual Enterprises v. Day all the way to the US Supreme Court.6 Writing in 1962 for a 6–1 majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan ruled that, although Womack’s magazines were “dismally unpleasant, uncouth, and tawdry,” they did not rise to the level of obscenity as marked out by a new legal test, that of “patent offensiveness.”7 Justice Harlan further wrote that “the magazines are not, as asserted by petitioners, physical culture or ‘body-building’ publications, but are composed primarily, if not exclusively, for homosexuals, and have no literary, scientific or other merit”—but at the same time, the understanding that “the magazines are read almost entirely by homosexuals” was a key factor in their failing to rise to the level of patent offensiveness. Harlan argued, “It is only in the unusual circumstance where, as here, the ‘prurient interest’ appeal of the material is found limited to a particular class of persons that occasion arises for a truly independent inquiry into the question whether or not the material is patently offensive”—the very test that was used to declare Womack’s publications not obscene. As a result, materials appealing to homosexuals could no longer be declared prima facie obscene.8 80 – Philip Clark The ruling boosted Womack’s confidence that he could publish and distribute materials marketed to gay men with relative legal impunity. Following this victory, he was no longer content selling only physique magazines. The 1964–65 catalog for the Guild Book Service, the gay mail-order house he founded after the Manual Enterprises decision, provides an overview of his developing concepts. The book service, he wrote, was founded “in the spring of 1963, in response to the insistent demands of patrons of Guild Press, Ltd.”—a step that was “taken reluctantly [because] there was considerable concern as to whether or not a special interest field such as ours could succeed financially,” but that was met with an “overwhelming ” response. Womack outlined extensive intentions for his “highly organized, efficient, and expanding service.” Not only did the Guild Book Service offer its clients “hardcover books, paperback books, nudist magazines , cologne and records,” but Guild Press would also be “launching a publishing program that...