1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

“Menus for Men . . . Or what have you”: Consuming Gay Male Culture in Lou Rand Hogan’s the Gay Detective and the Gay Cookbook

– 120 – “Menus for Men . . . or What Have You” Consuming Gay Male Culture in Lou Rand Hogan’s The Gay Detective and The Gay Cookbook Pamela Robertson Wojcik When one mentions queer pulp, certain images come to mind: titillating garish paperback covers with men in tight T-shirts exchanging lurid glances, women in lingerie posing provocatively in duos, or three people in queerly triangulated relationships, set in various seedy locales—prisons, bars, and cheap apartments—with adjectives like “twilight,” “strange,” “odd,” “forbidden,” “unnatural,” “bizarre,” “tormented,” and “secret” to describe the characters and actions within. The Gay Detective, originally published in 1961 under the pseudonym Lou Rand, fits neatly into the queer pulp canon. Cover art from the original paperback shows a nude woman wrapped in a blanket sandwiched between two men in suits. A caption under the illustration reads: “Francis and Tiger had found out what they needed to know. The Trick now was to get the nude Vivien out of the bathhouse and to safety . . .” While the positioning of the woman, her nudity, and the caption would suggest a standard “Menus for Men . . . or What Have You” – 121 heterosexual triangle, with two men fighting over a women, the glances between the two men—and the curious bathhouse pink interior—suggest a different trajectory of desire. In 1964, when it was reprinted in hardcover as Rough Trade, the new title signaled its gayness in more coded terms than the first version, but described the narrative as “Handsome homosexuals on a rampaging orgy of gay lust and the sultry women who tempt them.” The publisher restated the queer coding in its 1965 paperback-cover description as “a daring novel of handsome men caught in the violence of the twilight world of sex.”1 But how do we account for Lou Rand’s other major publication, The Gay Cookbook, published under the name “Chef Lou Rand Hogan”?2 Rather than a torrid scene, its cover features a feminized man in queer attire— tight pants, pocket hanky, neck scarf, and an apron that says “hers” and has a big bow—holding a steak, somewhat limp-wristedly, over a grill. The cover identifies the book as “the complete compendium of campy cuisine and menus for men . . . or what have you.” Describing its readers as “the androgynous,” the book makes clear its intended audience and its camp tone, waggishly admonishing readers, “Don’t bother to look it up, Maude. It means ‘limp wristed.’”3 Gay? Clearly. But not what we usually consider the stuff of pulp. The book is playful, not sensationalist; it is nonfiction, not a novel; and it places its gay character in the kitchen and at the backyard grill, not in the seedy milieu of urban subcultures. Rather than a “twilight world of sex,” it promises “canapés, hor d’oeuvres [sic], aphrodisiacs,” “swish steak,” and “that old tired fish.” The Gay Cookbook invites us to expand our understanding of what constitutes gay male pulp. While pulp has come to signal certain genres— crime novels, detective fiction, sleazy romance—the term initially described a method of paperback production that enabled books to be printed on smaller pages and with smaller type, thus permitting them to circulate more easily as pocket books and through mail-order catalogs. The term “pulp” applied to both fiction and nonfiction titles, and while most paperback originals were written for the mass pulp market, others became pulp by virtue of packaging and distribution systems. It includes reprints of high culture literature (such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Carson 122 – Pamela Robertson Wojcik McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Emile Zola’s Nana, which were repeatedly issued as pulps to attract new audiences), nonfiction tell-alls about underground cultures and subcultures (such as Christine Jorgensen’s autobiography, and other books about transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, and other gender benders); and pseudo-scientific and other nonfiction titles that could be made to appear titillating (such as books about Leopold and Loeb or the Kinsey Report on male sexuality).4 The larger category of pulp, then, signals not only certain genres, but cheap paperback culture generally, and it extends potentially to books that are not literally printed on pulp but deploy pulp marketing strategies and the exploitationist and sensationalist content associated with pulp titles. Saber Press of Fresno, California, the original publisher of The Gay Detective,wasaclassicpulppublisher,operatingonthe...