1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

Transcendent Submission: Resistance to Oppression in Jay Greene’s behind these Walls

– 248 – Transcendent Submission Resistance to Oppression in Jay Greene’s Behind These Walls Nicholas Alexander Hayes Brooks Peters, in his blog devoted to gay pulp books, describes buying the novel Pretty Boy by Jay Greene when he was a youth. Brooks reveals the titillation and arousal associated with encountering his first pulp novel. In addition to homoerotic content, Peters recognized that “Jay Greene had a perverse genius for contrasting fantasies of gay utopia with the hypocrisy of civilized society.” Many pulp authors embraced the fact that “‘happily ever after’ became a possibility they could choose” even if the “prospect was perhaps romantically unrealistic,” as Victor Banis puts it in his essay “The Gay Publishing Revolution.”1 Greene’s pessimistic vision resists the cultural acceptance and eventual expectation of such endings that developed throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. His first novel (if one can go by the series numbers Midwood Press assigned its books), Behind These Walls, typifies the way the author contrasts individual desires and social restrictions. It prepares the reader for the world Greene explored in eighteen novels published with Midwood between 1968 and 1972, with two Transcendent Submission – 249 more to appear in 1976.2 Perhaps it is his acute social critique that, more than anything else, accounts for the high regard that so many gay pulp aficionados feel for Greene’s body of work. Although he is not widely known, his readers recognize him as one of the true masters of the genre. Fellow pulp author Roland Graeme sums up Greene’s oeuvre: “His body of work is unique for its style, his ability to tell a story, and above all for his predominately dark, pessimistic vision.”3 Peters corroborates Graeme’s assessment: “It is a dark, vicious world out there, according to Jay Greene. . . . And one risked utter ruin and rejection by surrendering to one’s secret yearnings.” To reveal this vision, Greene places his characters in physically and emotionally destructive environments. Still, despite the seeming impossibility of enduring happiness, the author assures his readers, “A moment [of pleasure] can be forever.”4 This vision of the world is already fully articulated in Behind These Walls. There we watch this dark dynamic play out within the physical features of the Seneca County Reformatory for Boys (the novel’s main setting), whose agents control young men and their delinquent activities even as the inmates of the reformatory temporarily resist that control through acts of pleasure and submission to their lovers. In the creation of this fictional world, Greene was working his way toward much the same understanding of the prison world as a microcosm for society that Michel Foucault would articulate in Surveiller et punir (1975), translated into English as Discipline and Punish (1977). A more literal translation of the French title would be “Watch and Punish,” emphasizing the relationship between observation and control, a social aspect that Greene elaborates on in his narratives. The protagonists of Greene’s novels contend with the limitations of their physical environments and the emotional oppression they impose, even though their resistance is inherently a lost cause. The futility of resistance highlights Greene’s nonacceptance of the two nascent utopias of contemporaneous gay pulp: the one in which love overcomes all impediments and the one of perpetual sensual immersion. His rejection functions as an extended commentary on the structural circumscriptions of discourse and society. For Greene, these restrictions are most clearly represented by reformatories and boarding schools, settings he frequently returns to.5 In 250 – Nicholas Alexander Hayes a chapter titled “Docile Bodies,” Foucault elaborates on the shift from the concept of the heroic body to the moldable body in a variety of socially endorsed institutions, including monasteries, barracks, factories, schools, and other institutions of discipline.6 Greene’s protagonists struggle against agents who inherited the concept of discipline: teachers, guards, institutional functionaries. Foucault further notes that architectural design and use of space and time help these agents discipline the body so that it might become useful. Greene’s protagonists demonstrate that despite the author’s rejection of gay utopias, he is neither a defeatist toward nor an apostate of the forces of gay liberation. Central to the role of the main characters in a Greene novel is a position in which they defy the forces of discipline and refuse docility. Foucault observes, “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed , and improved” (136). While certainly...