1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage

Historicizing Pulp: Gay Male Pulp and the Narrativization of Queer Cultural History

– 43 – Historicizing Pulp Gay Male Pulp and the Narrativization of Queer Cultural History Whitney Strub The year was 1966. Writing for the homophile magazine Tangents, book critic Barbara Grier lamented, “It seems clear that the era of good Lesbian paperbacks is about over,” the rare high-quality works driven out of sight by the profusion of tripe unleashed as obscenity laws fell by the wayside. Meanwhile, only a few months later, the gay magazine Vector celebrated the publication of Richard Amory’s pulp novel Song of the Loon with “Well, here ’tis! The book you’ve all been waiting for,” calling it an “erotic fantasy” of “great literary merit” that portended a fusion of gay pulp and gay pride.1 Several decades later, the tables had turned. Lesbian pulp fiction was perceived as integral to the emergence of modern lesbian community and identity—a “sort of ‘how-to’ of lesbian lust,” the “closest thing to a Dewey decimal system for dykes,” “poised on the threshold of a feminist vision of lesbian identity,” as three scholars phrased it. The place of pulp authors Ann Bannon, Vin Packer, and Valerie Taylor in the lesbian pantheon was uncontested, and it was difficult to imagine a comprehensive lesbian 44 – Whitney Strub history that did not account for the writing, circulation, and reading of lesbian pulp fiction as a critical force in fostering awareness and providing a social roadmap to midcentury lesbians. Certainly the valorization of lesbian pulp maintained a critical awareness that the legal, social, cultural, and political contexts of the Cold War era mandated mixed messages that blurred lesbian-friendly themes with sensationalized and homophobic content, but historians gave lesbian readers credit for ably navigating the textual disarray, reading against the grain, long before critical theorists coined that phrase, to selectively create meaning.2 As lesbian pulp caught the eye of historians, gay male pulp receded to the background. In roughly three decades of gay history written inside and outside the academy, gay pulp occupied the most tenuous of margins , almost never receiving the close, attentive treatment accorded its lesbian sibling. Some of the reasons for this omission are obvious. As an oppressed group, gay men nonetheless benefited from male privilege in a patriarchal society that afforded them greater access to the means of cultural production. Gay culture-work was thus more widely dispersed across the arts and media than lesbian efforts, making lesbian pulp more prominent in a cultural landscape of necessity less expansive than that of gay men (for instance, with the one exception of Dorothy Arzner, almost no lesbians—much less women altogether—worked as filmmakers in the first half-century or longer of the cinema). Because of the rich gay tradition in film, art, and literature, no necessity to emphasize pulp ever developed ; with an iconography extending from Murnau to Warhol to Baldwin, aesthetics alone suggested that the admittedly purple prose of pulp fiction could never compete with the astonishing richness of more culturally legitimized gay contributions. Moreover, many of the great battles over free speech in gay history had been fought over films and magazines, bestowing historical importance to works on the frontlines of the legal struggle for gay equality but again leaving pulp fiction—affected by censorship and obscenity law but rarely taking center stage in memorable courtroom dramas —in the dustbin of historical memory. That the social circulation of gay pulp merits historical inquiry is beyond doubt, regardless of its aesthetic quality (which arguably varied as widely Historicizing Pulp – 45 as did lesbian pulp). Having proved lucrative for many years, including to some distributors with key links to gay rights activism, and having imparted imagery, characters, narratives, and eroticism to multiple generations of gay men and other interested observers, gay pulp fiction is simply a fact of the queer past. Why, then, has it gone so overlooked, even as the recovery of that past emerged as a major scholarly project beginning in the 1970s? In addition to the reasons I’ve mentioned, gay pulp fell between the cracks in the periodization of gay history. The homophile era, lasting from the early 1950s to the Stonewall rebellion of June 1969, relied on a model of respectability to gain acceptance in a violently hostile society. This bid for mainstream tolerance meant downplaying the role of anything that reinforced homophobic images of gay life—and pulp novels, with their lurid seediness, ran that risk. When Stonewall ushered...