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Queer Classics: Collecting Our Forgotten Past
 | Queer Classics: Collecting Our Forgotten Past |
by Ernie McLeod
| Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps edited by Michael Bronski St. Martin's Griffin |
Bronski demonstrates that a broad range of writing could be found beneath the covers of what was marketed as pulp fiction. And the gay (male) pulps Bronski has chosen to excerpt in this anthology range in literary quality from “high to idiosyncratically low.”
Bronski’s introduction sets the stage for what’s to come by dismantling myths about pulp and gay fiction: that gay fiction barely existed prior to the 1969 Stonewall uprising, that in the 1950s the subject of homosexuality was completely taboo, and that the few writings with gay content were relentlessly grim and unenlightened.
While hopelessly depressing takes on gay life certainly exist, Bronski serves up writers who take a more “complex view of gay male relationships and interactions.”
Before exploring Pulp Friction, I thought I was reasonably familiar with gay fiction from 1950-1978. Yet, not only had I not read any of the works featured in the anthology, I’d never heard of most of the authors. Why not?
Almost everything excerpted in Pulp Friction is long out of print. Pulps, by their very physical nature, were disposable. Additionally, gay pulps had a shame element working against their preservation: often they were clandestinely distributed, kept hidden and eventually destroyed, lest they out their owners.
The other reason gay pulps are largely forgotten – even by queer readers – is that after Stonewall, many gay people wanted to break free of the past. Pre-Stonewall depictions of gay life were deemed unfashionably obsolete by a new, forward-looking generation that dismissed them as negative relics from a time best forgotten. The queer characters who did survive were created by writers (Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote among them) who managed to etch a permanent place in the mainstream canon.
In making his selections for Pulp Friction, Bronski put aside notions of a canon – gay or otherwise. He finds the whole concept “not only unnecessary but unhelpful” and quotes Edmund White: a “canon is for people who don’t like to read.” Bronski believes – and I’m inclined to agree – that too much is made of the idea of “positive” and “negative” portrayals, the question of whether a particular work of art (whatever its artistic merits) is “good for the gays.”
I’ve perhaps made Pulp Friction sound more dryly academic than it actually is. What I wanted was an amiable guide to escort me into the “twilight world” of the pulps themselves. Bronksi is that, and more.
Bronski divides his selections into several general categories – chronologically, with a few zigzags – and then offers unobtrusive, illuminating introductions to each piece. He tells the reader what he knows about the authors (many of whom wrote under pseudonyms), the presses that published the books, and the historical climate in which the books were conceived and read.
Bronski recognizes that the slipshod erotic musings contained in the “Memoirs of Jeff X” or “The Boys of Muscle Beach” are, from an artistic standpoint, miles away from the nuanced prose of Lonnie Coleman’s “Sam” or Vin Packer’s “Whisper His Sin.” Refraining from making obvious value judgments, he’s more concerned with what each work has to say about the times and, especially, about the gay men who occupied them. That isn’t to say he doesn’t value good writing; he just refuses to devalue writing that can’t legitimately be called literature.
His critical insights into some of the quirkier selections were particularly useful. I wouldn’t have known what to make of an excerpt from Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon (along with its sequels, apparently the most widely read gay fiction of the ’60s and ’70s) without Bronski’s neat summary of Amory’s writing style as “a heady cross between a lush poetic epic verging on parody, a boys’ adventure story, and Victorian porn.”
I’ve left little space to discuss the selections themselves, but they are an eclectic lot, ranging from sympathetic character studies to a delightful “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”-style fantasy in which the whole world (even the President!) turns gay, to frank pornography. If I’d read Bruce Benderson’s “Kyle” when it was published in the mid-’70s, it would have scared me to death. Some of the language throughout Pulp Friction is inevitably dated, silly, or simply head-scratching. But just as often it’s surprisingly inspired for works typically penned by writers who – to earn a living – couldn’t fret over each semi-colon.
Several selections stood out, among them: “Spur Piece,” a refreshingly reversed take on an unconsummated love relationship between an older and younger man set just after World War II; a psychologically smart and subversive chapter from Vin Packer’s Patricia Highsmith-esque Whisper His Sin (Vin Packer is a pen name for Marijane Meaker, who has a memoir about Highsmith coming out and was recently interviewed in The Advocate.); and a charmingly campy excerpt from Victor Jay’s The Gay Haunt, which breathlessly blends pansexual porn elements, witty social critique, and a queered Blithe Spirit ghost story.
After reading Pulp Friction, I definitely want to seek out the writings of Marijane Meaker, James Barr, and Lonnie Coleman. Bronski includes a valuable appendix of important gay novels (some famous, many not) from 1940-1969. If I can find them, I plan to add several of the titles to my overcrowded reading list.
Pulp Friction is the rare anthology that’s arousing on various levels, equally appropriate for a quiet beach or cruisy library. It certainly has me looking at the ’50s – and my kitschy pulp-cover address book – in a whole new light.
Native Vermonter Ernie McLeod is spending time in his alternate pied a terre, but he can be reached via email at mcleod@middlebury.edu.