Items

• Parisian lives : a novel
  Samuel M. Steward (1909-1993) was, amongst other things, an academic, a novelist, a pornographer and a tattoo artist. During the 1930s, he befriended writer Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas. Both feature in this novel, which follows their painter protégé, Francis Rose (fictionalised as Arthur Lyly), in Paris just prior to the Second World War. The first paragraph sets a tone which blends fact and fiction, highlighting an ambiguity that was typical of Steward and which can also be seen in his writings under the pseudonym Phil Andros, some of which were also seized during the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. Written and edited over a thirty-year period, this novel was published in 1984 by Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s Press.
• The butch manual : the current drag and how to do it
  A tongue-in-cheek manual for gay men on how to appear more ‘butch’, or stereotypically masculine, written in the style of a women’s magazine – complete with a problem page featuring Gertrude Stein as a fictional agony aunt. Butch men shun smiling, screaming and “misquoting Dorothy Parker” in favour of moustaches, yelling and talking dirty, according to author, model and artist Clark Henley (1950-1988). The book is undoubtedly influenced by the wildly popular contemporary humorous titles ‘The Official Preppy Handbook’ (1980) and ‘The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook’ (1982). Henley also drew the rare 1976 ‘Tails of the City’ ‘Alligator Oz’ map of San Francisco, a gay map of the city populated by cartoon alligators, and ‘A Butch Look at America’ (1982), in which the United States is represented by torn cut-off jeans over bare buttocks. Diagnosed HIV-positive in 1986, Henley died in San Francisco of AIDS-related causes in 1988, aged just 38.