Items

• Adonis García : a picaresque novel
  Set in Mexico City’s Roma district, home to students, bohemians, the marginalised and impoverished, this radical experimental novel by Luis Zapata (1951-2020) follows Adonis García as he makes his “shameless and impudent” way through life, as José Joaquin Blanco puts it in the introduction to this edition. Refusing convention in both content and form, Zapata’s eponymous Adonis sets out his sexually adventurous story as if transcribed from a set of tapes, in a freewheeling, verbatim style which makes bold use of white space. The novel was first published in Mexico in 1979 by Editorial Grijalbo as ‘Las Aventuras, Desventuras y Sueños de Adonis García, El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma’. Translator E.A. Lacey (1938-1995) was also a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall generation.
• Bom-Crioulo : the Black man and the cabin boy
  Brazilian novelist Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897) wrote in the Romantic Naturalist tradition. His work, “polemic, provocative, misunderstood”, according to Raul de Sá Barbosa, who introduces this edition, was largely overlooked in conservative Brazil until it began to be revived in the early 1980s. ‘Bom-Crioulo’, which roughly translates as ‘the Good Black Man’, was first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1895, the same year as Oscar Wilde’s trial and just seven years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. It depicts, frankly and without moralising, the relationship between a formerly enslaved Black man and a fifteen-year-old white cabin boy. E.A. Lacey, a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall era, who translated ‘Bom-Crioulo’ from Portuguese, also translated Luis Zapata’s ‘Adonis García’ (another seized book) from Spanish.
• Game-texts : a Guatemalan journal
  This meditative travelogue is written in a fragmentary style, combining quasi-spiritual musings on the natural world (“See that a stone is a stoning in the same sense that a flower is a flowering”) with casual accounts of sexual encounters with various Guatemalan teenagers. The 1982 mail-order catalogue of Los Angeles bookstore A Different Light puts it bluntly – “Personal reflections & sex with Latin American boys.” Although Erskine Lane (1940-) was awarded a 1976 Fels award for the best non-fiction published by a small-press magazine (‘Gay Sunshine Journal’ no. 26/27, in which it first appeared), the lack of reflection on race, class, colonialism and the power dynamics at play make this an uncomfortable read. Lane also worked for Gay Sunshine Press as a translator from Portuguese and Spanish into English.
• My deep dark pain is love : a collection of Latin American gay fiction
  This anthology, edited by Winston Leyland (1940-), presents a selection of short stories, novellas and excerpts from longer works from a wide range of male Argentinian, Mexican, Cuban, Chilean and Brazilian authors. It is illustrated with graphic line-drawings by Argentian artist Jorge Gumier Maier and is a follow up to Gay Sunshine Press’s ‘Now the Volcano’ (1979) which focused on Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Like the first anthology, Brazilian literature predominates in this collection. It is a collaboration between Leyland, who travelled extensively in Latin America, and frequent Gay Sunshine translator, E. A. Lacey (1938-1995). The two anthologies form part of a small body of books from Gay Sunshine Press with a Latin American focus, including Luis Zapata’s ‘Adonis García’ and Adolfo Caminha’s ‘Bom-Crioulo’, both of which were also seized in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids.
• Now the volcano : an anthology of Latin American gay literature
  Edited by Winston Leyland (1940-) and published by his Gay Sunshine Press imprint, this book is an anthology of short stories, poems, novel excerpts and a memoir, interspersed with illustrations. The collection presents a snapshot of gay male writing from Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazilian literature, which Leyland notes is the richest, including ‘Bom-Crioulo’ which was first published in 1895 (and which was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’ as a separate title). The book’s title refers to Malcolm Lowry’s Mexican-set novel ‘Under the Volcano’. Translator Erskine Lane’s own novel, ‘Game-Texts – a Guatemalan Journal’, was also published by Gay Sunshine Press and seized during the raids.
• The winged dancer
  A “grown-up lesbian adventure story”, according to New Zealand’s feminist magazine ‘Broadsheet’. Part murder mystery, part tale of psychological development, part love story, it describes lesbian feminist Kat Rogan’s journey from Chicago to the fictional Latin American country of Marigua. Rogan spends time in prison, solves the case and also comes to terms with the dominant and submissive sides of her personality. The book was criticised by some reviewers for exoticising South America and failing to engage with the politics of the region. Camarin Grae (1941-), author of ‘Paz’ (1984) and ‘Soul Snatcher’ (1985), among other works, was the owner of Blazon Books – this was their first title.
• Treasures on earth : a novel
  This novel is a fictionalised depiction of a real expedition to Machu Picchu in Peru which was undertaken by Hiram Bingham in 1911. Running parallel to the main narrative is the story of the trip’s photographer, Willie Hickler, who discovers his sexuality when he falls in love with the expedition’s Peruvian assistant, Ernesto. Author Carter Wilson (1942?-), who later became an academic and Professor of Community Studies, described this book as “my coming-out novel”. The book was published by the well-established Knopf imprint and received good reviews, including from Christopher Isherwood who compared it to E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.