Items

• The joy of gay sex : an intimate guide for gay men to the pleasures of a gay lifestyle
  A collaboration between Dr Charles Silverstein (1935-2023) and novelist Edmund White (1940-), “by gays, for gays”. Structured as an A-to-Z guide to gay life, from Androgyny to Wrestling, plus a short bibliography, it is illustrated throughout by Michael Leonard, Ian Beck and Julian Graddon. Riding high on the popularity of ‘The Joy of Sex’ (1972), it sold out its first print run of 75,000 copies. Some commentators, however, were critical of this apparent mainstreaming. “If we have reached a point where cultural interests include the marketing of our sex lives, it would be nice for some basic civil rights to come along with that,” wrote Michael Bronski in ‘Gay Community News’ in November 1977. “You can still get arrested for having a good time.” The book was later used in healthcare during the AIDS crisis, and ‘The New Joy of Gay Sex’ (1993) was substantially updated with safe sex information.
• Witchcraft and the gay counterculture : a radical view of Western civilization and some of the people it has tried to destroy
  This book by Arthur Evans (1942-2011) is a rebuttal to the homophobic bias of “professional historians” and academics. Merging myth and history, the text is a self-proclaimed radical and subjective vision of a pre-Christian world of nature societies, which touches on many themes including Druids, Gnosticism, witchcraft, matriarchy, class politics and magic as a collective endeavour. Published by the Boston-based Fag Rag collective, it was edited by two of its members, Michael Bronski and Charles Shively, and chapters were initially published in the journals ‘Out’ and ‘Fag Rag’. Active in gay liberation movements, Evans was a co-founder of the Gay Activists Alliance and of the San Francisco Faerie Circle. This text is still in print in pirated editions and remains popular with Radical Faeries.