Items

• Ioläus : an anthology of friendship
  First published in 1902, this book contains selections from multiple texts, including poetry and essays, which present romantic friendships between men. The collection is edited by Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), a writer and socialist who campaigned for sexual freedom and homosexual equality. This collection covers three centuries, beginning with examples of male love from pagan and early worlds, and features the words of some English canonical writers, including William Shakespeare. This is a reprint of a 1917 Mitchell Kennerley edition and was the first book published by John Lauritsen’s Pagan Press which aimed to introduce a new audience to classical, “pro-male” texts.
• Kevin
  Wallace Hamilton came out in his fifties, moved to Greenwich Village and began writing popular books and plays about the queer community. ‘Kevin’, about a relationship between a teenage runaway and a professional man in his mid-thirties, draws in part on Hamilton’s own experiences. Hamilton died after a fall at his home in 1983, aged 64. Various obituaries note his involvement in the international paedophilia advocacy organisation NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association). Criticised by one contemporary reviewer for its sentimentality and lack of realism, readers of ‘Kevin’ today may have more serious concerns about the abusive power dynamics at play. Hamilton’s novel ‘Coming Out’ (1977) was also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’.
• Male love : a problem in Greek ethics and other writings
  Poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) had several same-sex relationships both before and after his marriage in 1864 to Janet Catherine North, with whom he had four daughters. ‘A Problem in Greek Ethics’, an extensive study of sexuality in Ancient Greece, including the culturally sanctioned practice of pederasty (sex between men and adolescent boys), was written in 1873 and published privately a decade later in an edition of ten. In 1897, it was expanded as an appendix to sexologist Havelock Ellis’s ‘Sexual Inversion’ (though immediately suppressed) and was subsequently reprinted over the course of the twentieth century, often using fictitious imprints to avoid prosecution. The Pagan Press edition of 1983, edited by John Lauritsen, marked the centenary of the work’s first publication and was named one of the ten best gay books of the year by ‘The Advocate’ newspaper.
• Men behind bars : sexual exploitation in prison
  This is an in-depth study of exploitative and consensual sex between men in prison, drawing on qualitative interviews with men in a medium-security correctional facility in California. It covers themes such as the prison setting, prison policy and staff attitudes towards homosexuality. Wayne Wooden, a sociologist, was based for several years at Cal Poly Pomona. He has also worked on aging and was an active member of the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Gerontology. First published by New York’s Plenum Press in 1982, ‘Men Behind Bars’ was then published by Da Capo in 1983 – this is the paperback edition of the following year.
• Moritz! : a comic novel
  A review of this novel described it as “a trashy book” but one that was nonetheless enjoyable thanks to its absurdist and silly humour. This satirical novel follows Jellico Moritz, a “well-endowed” young man, who travels from rural America to a new life and sexual awakening in New York City. The final chapter, entitled ‘Moritz Goes to a Garden Party’, was first published in ‘A True Likeness’ which was edited by Felice Picano. The book was published by Larry Mitchell’s Calamus Books which was one third of the Gay Presses of New York collective.
• Mr. Benson
  First published in 1983 by San Francisco-based publishers Alternate, John Preston’s classic S/M novel details a young man’s slave/master relationship with the sadistic and dominant Mr Benson. Preston (1945-1994) was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, as well as in gay activism. By 1975, he was editor of national gay newspaper, ‘The Advocate’. In the 1980s, he combined his writing of erotica and pornography with more mainstream anthologies about gay life. In 1995, he posthumously received a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award for 'Sister and Brother’, a nonfiction anthology co-edited with Joan Nestle. In 1994, the year of his death from complications from AIDS, he received the Steve Maidhof Award from the National Leather Association International, who inaugurated a short story prize in his name in 2007.
• New York native. Issue 82, January 30-February 12, 1984
  Published biweekly between 1980 and 1997, this is a relatively early edition of ‘New York Native’. Much of the paper’s reporting at this time concentrated on the growing AIDS crisis, and this issue is no exception, with headline statistics and an editorial concerned with a potential link between the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the African Swine Fever virus. While a paper supporting this theory appeared two years later in medical journal ‘The Lancet’, it was later discredited. Also featured are music, theatre, film, gallery and restaurant reviews, guides to New York and San Francisco, a letters page, classified ads and personal ads.
• New York native. Issue 83, February 13-26, 1984
  The ‘New York Native’ newspaper was published by Charles Ortleb (1950?-) between 1980 and 1997. This issue contains articles, reviews, personal listings, adverts, a fashion spread and a winter travel supplement. Most notable is the range of reports on AIDS, which begin with an editorial critiquing the racism and homophobia in press reports of the crisis. Other articles in this issue focus on the first European conference on AIDS and lists of numbers of cases reported in New York. The paper first reported on AIDS in 1981, after the ‘New York Times’ broke the story on 3 July that year. ‘New York Native’ had been pioneering in its coverage, although it later fell out of favour and was boycotted by some activists when it began to promote conspiracy theories regarding the cause of AIDS.
• Notes from a marriage : love poems
  Since the mid-1970s, the creative output of Gavin Geoffrey Dillard (1954-) has encompassed many forms including poetry, songwriting and acting in pornographic films. This poetry collection, Dillard’s third, explores the emotional and sexual relationship between two young men, with some undertones of violence. It was published in New York by Felice Picano’s Sea Horse Press. In 1988, Australian gay rights activist Dennis Altman described Dillard as “the laureate of the sensual”, while Dillard’s poetry forms the basis of Clint Borzoni’s 2014 opera ‘When Adonis Calls’. Today, Dillard self-publishes books under his Gavin Dillard Poetry Library & Archive imprint and recently produced a new text and photographic edition of ‘Notes from a Marriage’.
• Now let's talk about music
  Riding high on his wildly popular Peter and Charlie trilogy (also seized by Customs), Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) continued to publish paperback romances with Avon into the 1980s. ‘Now Let’s Talk About Music’ gave Merrick’s fans more of what they wanted – exotic locations (Thailand, a yacht off the coast of Sri Lanka), rich, beautiful gay men, steamy sex scenes and page-turning drama. “Another winner from the gay Harold Robbins” proclaimed a reviewer for ‘Gay News’ in December 1982. As with several other Merrick titles published by Avon, the cover art is by Victor Gadino, a noted illustrator of romance and erotica.
• One for the gods : a novel
  The second book in the Peter and Charlie trilogy by Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) and the couple, now a decade into their relationship, move from the South of France to Greece. The copy on display is the original Bernard Geis Associates edition from 1971. The cover design, by Roy E. LaGrone, is of a sculpted Greek head rendered in black ink against a red background, overlaid with large, sans-serif white lettering. It lends the book a serious air – this could be a historical novel or a textbook – at odds both with its content and with the smouldering pulp covers of later Merrick editions, as published by Avon Books. Bernard Geis was also responsible for Jacqueline Susann’s ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ in 1966, one of the bestselling novels in publishing history.
• 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.
• Perfect freedom
  This is another of Gordon Merrick’s (1916-1988) romance and sex novels published in paperback by Avon, with Victor Gadino illustrated covers. Avon was the paperback division of the Hearst Corporation, and ‘Gay Times’ claimed that publishing these novels was Avon's attempt to “cash in on the post-Stonewall gay market”. Based on one of his earlier novels, ‘Demon of Noon’ (1954) – an at-times-coded gay novel which is less explicit than his later work – this story is set in 1938 on a cruise in the Greek Islands and features Robbie’s sexual awakening with multiple partners. Some of the men he meets during his journey are listed and briefly described before the novel’s title page, including an “Italian deckhand”, a “Greek Adonis”, and a “brooding biker”. The title of the novel is a quote from E.M. Forster’s ‘The Longest Journey’.
• Proust & the art of love : the aesthetics of sexuality in the life, times, & art of Marcel Proust
  Volume four of Marcel Proust’s (1871-1922) seven volume novel ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (‘In Search of Lost Time’) is entitled ‘Sodome et Gomorrhe’. Published in 1921/22, volume four is an early literary representation of gay and lesbian sexuality, focussing on characters including the decadent Baron de Charlus. Written by Julius Edwin (J.E.) Rivers (1944-), this book is a scholarly study and critique of Proust’s depiction of homosexuality covering biographical, historical and psychological elements. The book was published by the academic Columbia University Press and is held in multiple UK university libraries.
• Ryder
  This first novel by modernist writer and artist Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was published in 1928 and focusses on the experiences of Wendell Ryder. The story is relayed in over fifty chapters of differing lengths, via experiments with literary form and style (including in a faux Medieval style, complete with explanatory footnotes). Part prose, part poetry, part play and accompanied by Barnes’s own illustrations, the novel was, for a time, a bestseller. Before publication, however, the proofs were seized by the New York Postal Service, who deemed them “obscene”. Barnes responded by removing some sections of the text and replacing them with asterisks. These textual markings are retained in this 1979 edition, although Barnes’s original foreword critiquing censorship is not. This was the edition seized at Gay’s The Word, making ‘Ryder’ a doubly censored book.
• S-M : the last taboo
  The appearance of this book is reminiscent of a 1950s pulp novel, with its paperback cover and cheap, browning paper. It was published by Grove Press, a predominantly literary publisher of writers including John Rechy and Michael Rumaker, under their Evergreen Black Cat Book imprint. The authors are, presumably, a married couple, although there is very little information about them. It is also unclear whether the couple were involved in sadomasochism (which they prefer to call “s-m”) or distant researchers of it. At one point, in a section on purchasing s-m materials, they use the word “we”. The book aims to describe the “psychology, techniques, and accessories” of s-m. The final section, ‘From the Fields of Infamy’, presents literary examples of s-m, including by Charles Baudelaire and Pauline Réage.
• Scotch verdict* : Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon
  A “Scotch Verdict” results in the Scottish legal system if a case is “not proven” or is inconclusive. Using archival documents, historian Lillian Faderman (1940-) explores this outcome in the 1810 case of Edinburgh teachers Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods. The two women were accused by pupil Jane Cumming of having a sexual relationship which led to the removal of all pupils from the school. Having lost their work, Pirie and Woods brought a libel case against Jane’s grandmother, Dame Cumming Gordon, which ended in the titular Scotch Verdict. Unlike many of the ‘Operation Tiger’ titles, this book is still in print. The Pirie and Woods case also inspired Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play ‘The Children’s Hour’ which was later filmed.
• Shock value
  This first book from John Waters (1946-) is a memoir of his early filmmaking years from his childhood puppet shows to his 1977 feature film ‘Desperate Living’. As a gay man with a deep and abiding love for both low- and highbrow cinema, his films feature over-the-top LGBTQ+ characters (and actors) and set out to shake up the status quo and shock his audience. As Waters explains in the book’s introduction, “to me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about”. The memoir is illustrated with film stills and photographs of Waters and his friends and associates, including Divine (1945-1988), the actor and drag queen who featured in several Waters films.
• Slashed to ribbons in defense of love : and other stories
  Eleven semi-autobiographical short stories of gay love and sex in New York City (and popular gay beach resort, Fire Island). It was published by the collective Gay Presses of New York (Sea Horse Press, Calamus Press and J.H. Press). Felice Picano (1944-) founded Sea Horse Press in 1977 and the Gay Presses came together – with co-editors Terry Helbing and Larry Mitchell – in 1981. An award-winning writer, Picano had published several novels, short stories and a book of poems before this collection, and has been prolific since, producing memoir, plays, screenplays and co-writing ‘The New Joy of Gay Sex’ with Charles Silverstein in 1993. This copy is signed by the author and inscribed on the titlepage, “In brotherhood – and against censorship!”
• Special teachers/special boys
  “What happens here when a teacher comes out?” is the question this novel explores. The “here” is the fictional Lennox School for troubled boys, who are taught in small groups by a dedicated teacher – the special boys and special teachers of the title. Amongst the teachers is Bob Davidson, who is gay and comes out publicly on a television programme, an act which reverberates through the school and gives courage to two gay pupils. The novel was criticised in some quarters for the style of writing but praised for providing an antidote to prejudicial accounts of gay teachers. The authors, Peter Fisher (1944-2012) and Marc Rubin (1932-2007), were both gay activists. Rubin was also a teacher, and the book draws on his own experiences. It is dedicated to “the staff and boys of ‘The Lennox School’”.
• Street theater : the twenty-seventh of June, 1969, in two acts
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, the play is set on Christopher Street on the eve of the police raids on the Stonewall Inn bar which led to the Stonewall Uprising, in which Doric Wilson (1939-2011) was a participant. The “street theater” of the title is created by the characters including a “flower child”, “street queens”, a “vice cop”, a “student radical” and a “politically incorrect lesbian”. First performed in 1982 in San Francisco, the play later moved to New York. Wilson also worked as a barman, the tips from which helped support his theatrical endeavours, including TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence) an Off Off-Broadway theatre space.
• Streetboy dreams : a novel
  ‘Streetboy Dreams’ by Kevin Esser (1953-) was published by two out of the three Gay Presses of New York, who note the “controversial and divisive” nature of its subject matter. The novel details the relationship between Peter, a teacher in his mid-thirties, and teenage Gito. Unlike Bruce, the adult protagonist of Wallace Hamilton’s ‘Kevin’, Peter is not presented as a gay character, per se – the novel opens with the end of “another fling at heterosexuality”. Marketed at the time as “a different approach” to what was euphemistically known as “man/boy love”, it is hard to read the novel today as anything other than the story of a grooming – a glorification of unequal power dynamics and dubiously consensual sexual experience.
• The AIDS epidemic
  In spring 1983, a “devastating, puzzling and fatal” new illness was spreading rapidly throughout the United States. At that time, some three to four years after the first cases of HIV/AIDS had emerged and under two years since the first cases were reported in the ‘New York Times’, New York City was the hardest-hit metropolitan area with 595 cases and 228 deaths. This astonishingly prescient book edited by physician Kevin Cahill (1936-2022) comprises the published proceedings of a symposium that took place at Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City. Doctors, epidemiologists and policy-makers gathered to discuss how they might combat the disease, stating that “there is every indication that we will soon be in the midst of a worldwide epidemic”. As of 2024, HIV has claimed over 40 million lives worldwide.
• The boy who picked the bullets up
  Charles Nelson (1942-2003) served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and claimed that some of this novel was autobiographical. The story follows medic Kurt Strom during a year he spent stationed in Vietnam. Strom’s experiences as a gay Marine are relayed via letters he sends home to his family and friends. One reviewer described the novel as containing “endless humour and devastating realism”, while the gay perspective was praised for presenting “decidedly different” insights on war. The novel’s title is taken from the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud. Published by William Morrow, the book’s dust jacket shows a soldier’s trousered backside, with a blue bandana in the left pocket, alluding to ‘flagging’, a coded means of expressing sexual preferences.
• 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.