Items

• A day and a night at the baths
  This book describes Michael Rumaker’s (1932-2019) first visit to the baths at West 28th Street, Manhattan. Although not named, this was the location of the Everard Turkish and Russian baths, which opened in 1888 and became a meeting place for gay men. Tragedy hit the increasingly run-down building in 1977, when nine men died in a fire so devastating it made newspaper headlines. This book is dedicated to all those who were at the Everard Baths during the fire and particularly “to the spirit of the rainbow gay and lesbian phoenix, rising” from the ashes. The publisher is Donald Allen whose Grey Fox imprint published works by several Beat authors, including Allen Ginsberg, whose words of praise for this book are on the back cover. Earlier in his career, Rumaker was aligned with the Beat movement.
• Human warmth : & other stories
  Twelve short stories featuring gay and lesbian characters, which strive for “some kind of universality, even when dealing with very specific homosexual content”, according to the author’s preface. Daniel Curzon (1938-) is a former journalist for publications such as ‘Gay News’, and a now-retired professor of English. In the mid-1970s, Curzon edited and published ‘Gay Literature – A New Journal’, a literary quarterly which folded after eighteen months. Following ‘Something You Do in the Dark’ (Putnam’s,1971), dubbed the “first gay protest novel”, Curzon wrote (and sometimes self-published) several other short story collections, novels, plays, poems and humorous titles, including ‘The Joyful Blue Book of Gracious Gay Etiquette’. His novel ‘From Violent Men’ was also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’.
• My first satyrnalia
  One of two Michael Rumaker (1932-2019) books seized, this novel follows a narrator through a night in New York, on the streets, in the bookshops and in “make-out booths”. The narrator’s ultimate destination is an apartment where a Fairy (Faerie) Circle is gathering for the Saturnalia of the book’s title, an “orgiastic celebration” of the Winter Solstice. The Fairy Circle refers to a meeting of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural movement founded in 1979. The novel is scattered with references to non-fictional locations, books and music, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, Donna Summer and Arthur Evans’s book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture’ (also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). The novel, therefore, provides a sense of gay culture in Greenwich Village as it was forty years ago.