Items

• And God bless Uncle Harry and his roommate Jack : who we're not supposed to talk about : cartoons from Christopher Street
  ‘Christopher Street’, named after the New York location of the Stonewall Inn, was a gay magazine which ran for almost twenty years. Founded in 1976 by Charles Ortleb (1950?-) and co-publisher Dorianne Beyer, the magazine published fiction and non-fiction and aimed to be a “cultural forum”. The magazine also prided itself on its satirical cartoons, a selection of which are collected in this book, published by mass market imprint Avon Books. The cartoons were often presented in a sophisticated style similar to the noted ‘New Yorker’ magazine. The titular cartoon, which is featured on the front cover, is by TABBAT, while several cartoons were drawn by the magazine's art director, Rick Fiala, using a range of pseudonyms.
• Ed Dean is queer : a novel
  Praised on publication for its “grabbing and lucid style”, ‘Ed Dean is Queer’ was the first novel by N.A. Diaman (1936-2022). Set in 1983, this tale of political intrigue grapples with pro- and anti-gay politics to provide a vision of a “meaningful future” for queer people, according to one reviewer. The book’s layout and typesetting are noticeably DIY in style, and Diaman set up Persona Press in order to self-publish, driven by the conviction that “straight people are not going to tell our stories.” He would go on to write another nine books. Timothy Thompson’s cover design features a striking monochrome graphic of two moustachioed men and a woman looking suspiciously on behind them. The copy on display here is dated “4 December 1984” and is inscribed “Best wishes to Gay’s the Word and its fight against censorship.”
• 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.
• Gay sunshine interviews. Volume 1
  In 1975, the editor of the ‘Gay Sunshine Journal’, Winston Leyland (1940-), founded the related book imprint Gay Sunshine Press, which published volumes of interviews. Most of the interviews had originally been published in the journal, which began its interview series with gay writers, artists and performers in 1973. This first volume includes interviews with William Burroughs, Jean Genet and Christopher Isherwood. Leyland conducted several of the interviews and noted that they all highlight “a definite gay sensibility in the arts”.
• Taking care of Mrs. Carroll : a novel
  This first novel by poet and novelist Paul Monette (1945-1995) begins with the sudden death of wealthy estate owner Mrs Beth Carroll and the introduction of her houseboy David who awakens in bed alongside John, the gardener. The narrative that follows, involving unsigned wills, forgery and impersonation, was described by one reviewer as “a most entertaining venture into fantasy, hilarity, and gay sex”. Monette’s later works, including a memoir of his partner Roger Horwitz’s illness and death from AIDS, took a more serious turn. Horwitz’s presence is felt in the novel displayed here – the book is dedicated to him, and the author photograph gracing the back cover was taken by him. Before Monette’s own death from AIDS, he founded the Monette-Horwitz Trust to honour individuals and organisations that fight to eradicate homophobia.
• The joy of lesbian sex : a tender and liberated guide to the pleasures and problems of a lesbian lifestyle
  Published a year after ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’, the subtitle of this volume introduces the “problems” as well as “pleasures” of lesbian life in marked contrast to its gay male counterpart. Written by Dr Emily L. Sisley (1930-2016) and novelist and Daughters, Inc. founder Bertha Harris (1937-2005), and illustrated by Yvonne Gilbert, Charles Raymond and Patricia Faulkner, it follows the formula set by ‘The Joy of Sex’ in 1972. It covers all aspects of lesbian life and sexuality from “Alcohol and sex” to “Water, water, everywhere”, followed by a bibliography. It had a smaller initial print run than ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’ – 50,000 rather than 75,000 copies – and its reception was mixed. One (lesbian) reviewer objected to its misandry while another suggested its “authors cling to the concept of a penis”. It was also criticised for its omissions, “myths and misconceptions”, particularly around disability, race and class.
• The quirk
  As with other Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) novels published by Avon Books, the cover of ‘The Quirk’ is the work of artist Victor Gadino. The style of these Avon paperbacks alludes to the romances published by Mills and Boon in the UK (or Harlequin in the USA), but in this case, they are aimed at gay readers. Gadino used male models as the basis of his illustrations which, unusually for the time, depict the men together and looking at each other rather than separate and isolated. In this instance, the full illustration wraps around the front and back covers. This novel centres on Rod, a bisexual artist in 1960s Paris who has relationships with men and a woman during the novel.
• True to life adventure stories. Vol. 1
  Judy Grahn (1940-) is a poet, lesbian feminist and advocate of women’s spirituality. She also wrote 1984’s ‘Another Mother Tongue’, a mythic queer history. In response to Grahn’s question, “what is a woman’s adventure story?”, this book presents stories by twenty writers which relate women’s direct experiences. Writing by working-class women is a strong feature of the collection, with an emphasis on maintaining the authors’ unedited natural language and spelling. The book was published by Diana Press, a feminist printing and publishing house founded in 1972 by Coletta Reid and Casey Czarnik. The cover illustration is by Karen Sjöholm, who also worked at the Press. The Press was vandalised in 1977, with damage to plates, paste-ups, books and machines. It closed in 1979.
• 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.
• You are the rain : a novel
  When a hurricane strikes an all-girl canoe trip in the Florida Everglades, athletic Crash and introvert June become separated from the group and must depend on each other to survive. The novel is described as being “Of lesbian interest” in the 1975-76 catalogue of women’s bookstore First Things First, although the relationship is implied rather than overt. The novel is endorsed on the back cover by lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, with several references to the poetry of Emily Dickinson throughout. The title is taken from a May Swenson poem – “I will be earth you be the flower / You have found my root you are the rain”. Swenson and R.R. Knudson (1932-2008) were lovers in the mid-1960s. They collaborated on the collection ‘American Sports Poems’ (1988), and Knudson was Swenson’s literary executor on her death in 1989.