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• 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.