Items

• A brother's touch
  Angus Rivers, a young Vietnam veteran from upstate New York, ventures to the city to discover the truth about his teenage brother’s death. Earl, a gay sex worker, has been found dead of a heroin overdose on the West Side piers (a notorious cruising ground), his body “stuffed into a rusty oil drum”. This mass-market crime paperback depicts the New York gay scene as a sleazy underworld of addicts, hustlers, self-serving politicians and corrupt priests. But it also introduces gay politics and campaigning, through the activities of the ‘GLP’ or Gay Liberation Party. Positively reviewed in the ‘New York Times’ on publication, Owen Levy’s debut went on to sell very well. His second novel, ‘Goodbye Heiko, Goodbye Berlin’, was published in 2015.
• A comfortable corner
  Set in 1980s New York, this second novel by Vincent Virga (1942-) deals with the issue of alcoholism within the gay community and how it affects couple Terence and Christopher. Reviews of the novel acknowledged the importance of the theme, but noted it was presented in a florid style, described by one reviewer as “‘purple’ (lavender?) prose”. The novel is dedicated to the memory of American artist, Jackson Pollock, who suffered from alcoholism. The book was published in a mass market edition by Avon Books, publishers of Virga’s first novel, ‘Gaywyck’, which was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’.
• 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.
• A family matter : a parents' guide to homosexuality
  Psychologist Charles Silverstein (1935-2023) was a writer and pioneering advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. His presentation to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) contributed to the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness from the APA’s ‘DSM’ (the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’) in 1974. Three years later, he published his first book, ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’, co-authored with Edmund White – another ‘Operation Tiger’ seized title – and, in the same year, ‘A Family Matter’. While ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’ focused on a community of men who have sex with men, ‘A Family Matter’ is a contribution to the genre of books intended to help parents of lesbian and gay children “come to terms with their own feelings about homosexuality”. In a briefing document about the seized titles, the Defend Gay’s The Word Campaign noted that the book was “Dedicated to his ma and pa!!”
• A thirsty evil : seven short stories
  Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was a writer of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and screenplays, on a diverse range of subjects, published across many decades. Some of Vidal’s works centre on gay characters or themes, including some of the tales featured in this collection of seven stories. This edition, which was seized in the raids, was published by Gay Sunshine Press, although it is a reprint of the 1956 first edition published by Zero Press. Additionally, some of the stories had originally been published in magazines. Readers, therefore, had twenty-five years of access to this book’s contents prior to the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. The front cover shows an illustration by Joe Fuoco.
• A World For Us
• Adonis García : a picaresque novel
  Set in Mexico City’s Roma district, home to students, bohemians, the marginalised and impoverished, this radical experimental novel by Luis Zapata (1951-2020) follows Adonis García as he makes his “shameless and impudent” way through life, as José Joaquin Blanco puts it in the introduction to this edition. Refusing convention in both content and form, Zapata’s eponymous Adonis sets out his sexually adventurous story as if transcribed from a set of tapes, in a freewheeling, verbatim style which makes bold use of white space. The novel was first published in Mexico in 1979 by Editorial Grijalbo as ‘Las Aventuras, Desventuras y Sueños de Adonis García, El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma’. Translator E.A. Lacey (1938-1995) was also a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall generation.
• An idol for others
  Biographer Joseph M. Ortiz claims that Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) “was the most commercially successful writer of gay novels in the twentieth century”. After a moderately successful career as a literary post-war novelist in the 1940s and 1950s, published by important trade presses, it was as the author of paperback gay romance novels, with sex featuring heavily, that Merrick gained success. This novel focusses on theatre producer Walter Makin, an apparently happily married father, who also has gay relationships. The back cover of this paperback outlines the roles played by each of the characters and makes clear that incest is a feature of this novel (Jerry, one of Walter’s lovers, is also his illegitimate son). One reviewer described the novel’s unhappy ending as a return to the 1950s, when gay characters were rarely shown living fulfilled lives.
• 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.
• Annie on my mind
  One of the first lesbian young adult novels with an unequivocally happy ending, this is the semi-autobiographical story of Liza and Annie, two teenage girls who fall in love before their relationship is discovered by the school secretary. Nancy Garden (1938-2014), who received an award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature in 2003, met her partner, Sandy, at high school in the 1950s. They remained together until Garden’s death. In 1993, copies of ‘Annie on My Mind’, which had been donated to high schools by an LGBT advocacy organisation, were burned in Kansas City. Following a lawsuit and trial, the book was returned to libraries in 1999. Now considered a classic, it has never been out of print. Garden disliked this cover artwork, preferring the 1992 edition which showed “the two girls really relating to each other equally”.
• Aphrodisiac : fiction from Christopher Street
  This anthology of “the best fiction from Christopher Street” was praised for its “literary excellence” by ‘Publishers Weekly’. It compiles eighteen short stories published in “America’s leading gay magazine”, from authors including Jane Rule, Edmund White, Tennessee Williams and Kate Millett. The magazine, named after the location of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, was founded in 1976 and published monthly until the mid-1990s. As well as original fiction, it featured writing on gay politics and culture, interviews and satirical cartoons. A series of essays about the unfolding AIDS crisis in New York by Andrew Holleran – one of the featured authors in this collection – was later published as ‘Ground Zero’.
• Army of Lovers
• Art or Obscene?
• Autobiography in search of a father. Mother bound
  Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a critic, journalist, feminist and leader of the lesbian-separatist movement in the 1970s. Before publishing perhaps her best-known work, ‘Lesbian Nation - The Feminist Solution’ in 1973, Johnston wrote on dance for the ‘Village Voice’ newspaper, and was the first of its columnists to come out in print. ‘Mother Bound’ details her complicated family relationships and narrates her life up to 1965. Characterised as “readably rambling, pseudo-psychological ponderings” by one somewhat withering reviewer, though notably less experimental in form than her later criticism, ‘Mother Bound’ was followed by a second volume of autobiography, ‘Paper Daughter’, in 1985.
• Be Yourself
• Below the belt : & other stories
  These stories were written by Samuel M. Steward (1909-1993) under the pseudonym Phil Andros. Andros is also the central character – a drifter and hustler, intelligent and well-read, and as handsome as a Greek god – who recounts his sexual exploits in these erotic stories. This book contains an introductory note which flips the interlinked identities of author and subject by suggesting that Andros has lived these experiences, and Steward is an “alter ego” writing them for him. This was the first of seven Andros titles published by Donald Allen of Grey Fox Press, who created the Perineum Press imprint for this purpose. This copy is inscribed by Andros to Gay’s The Word, with hopes that they overcome the “hypocritical, archaic, stupid, and middle-class” Customs officials.
• Bit o’ bob
• BITCH
• Black men/white men : a gay anthology
  A collection of forty poems, short fiction and non-fiction pieces which explore the intersections of race and sexuality “from the most scholarly to the most explicit”, by authors such as Langston Hughes, Eric Garber and Bruce Nugent. Contributions on sexual stereotyping, discrimination and anti-Black racism within the white gay community are interspersed with several high-quality monochrome photographs and drawings of gay men, both Black and white, pictured separately and in couples. Editor Michael J. Smith founded the advocacy organisation Black and White Men Together in 1980. Chapters sprung up in cities across the United States – there was even, briefly, a Dalston-Hackney branch in London – and the organisation continues today. Smith died of AIDS in 1989 aged 45.
• Bodies and souls : a novel
  Born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican parents, John Rechy’s (1931-) first novel, ‘City of Night’, was published in 1963 and became a bestseller. Twenty years later, ‘Bodies and Souls’ was published by Carroll & Graf. Written in the style of a classic Hollywood film, the novel is set in Los Angeles and follows a range of characters including porn stars, punks, strippers, television reporters and an evangelist. In addition to his own literary career, Rechy taught creative writing and was also a sex worker. Many of Rechy’s experiences informed his fiction.
• Body parts : a woman looks at men's
  A Defend Gay’s The Word briefing document about the seized titles lists a book called ‘Body Parts’. Its author and publisher are unclear. The book presented here is a candidate for the correct book, but we cannot be sure. Actress and photographer Christie Jenkins, who was initially inspired by the bodies of male ice-skaters (some of whom are spotlighted in the book) presents here a selection of black-and-white photographs of men. The photographic models are named, and feature in sections focussing on specific body parts, including the subtly described ‘Middle Part’. Some images are published with just a question mark, and readers are invited to guess who is featured. The cover model is Leland (Lee) Nicholl, Jenkins’s ideal of “the perfectly built male”.
• Bom-Crioulo : the Black man and the cabin boy
  Brazilian novelist Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897) wrote in the Romantic Naturalist tradition. His work, “polemic, provocative, misunderstood”, according to Raul de Sá Barbosa, who introduces this edition, was largely overlooked in conservative Brazil until it began to be revived in the early 1980s. ‘Bom-Crioulo’, which roughly translates as ‘the Good Black Man’, was first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1895, the same year as Oscar Wilde’s trial and just seven years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. It depicts, frankly and without moralising, the relationship between a formerly enslaved Black man and a fifteen-year-old white cabin boy. E.A. Lacey, a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall era, who translated ‘Bom-Crioulo’ from Portuguese, also translated Luis Zapata’s ‘Adonis García’ (another seized book) from Spanish.
• Burning : a novel
  Jane Chambers (1937-1983) was an award-winning poet, screenwriter and playwright, who broke new ground by bringing happy, well-adjusted lesbian characters to the stage in plays such as ‘Last Summer at Bluefish Cove’. In ‘Burning’, Cynthia and Angela are on holiday in a New England farmhouse when they are possessed by the spirits of two women persecuted for their love some two hundred years earlier. ‘Burning’, Chambers’s first novel, was originally published by Jove in 1978 before being published by JH Press, one of the Gay Presses of New York. In 1981, Chambers received a Human Fund for Dignity Award with Harvey Fierstein (actor and writer of ‘Torch Song Trilogy’, also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). In the same year, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died two years later. Since 1984, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award has been offered in her name.
• Burton and Speke
  A historical novel of colonial East Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke drink gin, hunt big game and search for the source of the Nile. Burton is depicted as possibly closeted, Speke as probably gay, but the novel’s racist and imperialist overtones are all too blatant (note the unpleasant reference to “primitive Africa” in the inside book-jacket blurb). There is in addition a deeply misogynistic streak running through the book, including an episode featuring Female Genital Mutilation. The seventh novel from William Harrison (1933-2013), it was received positively by contemporary reviewers, one crediting Harrison with “uncovering a part of lost gay history”. Unusually for the time, ‘Burton and Speke’ was not aimed at a distinctly ‘gay market’. Harrison, who was himself heterosexual, also wrote short stories, nonfiction and screenplays, including for the adaption of this book as ‘Mountains of the Moon’ (1990).
• Censoring survival