SEXIS WRONG

The gay world took to their new superhero with a passion—
and so launched the gay paperback revolution that would
change the publishing, and social, landscape of the 1960s
and 1970s.
I considered that a good trade for my maidenhead.
I have stated in other contexts that Earl Kemp is the Godfather
of gay publishing, Il Capo de Tutti Frutti, notwithstanding
the fact that he was as much a virgin to gay publishing as I
was, and we lost our maidenheads together, so to speak.
To really understand this, you need to hearken back to the
“swinging sixties”: the sit-ins and love-ins and demonstrations
in the streets. We were burning draft cards and bras and
even jockstraps—well, admittedly mine wasn’t having a blazing
career anyway, but that’s another story. The point here is,
when one remembers the social and sexual revolution of the
1960s and 1970s, it is those dramatic goings-on in the streets
and in public that one recalls.
Of course, it wasn’t all so dramatic and not all
so public. Some of the battles in that revolution
took place in offices and at the desks of
writers, publishers, and editors—at Greenleaf,
in fact.
There’s no disputing the impact of Greenleaf on gay publishing.
The history of gay publishing divides cleanly into B.E.
(Before Earl) and A.E. (After Earl). The few gay novels—and
they were few—published before Greenleaf were mostly a
dreary lot, in which we were generally portrayed as sickos,
freaks, and monsters, living in guilt and angst, and soundly
punished for our sins in the end.
To be sure, there was some good writing to be found if you
looked hard. Jean Cocteau’s Le Livre Blanc (The White Paper)
from 1928 is wonderful indeed, but, after all, Cocteau is Cocteau.
You can’t say that about anybody else.
Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler), John Henry MacKay’s 1926
novel, was originally published in German, and it wasn’t until
Hubert Kennedy’s excellent 1985 translation that it could finally
be enjoyed by the rest of us.
W. Somerset Maugham was gay and might have written “the
great gay novel,” but he grew up in an England still roiled by
the Oscar Wilde trials and so remained in the closet throughout
his life, though he did show a certain courage in including
some gay characters in his books and stories. What is
obviously a pair of male lovers appears briefly in Christmas
Holiday, and in The Three Fat Women of Antibes, one of my
favorites, the cigar-smoking Francis prefers to be called Frank
and dresses “as much like a man as she could.”
Robert Calder argues in Willie: The Life of W. Somerset
Maugham that Mildred, the splendidly nasty “heroine” in
Of Human Bondage (“every time you kissed me I wiped my
mouth. Wiped my mouth!”), was in real life a young man.
Maugham’s custom of basing his characters on real people
is well known, so the allegation is certainly credible, and it is
interesting to reread the novel with that idea in mind, but of
course, we can never know for sure.
Other writers sidled cautiously around homosexuality in their
books. James Jones wrote a homosexual subplot into From
Here to Eternity, though there was not a hint of it in the movie.
Mickey Spillane’s tough guy Mike Hammer has a serious case
of the hots for the beautiful Juno in Vengeance Is Mine—until
the very end, when her erotic striptease reveals the shocking
truth: “Juno was a man.”
Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948) exemplified the
“sad young men” school of gay writing so common in the
1940s and 1950s and caused him to be blacklisted for many
years, though the “frank” homosexuality would hardly get
anyone’s fist moving today.
Not all of those novels ended in
suicide, of course. The heterosexual
cure was a popular alternative.
I have said before that James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
from 1956 might better have been called Giovanni Jones
and the Temple of Gloom, positively dripping as it does with
gay self-loathing: “my sex, my troubling sex....(be it) ever so
vile....” Not exactly positive reinforcement.
The real problem with most of these books is that, despite
the sometimes fine writing, they are dishonest in their onesidedness.
Of course, in the 1940s and 1950s, gays lived
with much harassment; they were beaten and robbed, sometimes
murdered, with impunity; they were often blackmailed,
sometimes by the police, and one can hardly wonder that
they were often lonely, afraid, ashamed. Worse, the fictional
mirrors these writers held up for us offered us nothing but
bleak reflections.
Having lived through the era, however, I can tell you honestly
that things were not as dire as these novels depict them.
Some of us—most, I suspect—quite enjoyed our sexual activities.
We made friends, found lovers. I know couples still
together today who first met in that twilight world of the
1940s and 1950s.
We laughed, if often at ourselves. As anyone knows who’s
ever been around one of our street fairs or pride parades, gay
boys know how to have fun, and they did back then, too.
Indeed, perhaps because it has always been somewhat un-
THE VIRGIN DIARIES 229