SEXIS WRONG

derground, homosexuality often spawns a very special kind
of camaraderie. Gay friends are often more like lovers than
the buddies of the heterosexual world, sharing a peculiarly
intimate kind of connection that at the same time is not in the
least sexual in nature.
Not all of those novels ended in suicide, of course. The heterosexual
cure was a popular alternative, in novels like Rodney
Garland’s The Heart in Exile, Lee Walter’s The Right Bed, and
Jay Little’s Somewhere Between the Two. Indeed, it sometimes
seemed the lowly pansy was an endangered flower.
I first encountered the word gay (in its homosexual context)
in Nials Kent’s The Divided Path, a novel that actually hints at
happiness for its hero, until the finale when he is killed in a car
accident—so much for that happy ending.
In James Barr’s Quatrefoil and Derricks (obviously an inspiration
for the Loon Trilogy that came later), macho men get it
on with heroic enthusiasm but otherwise hardly seem to be
gay at all.
Here, instead, was a book about
happy homosexuals who spouted
the gay cause and hopped blithely in
and out of bed.
In the years leading up to and including 1963, there were
surely no more than another couple-dozen gay books, all
much the same, with only a rare exception or two.
A decade later, there were at least a thousand gay books,
maybe as many as four thousand. Even more surprising is
that, apart from their homosexual characters and a new sexual
bluntness, these books have little in common.
A gay man venturing into a bookstore in 1973 had whole
shelves of gay books to pick from: nonfiction works, some
of it scholarly, some nothing more than disguised porn; and,
especially, an incredible variety of novels: mysteries, science
fiction, adventures, war stories, gangsters, and cowboys,
and even romances with happy endings. In those ten years
a genuine and very dramatic revolution had occurred in gay
publishing.
One other thing that many of these books had in common
was Earl Kemp. By 1973 others were producing gay material:
Sherbourne Press, Milt Luros’ Brandon House Books, Lynn
Womack’s Grecian Guild. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press
fame in Paris (think such banned but worthy writers as Burroughs,
Beckett, Genet, and Miller), launched an American
gay-paperback series, “The Other Traveller.” The first book
with that imprint, my novel The Gay Haunt (by “Victor Jay”),
sold something close to 150,000 copies, an astonishing figure
for a gay paperback novel in 1970.
These publishers, though, got on the bandwagon after it was
rolling along and, not coincidentally, when they listened to the
music of the cash registers ringing and realized that Greenleaf
was making money with this stuff. The one who first got the
bandwagon moving, however, was Earl, and he did it with my
spy spoof, The Man From C.A.M.P.
I don’t want to make myself out a hero, though I am proud
to think that I made a difference, if only a modest one. I was
mostly just having fun, making some money, and, yes, thumbing
my nose at people like Donald Schoof.
Best of all, I got lucky. I got Earl.
I doubt that Earl had even read The City and the Pillar or
Giovanni’s Room, so he probably did not altogether grasp
that we were supposed to be miserable and commit suicide
or die in car crashes. He might well have thought that gays
could reasonably be as happy as anyone else.
A revolutionary concept in the early 1960s, to
be sure.
It was certainly not, however, mere ignorance
on his part. He knew of the convictions of
Aday and Maxey; he knew, assuredly, that he
was pushing the borders by publishing gay books at all, even
“sad young men” gay books. Here, instead, was a book about
happy homosexuals who spouted the gay cause and hopped
blithely in and out of bed; and Jackie Holmes always got his
man in the end. I am convinced that no other editor at the
time would have risked publishing The Man From C.A.M.P.
Needless to say, once it’s milked, you can’t put the cream
back in the cow. When Jackie Holmes made his debut, a
new kind of gay hero was born, and the homosexual world
adopted the baby as it own. A veritable flood of gay books followed,
many from Greenleaf, and most of them were upbeat
stories of gays who were no nuttier, no more unhappy, and
no more likely to kill themselves than your average heterosexual.
Which is to say, gay people just like the real ones.
Historians and scholars have opined that this boom in gaypaperback
publishing first created for gays a sense of community,
and I think they are probably right. In the past, we
had been lucky to find any books about our world, and when
we did, it was badly reflected. Often those few books were
hidden under the counter, and we heard of them in whispers.
Now bright sunlight chased away the shadows of that infamous
“twilight world.”
We felt a new kind of connection with the people in these
novels, and, inevitably, with one another. We were less iso-
230 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG