and I never saw them once the manuscripts had been mailed. From time to time I still pick up a paperback book at a flea market and am surprised to discover that it’s something I wrote in the distant past. How was I to know they would pick a name like Flaubert?
As it happened my paperback years coincided with a time of major revolution in the publishing industry. An entire new, alternative publishing industry was bursting onto the scene. Mostly this was a West Coast phenomenon, though there were a few houses in the East and Midwest. At the time the major publishers on the East Coast tut-tutted and looked condescendingly, at best, at what was happening in California. In the late sixties Publishers Weekly replied to a query from me with the information that they had “no interest in California sex publishers.”
Well, yes, to a large extent, sex was the engine that powered this publishing revolution—let’s face it, if the Constitution had been written in California, sex would have been mentioned in the Bill of Rights—but it was not only that. Milton Luros owned one of the largest of these publishing operations in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. His critics called Milt the King of Pornography, but that realm apparently had many “kings”—the title got passed around a lot. The thing is, Milt was a graduate of New York’s prestigious Hunter’s College and an artist of some note. Like many of these early pulp people, Milt started out in the science fiction and fantasy fields, and several of those early sci-fi and fantasy pulps featured covers by Milt. So far as his own publishing was concerned, Milt’s real interest lay in high quality art books.
San Diego’s Greenleaf Classics, another major player, did paperback editions of classic novels. In Los Angeles, Sherbourne Press aka Medco Books published books on witchcraft, male baldness, betting systems—a long list of non-sexual subjects.
Even where sex was a factor, it wasn’t necessarily of the sleazy, pornographic sort. The Other Traveller line of books was an offshoot of Maurice Girodias’ legendary Olympia Press, which for years published major but out-of-the-mainstream works in Paris in familiar green covers; think Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, or Vladimir Nabokov.
Luros’ operation in the San Fernando Valley published paperback editions of such works as Terry Southern’s Candy (1964), and Sherbourne Press published Robert Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment (1966) and the fledgling efforts of Joseph Hansen (writing as James Colton), who went on to well justified fame for his Dave Brandstetter mysteries, among other efforts.
It was largely the work of these West Coast publishers that pushed the borders of what was permissible to say and to write about, sexually. It was they who left behind “his manhood” and introduced “his cock,” and made an honest orgasm of “her fulfillment.” I’ll leave it to others to debate the good or bad of that but I will say that the freedom today’s writers enjoy—mainstream romances today are far “hotter” than anything I wrote then—came from this revolution of the sixties.
Even more significant, in my opinion, were the doors that were opened to alternative themes. Gay novels were rare and mostly a sorry lot heretofore. The California houses—with a big push from yours truly—jumped into gay in a big way. There were books, too, on S&M.—I wonder if The Story of O would have made it to print without them? Larry Townsend became the premier writer for those interested in the leather world. John Maggie wrote about boy-love in neither a condescending nor a prurient voice—I can’t imagine what New York publishing house even today would have the guts to tackle his novels. And if they did the watchdogs of our morality would be on them in a thrice, you can take my word for it. As adults, it is important that we have someone decide for us what it is safe for us to read, don’t you see?
None of this came without a price. The would-be censors, the Federal Government, particularly the U.S. Postal Service, waged a decades-long campaign to shut these publishers down. There were obscenity trials all over the place—usually in small towns where it was hoped community standards would be stiffer than the big cities—the scatter shot approach, as it was known.
I was arrested twice (I went through one long, scary Federal trial in Sioux City, Iowa, which I will get to in due course) and threatened with arrest on more than one occasion. Publishers, editors, writers, and others actually went to jail for exercising their free speech rights. Even where the publishers prevailed, the costs—financial and otherwise—of defending these cases was enormous.
Milt Luros once said to me; “In every revolution, there are those on the ramparts taking the slings and arrows, and there are those back snug in the castle enjoying the fruits.”
Personally I would have preferred curled up in front of the fire on some bare skin. I certainly never set out to be a revolutionary and I suppose I would have preferred not to suffer the slings and arrows. When I look back now, however, I can see, as I said, that I did indeed play a part in a genuine revolution, not only in publishing, but in social customs as well.
I was certainly a key player—maybe the key player—in that gay publishing revolution. There were others, of course. I mentioned Larry Townsend above, who is still writing at the dawn of the new century, and I don’t think his role in the social upheaval of the sixties has ever been properly acknowledged. Joseph Hansen (who wrote as James Colton), Marijane Meaker (as Vin Packer), Ann Weldy (as Ann Bannon), and Clarence Miller (as Jay Little) were among the early pioneers in gay fiction.
There were editors, too, who were willing to take that big—and truly risky—extra step; Gil Porter of Sherbourne Press, for example, and most notably Earl Kemp of Greenleaf Classics. It wasn’t only the publishers of these books but the editors as well who could end up facing indictment and possible prison sentences—a chilling subtext to editing books.
The important thing is, there’s little question that the revolution in publishing and the sexual revolution of that era fed one another. It wasn’t only books that changed, it was how we lived our lives.
My books reflected what was happening then, which probably explains in part why many of them have become collectors’ items, and why younger gay people ask me often about my role in our history.
As I said earlier, I seem to have become a cult figure in my old age.
CHAPTER TWO
PAPERBACK VIRGIN
By the early sixties I had tried on a number of different hats. Acting, for one. I sang vowels over burning candles, the idea being not to make the flame flicker. I was pretty good at non-flickering but I was paralyzed by stage fright. Anyway, I was willowy and a bit effeminate. My drama coach kept the candles burning but warned me I had to be prepared to be limited to character parts. Later I would have welcomed that suggestion but at the time I thought he was insulting me. My real ambition was to play Lady Macbeth and I still believe I would have been fabulous in the part—but outside of Harvard there weren’t a lot of theater companies casting men in women’s parts in the fifties.
I moved on to dancing—I wasn’t bad for a guy with a questionable sense of rhythm. High on my list of Things-I-Never-Imagined is that time when I danced in Swan Lake with the La Scala Ballet Company.
Well, tee hee, that is a not-quite fib. I was only a super—a supernumerary, to be exact (or a spear carrier to make it clearer)—with the Company, and I had signed on mostly because the legendary Carla Fracci was dancing Odette and Odile.
What happened was, in the big wedding scene I was the friendly innkeeper and when I asked in rehearsal what we supers should do with ourselves, the director said, “It’s a wedding. What would you do at a wedding?”
I thought about it, and each night when the festivities began I grabbed my stage wife and we whirled around the big wedding table. So it’s not quite a fib to say I danced in Swan Lake with the La Scala Ballet Company,
