who might refuse to circulate books and exert surveillance on publishers and writers, so that the fight for queer visibility had courts as its battlefield, editors and writers on the one side, aided by their attorneys, obscenity laws—with Post Offices as their armed forces—on the other side. In such traffic warfare, pulps played a role indeed in changing the self-image of America. The readership for paperback novels had been boosted by military authorities, who promoted cheap editions of American classics—a huge number of books were published by Armed Services Editions—to benefit troops in World War II; cheap entertainment, role models and motivation for the heroes of American identity, freedom and constitutional rights. They served this end far beyond the first intentions of the military forces; when the battleground moved from trenches and warships to the legal courts, pulps were a relevant factor in reassessing what was legitimate to stage as part of American identity and constitutional rights—precisely because a potential readership had been created by such mass-produced American classics, and liberal consumer society models.
First came the success gracing John Rechy’s City of Night, issued by Grove Press in 1964. A bestselling exposé on the promiscuous and degraded underworld of hustlers and drag queens, it introduced the queer scenario to a wider reading public, and with a sensation that is testimony to the furtive titillation that the reign of neon-lighted obscurity, the aura and fascination of obscenity, exerted on both queers and ‘straights.” Then came signs of a pulp deluge. The year 1965, in fact, inaugurated a flood of gay pulps, and announced the Golden Age of the gay paperback. Overnight, within a few months, an impressive number of gay pulps (thirty paperback originals were published in 1965; more than a hundred were issued the following year), and a whole throng of gay representations, were made available. Hey, there were thousands of readers out there, there were writers ready to give them the stories they were looking for, there was an adequate production system, and an excellent distribution line. There lay a huge potential market, and the gay pulp industry was born. With a number of presses on both East and West coasts (Greenleaf Classics, Pyramid Books, Paperback Library, Classic Publications, Brandon House, and dozens of imprints) ready to seize the opportunity to harvest the field of increasingly explicit (albeit rather tame, by today’s standards) gay writing.
The reality depicted in gay pulps, however, was not in itself positive; the weakening of censorship strictures did not automatically imply a gay pride. Characters were stereotyped, sexploitation was the dominant feature, and writers still largely used the cover up of pseudonyms, as nothing guaranteed that the cultural wind would not, abruptly, change its direction again. (And it did change, occasionally; as late as 1970, one of the major presses in queer pulp, Greenleaf Classics, was indicted and condemned; the Supreme Court confirmed the verdict in 1975, sending pulp guru Earl Kemp to prison.) In the bourgeoning pulp industry of the mid-sixties, few book contracts were signed (better not to leave traces), books were written in days, manipulated by editors for both legal and market reasons (pulps usually had standard length), attributed to pen or house names, and issued by analogously ubiquitous publishers, whose name and location shifted frequently. A standardized production for standard plots, characters and length, plus a fixed rate of sex to feed the market; that’s how the production line of queer pulp beauty worked, and one may well say that it apparently had little to share with the gay pride, poetry and art of the seventies. What it did share, though, is the political relevance of representation, as inherent to the very possibility for self-recognition; despite their industrial nature, despite all their literary and political flaws, pulps were the first mass representation available to generations of (embryo) gay people, as they made the obscene into a sensation. Gay characters and plots progressively lost their lurid nature, developed a more ironic and sexually explicit stance, and peopled a whole new variety of gay fantasies (including gay westerns, thrillers and detective stories, war stories, gay spoofs, etc.), offering a queer mirror that enabled queers—and heterosexuals, to some extent—to literally come to terms with their own self-understanding.
The Golden Age of the gay paperback was rather short-lived; it lasted for the brief time span between the 1966 lift of bans on Fanny Hill and on Naked Lunch, and the actual “end of obscenity” in the early seventies. A landmark legal statement took place in 1973, in the famous Miller vs. California case, whose verdict changed the test regulating obscenity charges. The three-pronged Miller test assessed the obscenity of a work i) that “the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find [to appeal] to the prurient interest,” ii) that represents, “in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct,” and iii) that “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” But the Miller test was quite ineffective; the Supreme Court, chaired by Chief Justice Burger, had to acknowledge that “community standards” must be locally defined; as to “artistic value,” Andy Warhol and John Waters had shown that it may be found even in supermarkets and in filth (well, Waters’ Pink Flamingos made drag actor Divine the ultimate trash superstar by having her eat dog’s fresh poo). The frailties of the Miller test unleashed the gates to the season of commercial, mass pornography. In the same years, as gay pulp grew more unabashedly explicit in its sexual content, and social psychology justifications became less stringent, the birth of a gay activism following the Stonewall riots, and the increasing legitimacy of a gay identity, made pulp redundant. The two-fold nature of pulp, its pornographic and socioliterary self-justificatory nature, was split. Pornography acquired its own right to exist as such, and the possibility for gay writing, of high literary value and positive self-representation, was envisioned. Depriving them of their obscenity, the early seventies decreed the end of pulps.
It was a new freedom of expression, gay activism, and the fight for gay rights to constitutional happiness, that brought gay pulps to the cobwebbed garrets, and into the garbage bins of history. Back off scene, to the obscure and shadowy realm that they rightfully belonged to. Until, some thirty years later, cultural critics, second-hand book dealers and postcard companies unpacked those half-concealed cardboard boxes in their garrets, ran into these campy revenants, and reconsidered their worth, as collectibles, memorabilia, and significant cultural tokens. Pulps offered a Barnum of popular beliefs on what being queer before Stonewall was like. They were not just amusing Kitsch, a source of camp-flavored nostalgia for both queers and straights; they were documents on the time when pulps provided a queer mirror to many people giving evidence that they were not the only “freaks”—once small-priced, but now precious documents on the fragmented identities, desires and struggles out of which seventies liberation and identity politics emerged. Pulps had found a new market, a refurbished stage. Yes, they were obscene again.
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The history of pulp fiction is not only the history of mid-twentieth-century obscenity regulations, charges, trials and verdicts; it is in itself an obscene history, both invoked and hidden by the “(hetero)sexual revolution” rhetoric, and the Stonewall mythology of gay (self-)liberation. Pulps entail that hetero and queer sexual revolutions were part of an economic negotiation between representation, and market strategies, culture industry and pornography, a negotiation in which the very categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality cannot simply be distributed into clear-cut fronts, even more so into fronts of heterosexual conservatism vs. homosexual progressive agency (it was a queer scenario, after all, that preceded identity politics). The return of pulps does set up in fact an agenda for a more complex cultural and social history, an agenda taking into account the variety of actors and factors inherent to cultural production. In other words, the history of pulp fiction summons what is still much silenced in American history—and it is in itself a necessarily pulp, fictional history.
While some pioneering, classic studies from the early eighties—say, Barbara Grier’s annotated checklist in The Lesbian in Literature (Naiad Press, 1981), and Michael Bronski’s Culture Clash (South End Press, 1984), outlining the role of porn in the “making of gay sensibility”—offered valuable, albeit unsystematic, insights into the role played by queer paperbacks, in the last few years a number of invaluable resources have been made accessible. Relevant critical readings have been published by established presses, including, most notably, Dawn B. Sova’s Passion and Penance; The Lesbian in Pulp Fiction (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998), Jaye Zimet’s Strange Sisters; The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1949-1969 (Penguin, 1999),
