Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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, which is more than a lot of serious dance students can claim.
That, however, was pretty nearly the extent of my dancing career. I tried singing as well, with not much more success. I did get to appear with the San Francisco Opera Company but it was, again, only as a super. I met some fabulous people, including Placido Domingo, who couldn’t have been more charming. I had lots of fun but unfortunately this does not exactly constitute a career in music.
I made a stab at modeling. Somewhere out there surely copies remain of Army & Navy Times with yours truly in Navy blues (I’m afraid the white socks rather spoiled the illusion). Anyway, despite my best efforts—gazing into mirrors, glancing back at the camera from under my armpit—the shots they used avoided my face. A bad omen for any aspiring model, I fear.
Oddly enough, what I hadn’t pursued was writing. Oh, I still wrote, for my own pleasure. I was even published here and there. Some poetry in One magazine and a short story in Der Kreis, an early gay magazine published in Zürich (Switzerland) in three languages and also called Le Cercle and The Circle. In 1963 they announced an English-language short story competition, to which I submitted a gem titled “Broken Record,” which came in fourth and got me no prize, but was published. The magazine is long defunct, the story long out of print, and you are highly unlikely ever to see it anywhere—which is perhaps just as well.
“Broken Record” was not my only writing effort at the time. I worked for a while on a novel, Perry for President, in which a cartoonist launches a presidential campaign for his main character, Perry the Ostrich, and the campaign becomes a real one. I think the “Pogo for President” campaign was running at the time. I thought it was a funny idea—I still do actually—but I don’t recall that I ever finished it. Be my guest.
So it wasn’t that I didn’t write, but it really didn’t cross my mind to try to write for a living. I hardly bothered with getting my efforts published. Looking back it seems as if it just didn’t occur to me that a boy from Eaton, Ohio, could be a real writer—which is truly puzzling. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was in fact Camden, about nine miles down the road from Eaton, where I grew up. So there was precedent, as the lawyers say.
It was my good friend, George, who first suggested that I try writing for a living. However, I should explain that we have always called him Crazy George. The idea intrigued me but I still didn’t take it too seriously.
In any case, what happened was, I went into a paperback bookstore one day. Now, this in itself was a rather new development at that time, an entire bookstore devoted to paperback books—mostly sexy paperbacks, though I have to say again that the sex was tepid indeed compared to what gets published today.
Anyway, there were these racks and racks of sexy books—heterosexually sexy books, with the occasional nod in the direction of lesbianism but nary a gueen to the realm. I looked through a few of these books and said to myself, “Gosh, I could do this.”
I bought an armful of them, seven or eight I suppose, took them home, read them, and sat down to write my own. It was intended to be a spoof, but not too pointed in its spoofery; I didn’t, after all, want to offend these potential publishers. I sent the manuscript off to the publisher of three or four of the ones I had read, the publisher who seemed to offer the most variety—Brandon House Books in North Hollywood. Milt Luros’ company as it happened, though I did not know this at the time.
In a short time I got a letter back from a Brandon House editor—I’m afraid time has robbed me of his name—telling me he liked the book but it was too short for their purposes. Would I be interested in expanding it?—in which case he would like to see it again and thought probably they would buy it.
I did and they did and within a few months I had in my hands copies of my first novel—The Affairs of Gloria (“The uninhibited story of a free-loving, free-wheeling nympho!”)—or as Fanny later described it, Dolly-Do-Good in the Boudoir.
Now, she had a point. Gloria did do lots of good deeds—I wanted a virtuous heroine—and she also did lots of moaning and writhing, and some of the latter was with women instead