Items

• A day and a night at the baths
  This book describes Michael Rumaker’s (1932-2019) first visit to the baths at West 28th Street, Manhattan. Although not named, this was the location of the Everard Turkish and Russian baths, which opened in 1888 and became a meeting place for gay men. Tragedy hit the increasingly run-down building in 1977, when nine men died in a fire so devastating it made newspaper headlines. This book is dedicated to all those who were at the Everard Baths during the fire and particularly “to the spirit of the rainbow gay and lesbian phoenix, rising” from the ashes. The publisher is Donald Allen whose Grey Fox imprint published works by several Beat authors, including Allen Ginsberg, whose words of praise for this book are on the back cover. Earlier in his career, Rumaker was aligned with the Beat movement.
• Gay sunshine interviews. Volume 1
  In 1975, the editor of the ‘Gay Sunshine Journal’, Winston Leyland (1940-), founded the related book imprint Gay Sunshine Press, which published volumes of interviews. Most of the interviews had originally been published in the journal, which began its interview series with gay writers, artists and performers in 1973. This first volume includes interviews with William Burroughs, Jean Genet and Christopher Isherwood. Leyland conducted several of the interviews and noted that they all highlight “a definite gay sensibility in the arts”.
• Meat : how men look, act, walk, talk, dress, undress, taste & smell
  Described in the introduction by ‘Fag Rag’ co-founder and Walt Whitman scholar Charles Shively as “an unprecedented piece of literature”, ‘Meat’ is an anthology of writing from the first forty-seven issues of ‘Straight to Hell (S.T.H.)’, a self-published magazine sometimes known by other titles including ‘The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts’. Created by Boyd McDonald (1925-1993), the publication predominantly contains explicit true stories of gay men’s sexual experiences which have been submitted by readers. These are accompanied by photos of muscular men, not unlike those published in physique magazines, often posed by models from agencies such as the Athletic Model Guild. This collection is published by Gay Sunshine Press, and the back cover includes quotes from readers including Gore Vidal, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
• My first satyrnalia
  One of two Michael Rumaker (1932-2019) books seized, this novel follows a narrator through a night in New York, on the streets, in the bookshops and in “make-out booths”. The narrator’s ultimate destination is an apartment where a Fairy (Faerie) Circle is gathering for the Saturnalia of the book’s title, an “orgiastic celebration” of the Winter Solstice. The Fairy Circle refers to a meeting of the Radical Faeries, a countercultural movement founded in 1979. The novel is scattered with references to non-fictional locations, books and music, including the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Christopher Street, Donna Summer and Arthur Evans’s book ‘Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture’ (also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). The novel, therefore, provides a sense of gay culture in Greenwich Village as it was forty years ago.
• Straight hearts' delight : love poems and selected letters, 1947-1980
  Containing thirty years of poetry and numerous letters, this book relates the lives and works of two key figures of the Beat Generation. Documenting chronologically the relationship between Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Peter Orlovsky (1933-2010), the book is not only a record of their love but also of the milieu in which they lived and worked. The book contains previously unpublished poems and is illustrated, including with a Richard Avedon photograph of the authors naked. Edited by Winston Leyland, the authors were involved in the book’s production and contributed footnotes. As with many Gay Sunshine Press (and Fag Rag) publications, it was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency established by the US Congress.