Items

• 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.
• Witchcraft and the gay counterculture : a radical view of Western civilization and some of the people it has tried to destroy
  This book by Arthur Evans (1942-2011) is a rebuttal to the homophobic bias of “professional historians” and academics. Merging myth and history, the text is a self-proclaimed radical and subjective vision of a pre-Christian world of nature societies, which touches on many themes including Druids, Gnosticism, witchcraft, matriarchy, class politics and magic as a collective endeavour. Published by the Boston-based Fag Rag collective, it was edited by two of its members, Michael Bronski and Charles Shively, and chapters were initially published in the journals ‘Out’ and ‘Fag Rag’. Active in gay liberation movements, Evans was a co-founder of the Gay Activists Alliance and of the San Francisco Faerie Circle. This text is still in print in pirated editions and remains popular with Radical Faeries.