Items

• Ed Dean is queer : a novel
  Praised on publication for its “grabbing and lucid style”, ‘Ed Dean is Queer’ was the first novel by N.A. Diaman (1936-2022). Set in 1983, this tale of political intrigue grapples with pro- and anti-gay politics to provide a vision of a “meaningful future” for queer people, according to one reviewer. The book’s layout and typesetting are noticeably DIY in style, and Diaman set up Persona Press in order to self-publish, driven by the conviction that “straight people are not going to tell our stories.” He would go on to write another nine books. Timothy Thompson’s cover design features a striking monochrome graphic of two moustachioed men and a woman looking suspiciously on behind them. The copy on display here is dated “4 December 1984” and is inscribed “Best wishes to Gay’s the Word and its fight against censorship.”
• 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.
• Second crossing : a novel
  N.A. (Nikos) Diaman (1936-2020), also known as Tony, was a novelist, video filmmaker, photographer, writer and magazine editor. Amongst the many groups he joined were the San Francisco Radical Faeries and the New York Gay Liberation Front (some of his work was published in the associated newspaper ‘Come Out!’). Based for many years in San Francisco, Diaman self-published novels under the imprint Persona Press which allowed him the space to tell stories about the gay community. This novel is set in the 1950s and follows a young writer as he explores his sexuality among San Francisco’s North Beach gay and literary circles. This copy is inscribed by Diaman to Gay’s the Word, wishing them well “in the battle against homophobia and censorship”.
• 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.