Items

• Cruise to win
  “This book is about making contact” is the opening declaration of this self-help guide to successful and confident cruising for gay men. Written by Lenny Giteck, assistant editor and columnist at ‘The Advocate’, the book is based on interviews with fifty pseudonymous gay men and seventeen mental health professionals. In chapters on the principles of cruising, ‘dealing with rejection’ (and ‘rejecting others’), ‘sex and intimacy’ and older men and cruising, among others, the book aims to bolster self-worth and reduce anxiety around meeting other men, especially in bars. The inside back cover includes a statement that the book now comes with an ‘AIDS Supplement’. This suggests that this is a later edition of the book – an exact date of publication is not given – as this kind of material would not have been available on first publication in 1982. The supplement is unfortunately not included with this copy.
• Cum : true homosexual experiences from S.T.H. Volume 4
  This volume of “more than 100 sexually explicit stories” is one of a few anthologies culled from ‘Straight to Hell’, the magazine self-published by Boyd McDonald (1925-1993), that were seized during the raids. The collection gathers ‘true’ stories of sexual experiences, sent to the magazine by its readers, interspersed with black-and-white photographs. The book notes that the pictures are posed by professional models, and their inclusion “does not imply that they are necessarily homosexual”. The humour of these publications is reflected in the title of the cover photograph, taken by Mike Arlen – ‘A typical laundry scene in present-day London’.
• Flesh : true homosexual experiences from S.T.H. Volume 2
  The second anthology of readers’ real-life sexual experiences from Boyd McDonald (1925-1993), compiled from his self-published magazine, ‘S.T.H. (Straight to Hell)’ and illustrated with explicit black-and-white nude photographs posed by models. McDonald used newspaper headlines to frame stories, interspersed with "demented interviews with diverse groups of homosexual men”, according to one reviewer, featuring quick-fire questions about sexual likes, dislikes and exploits. Other ‘S.T.H.’ anthologies seized in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids included ‘Meat’, ‘Cum’ and ‘Sex’. ‘Juice’, the fifth volume in the series, continued to cause problems with the establishment. A review in ‘OUT! New Zealand’s Alternative Lifestyle Magazine’ from December 1991 includes the info “Just released by customs”.
• 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”.
• Gay sunshine interviews. Volume 2
  This volume contains interviews with gay artists and cultural figures, including Ned Rorem, John Wieners and Samuel M. Steward. It also features Harry Britt, who was a gay member of the legislative San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and succeeded Harvey Milk, who had been the first openly gay man in such a role. Winston Leyland (1940-), the publisher of this book, had been ordained as a priest, a role he abandoned as he became more involved in radical and gay politics. This is most clearly seen in his work as a publisher, which he described as follows – “I see Gay Sunshine Press as a catalyst in the evolving Gay Cultural Renaissance and myself as deeply involved in that process”.
• 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.
• Men behind bars : sexual exploitation in prison
  This is an in-depth study of exploitative and consensual sex between men in prison, drawing on qualitative interviews with men in a medium-security correctional facility in California. It covers themes such as the prison setting, prison policy and staff attitudes towards homosexuality. Wayne Wooden, a sociologist, was based for several years at Cal Poly Pomona. He has also worked on aging and was an active member of the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Gerontology. First published by New York’s Plenum Press in 1982, ‘Men Behind Bars’ was then published by Da Capo in 1983 – this is the paperback edition of the following year.
• Sex : true homosexual experiences from S.T.H. Volume 3
  “Laughing out loud with a hard-on”, as one reader put it in the back-cover endorsements. This is the third in a series of thirteen anthologies from the self-published magazine ‘S.T.H.’, or ‘Straight to Hell’, which was founded circa 1973 by editor Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) and is still published today. The premise is simple – readers send in their accounts of real-life sexual experiences. These are published with minimal editorial intervention under tongue-in-cheek tabloid-style headlines (‘Priests Expect Students to Put Out’). The articles are illustrated with black-and-white nude photographs posed by models, cut-and-pasted from old magazines. Copies of ‘Sex’ were also seized by Canadian customs officers in the mid-1980s according to newspaper ‘Body Politic’.
• The boy from Beirut : and other stories
  Robin Maugham (1916-1981), Second Viscount Maugham of Hartfield and nephew of the novelist W. Somerset Maugham, wrote short stories, novels, screenplays, plays and non-fiction. “Bisexual, though predominantly homosexual”, as he put it, Maugham published his first short story in 1943 (‘The 1946 Ms’, praised by George Orwell), turning more to gay themes in his post-1970 work. Published posthumously, Maugham’s ‘The Boy from Beirut’ consists of eight short stories, introduced by writer and former editor for ‘Gay News’, Peter Burton. These stories draw partly on Maugham’s time in North Africa during the Second World War and had all previously been published in the UK. The volume closes with Burton’s long interview with Maugham, first published in ‘Gay Sunshine’ magazine in the Summer/Fall edition, 1977 (no. 33/34).