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• Counter play
  A high school football novel about friends Brad and Alex, one straight, one gay. Alex’s sexuality is revealed in the first few pages, but remains central to the plot, as Brad is forced to choose between his friend and his wider community. Anne Snyder (1922-2001) wrote seventeen books, mainly young adult ‘problem novels’ which explored issues such as alcoholism, homelessness and anorexia. She collaborated with Louis Pelletier on several titles. Originally marketed as an adult novel, ‘Counter Play’ was republished in 1987 as ‘The Truth about Alex’ and was adapted into a television movie of the same name, broadcast by HBO. Teen heartthrob Scott Baio (Chachi from ‘Happy Days’) played the character of Brad.
• Fox Running : a novel
  The fourth novel for teenagers by R.R. Knudson (1932-2008), again with a sporting theme (‘You Are the Rain’, about a doomed canoe trip, was another of the books seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). Fox Running is a Mescalero Apache girl in her late teens, coached by young former Olympian Kathy ‘Sudden’ Hart. To research the novel, Knudson spent time at the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico and with an athletics track team at the University of Arizona. ‘Fox Running’ was first published by Harper & Row in 1975 before being reprinted by Avon in 1977 and as an Avon Flare paperback in 1981. The inside illustrations are by Ilse Koehn and are reproduced from the Harper & Row edition.
• The front runner
  After the Stonewall Uprising, many mainstream publishers realised they could have commercial success with gay fiction. ‘The Front Runner’ was the first bestselling novel of this era, selling millions of copies when first published in 1974 by William Morrow. The story concerns Billy Sive, a young, gay athlete training for the 1976 Olympics, and his relationship with his older sports coach. Patricia Nell Warren (1936-2019), who was also an athlete, considered the novel’s publication to be a step in her own coming-out process. Latterly, Warren self-published lesbian fiction under the Wildcat Press imprint, fought online censorship laws and was one of the initial fifty nominees for the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor in New York City. The edition seized was probably the 1975 Bantam Books paperback rather than the one on display here.
• You are the rain : a novel
  When a hurricane strikes an all-girl canoe trip in the Florida Everglades, athletic Crash and introvert June become separated from the group and must depend on each other to survive. The novel is described as being “Of lesbian interest” in the 1975-76 catalogue of women’s bookstore First Things First, although the relationship is implied rather than overt. The novel is endorsed on the back cover by lesbian poet Adrienne Rich, with several references to the poetry of Emily Dickinson throughout. The title is taken from a May Swenson poem – “I will be earth you be the flower / You have found my root you are the rain”. Swenson and R.R. Knudson (1932-2008) were lovers in the mid-1960s. They collaborated on the collection ‘American Sports Poems’ (1988), and Knudson was Swenson’s literary executor on her death in 1989.