Items

• A brother's touch
  Angus Rivers, a young Vietnam veteran from upstate New York, ventures to the city to discover the truth about his teenage brother’s death. Earl, a gay sex worker, has been found dead of a heroin overdose on the West Side piers (a notorious cruising ground), his body “stuffed into a rusty oil drum”. This mass-market crime paperback depicts the New York gay scene as a sleazy underworld of addicts, hustlers, self-serving politicians and corrupt priests. But it also introduces gay politics and campaigning, through the activities of the ‘GLP’ or Gay Liberation Party. Positively reviewed in the ‘New York Times’ on publication, Owen Levy’s debut went on to sell very well. His second novel, ‘Goodbye Heiko, Goodbye Berlin’, was published in 2015.
• A comfortable corner
  Set in 1980s New York, this second novel by Vincent Virga (1942-) deals with the issue of alcoholism within the gay community and how it affects couple Terence and Christopher. Reviews of the novel acknowledged the importance of the theme, but noted it was presented in a florid style, described by one reviewer as “‘purple’ (lavender?) prose”. The novel is dedicated to the memory of American artist, Jackson Pollock, who suffered from alcoholism. The book was published in a mass market edition by Avon Books, publishers of Virga’s first novel, ‘Gaywyck’, which was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’.
• Adonis García : a picaresque novel
  Set in Mexico City’s Roma district, home to students, bohemians, the marginalised and impoverished, this radical experimental novel by Luis Zapata (1951-2020) follows Adonis García as he makes his “shameless and impudent” way through life, as José Joaquin Blanco puts it in the introduction to this edition. Refusing convention in both content and form, Zapata’s eponymous Adonis sets out his sexually adventurous story as if transcribed from a set of tapes, in a freewheeling, verbatim style which makes bold use of white space. The novel was first published in Mexico in 1979 by Editorial Grijalbo as ‘Las Aventuras, Desventuras y Sueños de Adonis García, El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma’. Translator E.A. Lacey (1938-1995) was also a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall generation.
• An idol for others
  Biographer Joseph M. Ortiz claims that Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) “was the most commercially successful writer of gay novels in the twentieth century”. After a moderately successful career as a literary post-war novelist in the 1940s and 1950s, published by important trade presses, it was as the author of paperback gay romance novels, with sex featuring heavily, that Merrick gained success. This novel focusses on theatre producer Walter Makin, an apparently happily married father, who also has gay relationships. The back cover of this paperback outlines the roles played by each of the characters and makes clear that incest is a feature of this novel (Jerry, one of Walter’s lovers, is also his illegitimate son). One reviewer described the novel’s unhappy ending as a return to the 1950s, when gay characters were rarely shown living fulfilled lives.
• Annie on my mind
  One of the first lesbian young adult novels with an unequivocally happy ending, this is the semi-autobiographical story of Liza and Annie, two teenage girls who fall in love before their relationship is discovered by the school secretary. Nancy Garden (1938-2014), who received an award for lifetime achievement in young adult literature in 2003, met her partner, Sandy, at high school in the 1950s. They remained together until Garden’s death. In 1993, copies of ‘Annie on My Mind’, which had been donated to high schools by an LGBT advocacy organisation, were burned in Kansas City. Following a lawsuit and trial, the book was returned to libraries in 1999. Now considered a classic, it has never been out of print. Garden disliked this cover artwork, preferring the 1992 edition which showed “the two girls really relating to each other equally”.
• Aphrodisiac : fiction from Christopher Street
  This anthology of “the best fiction from Christopher Street” was praised for its “literary excellence” by ‘Publishers Weekly’. It compiles eighteen short stories published in “America’s leading gay magazine”, from authors including Jane Rule, Edmund White, Tennessee Williams and Kate Millett. The magazine, named after the location of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, was founded in 1976 and published monthly until the mid-1990s. As well as original fiction, it featured writing on gay politics and culture, interviews and satirical cartoons. A series of essays about the unfolding AIDS crisis in New York by Andrew Holleran – one of the featured authors in this collection – was later published as ‘Ground Zero’.
• Black men/white men : a gay anthology
  A collection of forty poems, short fiction and non-fiction pieces which explore the intersections of race and sexuality “from the most scholarly to the most explicit”, by authors such as Langston Hughes, Eric Garber and Bruce Nugent. Contributions on sexual stereotyping, discrimination and anti-Black racism within the white gay community are interspersed with several high-quality monochrome photographs and drawings of gay men, both Black and white, pictured separately and in couples. Editor Michael J. Smith founded the advocacy organisation Black and White Men Together in 1980. Chapters sprung up in cities across the United States – there was even, briefly, a Dalston-Hackney branch in London – and the organisation continues today. Smith died of AIDS in 1989 aged 45.
• Bodies and souls : a novel
  Born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican parents, John Rechy’s (1931-) first novel, ‘City of Night’, was published in 1963 and became a bestseller. Twenty years later, ‘Bodies and Souls’ was published by Carroll & Graf. Written in the style of a classic Hollywood film, the novel is set in Los Angeles and follows a range of characters including porn stars, punks, strippers, television reporters and an evangelist. In addition to his own literary career, Rechy taught creative writing and was also a sex worker. Many of Rechy’s experiences informed his fiction.
• Bom-Crioulo : the Black man and the cabin boy
  Brazilian novelist Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897) wrote in the Romantic Naturalist tradition. His work, “polemic, provocative, misunderstood”, according to Raul de Sá Barbosa, who introduces this edition, was largely overlooked in conservative Brazil until it began to be revived in the early 1980s. ‘Bom-Crioulo’, which roughly translates as ‘the Good Black Man’, was first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1895, the same year as Oscar Wilde’s trial and just seven years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. It depicts, frankly and without moralising, the relationship between a formerly enslaved Black man and a fifteen-year-old white cabin boy. E.A. Lacey, a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall era, who translated ‘Bom-Crioulo’ from Portuguese, also translated Luis Zapata’s ‘Adonis García’ (another seized book) from Spanish.
• Burning : a novel
  Jane Chambers (1937-1983) was an award-winning poet, screenwriter and playwright, who broke new ground by bringing happy, well-adjusted lesbian characters to the stage in plays such as ‘Last Summer at Bluefish Cove’. In ‘Burning’, Cynthia and Angela are on holiday in a New England farmhouse when they are possessed by the spirits of two women persecuted for their love some two hundred years earlier. ‘Burning’, Chambers’s first novel, was originally published by Jove in 1978 before being published by JH Press, one of the Gay Presses of New York. In 1981, Chambers received a Human Fund for Dignity Award with Harvey Fierstein (actor and writer of ‘Torch Song Trilogy’, also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). In the same year, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and died two years later. Since 1984, the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award has been offered in her name.
• Burton and Speke
  A historical novel of colonial East Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke drink gin, hunt big game and search for the source of the Nile. Burton is depicted as possibly closeted, Speke as probably gay, but the novel’s racist and imperialist overtones are all too blatant (note the unpleasant reference to “primitive Africa” in the inside book-jacket blurb). There is in addition a deeply misogynistic streak running through the book, including an episode featuring Female Genital Mutilation. The seventh novel from William Harrison (1933-2013), it was received positively by contemporary reviewers, one crediting Harrison with “uncovering a part of lost gay history”. Unusually for the time, ‘Burton and Speke’ was not aimed at a distinctly ‘gay market’. Harrison, who was himself heterosexual, also wrote short stories, nonfiction and screenplays, including for the adaption of this book as ‘Mountains of the Moon’ (1990).
• Coming out
  This novel tells the story of middle-aged divorcee Roger Thornton, and his new life as an out gay man residing in New York, in a relationship with the younger and more extrovert Michael. In addition to this central relationship, the novel features characters from the wider LGBT community including a lesbian couple and Lola, who we would now recognise as a trans woman. The book’s design is reminiscent of a pulp novel, complete with yellow edges. The blurb contains the word “sensitive” which was often used by publishers in the earlier half of the twentieth century to allude to gay men. Wallace Hamilton (1919?-1983) also wrote non-fiction and plays and was a contributor to the ‘New York Native’ paper. Like his character Roger, he was married and came out when he was middle-aged.
• Cry to heaven
  ‘Cry to Heaven’ is a historical novel set in the world of eighteenth-century Italian opera. It follows castrato singer Guido Maffeo and his star student, the young Venetian nobleman Tonio Treschi, as they navigate same-sex love affairs, incestuous seductions and melodrama both on and off-stage. Anne Rice (1941-2021) was a prolific writer of gothic, erotic, and Christian fiction, perhaps best known for her 1976 debut, ‘Interview with the Vampire’, which was adapted into a feature film in 1994. ‘The Sleeping Beauty Quartet’, written under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, explored sadomasochism and a range of sexualities and sexual practices. Rice has commented that “From the beginning, [...] gay readers [...] felt that my works involved a sustained gay allegory [...] I didn't set out to do that, but that was what they perceived.”
• Death claims
  Following ‘Fadeout’ (1970), this is the second book in Joseph Hansen’s Brandstetter series, featuring gay private investigator David ‘Dave’ Brandstetter. Set in Los Angeles, it moves through the worlds of rare books, community theatre and television. Hansen eventually published twelve books in the series and can be credited with inventing the ‘gay detective’ genre. Gay themes are woven throughout – in book nine, Brandstetter must track down a serial killer who is targeting gay men with AIDS. Hansen, born in 1923, was also a poet and journalist. Under the pen name James Colton, he published several gay novels in the pre-Stonewall era, including ‘Strange Marriage’ (1965) and ‘Known Homosexual’ (1968). He received a Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992, writing several more books before his death in 2004.
• Death trick
  Written by journalist and author Richard Lipez (1938-2022), using the name Stevenson, this is the first novel in a series of sixteen to feature the private investigator, Donald Strachey. The story follows Strachey as he investigates a murder in Albany, New York, where the victim and prime suspect are both gay men. Strachey is also gay so can explore the otherwise closed ranks of the gay community. The back cover blurb includes a quote from author Armistead Maupin which makes the perhaps unavoidable comment, “At last a private dick who really earns the title”. Some other books in the Donald Strachey series were filmed for television. Stevenson’s series is often considered alongside books by Joseph Hansen featuring gay detective Dave Brandstetter, who first appeared in print in 1970. One of these books, ‘Death Claims’, was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’.
• 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.”
• Enemy : a novel
  First published in the UK in 1981 as ‘The Deserters’, ‘Enemy’ was based initially on Robin Maugham’s play of the same name, which premiered in Guildford in 1969 before transferring to London. Maugham (1916-1981), the nephew of the novelist W. Somerset Maugham, drew on his experience in the Sahara during the Second World War for this tale of two soldiers, one British and one German, who stumble across each other in the desert. Maugham depicts a friendship that crosses boundaries of class, sexuality and nationality. Supported by Peter Burton, who edited Maugham’s short-story collection ‘The Boy from Beirut’, another of the books seized in ‘Operation Tiger’, ‘Enemy’ was the last book Maugham published before he died.
• Forth into light
  Impossibly handsome lovers Peter Martin and Charlie Mills continue to work out their complicated romance. Peter, Charlie and sometime heterosexual love interest Martha – the Mills-Martins – are long-established in comfortable family life, complete with children (named Charlotte and Peter after their respective fathers), but newcomer Jeff still creates tension. This is the concluding part of the bestselling erotic trilogy by Gordon Merrick (1916-1988), following ‘The Lord Won’t Mind’ (1970) and ‘One for the Gods’ (1971), which were also seized in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. It is set on an island in the Aegean in the 1950s. Merrick himself had moved to the island of Hydra in 1960.
• 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.
• From violent men : a novel
  In 1978, gay politician Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in San Francisco by former city Supervisor Dan White. Daniel Curzon (1938-) self-published this loosely fictionalised version of the aftermath of these deaths through IGNA (or International Gay News Agency). He had experienced “a decade of frustration with publishing houses” over this and other works, according to a 1983 article in ‘Out’ magazine. This copy is inscribed by the author, “Give ‘em hell at Customs! Long live Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence and gay rights!”, and dated 27 February 1985. “D.H. Lawrence” is a reference to the ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ trial in 1960, when the amended Obscene Publications Act 1959 allowed for a work to be defended on the grounds of literary merit for the first time. Curzon’s short story collection ‘Human Warmth and Other Stories’ was also seized in ‘Operation Tiger’.
• Gay fiction journal. No. 47 : anthology of fiction/poetry/prose
  ‘Gay Sunshine’ was published, in tabloid newspaper format, between 1970 and 1982. The first issues focussed on radical gay politics and liberation, but when Winston Leyland (1940-) became editor in 1971, he included an emphasis on literature. Leyland made the decision to publish this issue, which became the final one, in book format, as it was less ephemeral and easier to preserve than a newspaper. The issue contains poetry, fiction and prose, most of it previously unpublished, including the first English translation of Paul Verlaine’s story ‘A Draw’. The book also features illustrations, and the cover is by Joe Fuoco, who also illustrated other seized books, Gore Vidal’s ‘A Thirsty Evil’ and Jim Everhard’s ‘Cute’.
• Gaywyck
  ‘Gaywyck’ was the first novel by New York writer and photo editor Vincent Virga (1942-). The first edition of the book, the one seized during ‘Operation Tiger’, was published in 1980 by Avon and advertised with a quote from ‘New York Magazine’ stating it was the “first gay gothic” novel. As a fan of gothic romance – the title is a play on Anya Seton’s 1944 gothic novel, ‘Dragonwyck’ – Virga wrote the novel with gay characters “to show that genres know no gender”. Set in the nineteenth century at Gaywyck, a Long Island estate owned by the Gaylord family, the story follows Robert Whyte, who is employed to catalogue the library, and his relationship with Donaugh Gaylord. Dark family secrets are revealed, but the story ends happily for the couple. Virga’s second book, ‘A Comfortable Corner’, was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’.
• Happy endings are all alike
  Uncompromisingly frank from its opening line, Sandra Scoppettone’s (1936-) depiction of the love affair between teenage girls Jaret and Peggy was a much-needed riposte to 1950s lesbian pulp, such as the novels of Ann Bannon and Vin Packer. As one reviewer put it, “The story 1) is not preachy, 2) does not kill off either girl in the end, 3) is not syrupy”. The ground-breaking ‘Happy Endings Are All Alike’, chosen as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, was first published by Harper & Row in 1978, preceding Nancy Garden’s ‘Annie on My Mind’ by four years. Scoppettone is known also for her crime-writing, as a playwright and for her collaboration with Louise Fitzhugh (author of ‘Harriet the Spy’) on the 1961 picture book ‘Suzuki Beane’, a counterculture parody of the ‘Eloise’ books set in Greenwich Village.
• Independence day
  “What does it mean when you fall in love with your best friend?”, asks the cover of this coming-of-age story, which depicts identically clad high-school students Mike and Todd. Mike decides to tell Todd how he feels about him on 4 July – Independence Day in the US – and although Todd does not feel the same, this proto-Young Adult novel models understanding and acceptance. By its close, Mike has “dated several guys” in college and is taking a course “to become a counselor to gay kids”. B.A. Ecker includes a reference to another of the books erroneously seized in ‘Operation Tiger’, Patricia Nell Warren’s ‘The Front Runner’ (1974), which Mike “really found some comfort reading”. ‘Independence Day’ appears to be Ecker’s only published work.
• Moritz! : a comic novel
  A review of this novel described it as “a trashy book” but one that was nonetheless enjoyable thanks to its absurdist and silly humour. This satirical novel follows Jellico Moritz, a “well-endowed” young man, who travels from rural America to a new life and sexual awakening in New York City. The final chapter, entitled ‘Moritz Goes to a Garden Party’, was first published in ‘A True Likeness’ which was edited by Felice Picano. The book was published by Larry Mitchell’s Calamus Books which was one third of the Gay Presses of New York collective.