Items

• 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.
• 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’.
• 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.