Items

• 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’.
• 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.
• 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’.