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’.
• A family matter : a parents' guide to homosexuality
  Psychologist Charles Silverstein (1935-2023) was a writer and pioneering advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. His presentation to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) contributed to the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness from the APA’s ‘DSM’ (the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’) in 1974. Three years later, he published his first book, ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’, co-authored with Edmund White – another ‘Operation Tiger’ seized title – and, in the same year, ‘A Family Matter’. While ‘The Joy of Gay Sex’ focused on a community of men who have sex with men, ‘A Family Matter’ is a contribution to the genre of books intended to help parents of lesbian and gay children “come to terms with their own feelings about homosexuality”. In a briefing document about the seized titles, the Defend Gay’s the Word Campaign noted that the book was “Dedicated to his ma and pa!!”
• 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.
• And God bless Uncle Harry and his roommate Jack : who we're not supposed to talk about : cartoons from Christopher Street
  ‘Christopher Street’, named after the New York location of the Stonewall Inn, was a gay magazine which ran for almost twenty years. Founded in 1976 by Charles Ortleb (1950?-) and co-publisher Dorianne Beyer, the magazine published fiction and non-fiction and aimed to be a “cultural forum”. The magazine also prided itself on its satirical cartoons, a selection of which are collected in this book, published by mass market imprint Avon Books. The cartoons were often presented in a sophisticated style similar to the noted ‘New Yorker’ magazine. The titular cartoon, which is featured on the front cover, is by TABBAT, while several cartoons were drawn by the magazine's art director, Rick Fiala, using a range of pseudonyms.
• 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”.
• Autobiography in search of a father. Mother bound
  Jill Johnston (1929-2010) was a critic, journalist, feminist and leader of the lesbian-separatist movement in the 1970s. Before publishing perhaps her best-known work, ‘Lesbian Nation - The Feminist Solution’ in 1973, Johnston wrote on dance for the ‘Village Voice’ newspaper, and was the first of its columnists to come out in print. ‘Mother Bound’ details her complicated family relationships and narrates her life up to 1965. Characterised as “readably rambling, pseudo-psychological ponderings” by one somewhat withering reviewer, though notably less experimental in form than her later criticism, ‘Mother Bound’ was followed by a second volume of autobiography, ‘Paper Daughter’, in 1985.
• Body parts : a woman looks at men's
  A Defend Gay’s the Word briefing document about the seized titles lists a book called ‘Body Parts’. Its author and publisher are unclear. The book presented here is a candidate for the correct book, but we cannot be sure. Actress and photographer Christie Jenkins, who was initially inspired by the bodies of male ice-skaters (some of whom are spotlighted in the book) presents here a selection of black-and-white photographs of men. The photographic models are named, and feature in sections focussing on specific body parts, including the subtly described ‘Middle Part’. Some images are published with just a question mark, and readers are invited to guess who is featured. The cover model is Leland (Lee) Nicholl, Jenkins’s ideal of “the perfectly built male”.
• 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).
• Circles on the water : selected poems of Marge Piercy
  Marge Piercy (1936-) is perhaps best known for her speculative feminist tale ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ (1976), although she has authored many other novels, short stories and poems. This book collects in one volume 150 of Piercy’s poems from seven titles published between 1963 and 1982. As a result of the twenty-year span, the poems reflect Piercy’s developing ideas and changing themes including her involvement in the USA activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), her enjoyment of growing fruit and vegetables in Cape Cod, her involvement in second-wave feminism and her Tarot poems. The book has been continuously in print ever since its first publication by Alfred A. Knopf.
• 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.
• 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.
• Cross sections from a decade of change
  Elizabeth Janeway (1913-2005) was a novelist, pro-abortion campaigner and prominent second-wave feminist. In this book, which has minimal LGBTQ+ content, Janeway discusses the process of social change regarding women’s personal and public lives and rights in sections entitled ‘History’, ‘Work’, ‘Sexuality’, ‘Literature’ and ‘Dailyness’ (which she describes as “the homely details of ordinary life”). Published in 1983, the book is an unillustrated collection of Janeway’s writings, including essays and reviews, with one piece – a review of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel ‘Lolita’ – dating from 1958. A book named ‘Cross Sections’ was listed, minus author and publisher, in a Defend Gay’s the Word briefing document about the seized titles. It is likely it was this book.
• 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’.
• Facing up
  Featuring on the front cover a shadowy photograph of a man in silhouette and only four words, it is not until opening the book that the title and full author name are apparent, and it becomes clear that this is a photography book. The photographer, Arthur Tress (1940-), is described by Yves Navarre in the book’s introduction as a “prowler, voyeur, trickster, devourer, lover of his city and its life”. The backdrop to the sixty-five black-and-white photographs is New York, depicted predominantly as a place of urban decay. Juxtaposed with the cityscapes are (mainly) naked men posed in positions and with objects that explore ideas of male sexuality and power, dreams and the subconscious. Still producing work, Tress was recently described as “one of the most innovative American photographers of the postwar era”.
• 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.
• Forty-deuce : a play
  This dark play was first performed Off Off-Broadway in 1981 and gave Kevin Bacon (seen here on the cover) an early, award-winning role. The play’s title is a riff on both the tennis score and a junction at New York's 42nd Street known as ‘the Deuce’, where sex shops, porn cinemas and peep shows were clustered. The play, by Alan Bowne (1945-1989), depicts the death and exploitation of a young boy alongside a critique of commodity culture and was published by Felice Picano’s Sea Horse Press. Sea Horse Press was one of the Gay Presses of New York collective, which worked to increase the visibility of gay books.
• 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.
• Gay Theatre Alliance directory of gay plays
  This book was the first to list plays where gay men and lesbians are the “main, primary, or at least, very important focus”. As part of the criteria for including a play, the key emphasis was on the sexuality of the characters not the playwright, so works authored by straight writers are listed. The four hundred plays are organised alphabetically by title, alongside information such as number of male and female characters and date of first performance. The appendixes list '“Lost” Plays’ and names of gay theatre companies. Terry Helbing (1951-1994) was co-founder of the Gay Theatre Alliance, which supported and promoted gay theatre, and the book is published by his JH Press, which was one third of the Gay Presses of New York. He died from AIDS in 1994.
• 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.
• If this isn't love! : (two men--twenty years--in three acts)
  Part of the ‘JH Press Gay Play Script’ series, this was one of the most successful plays performed at The Glines, a not-for-profit gay theatre company in New York. Written by Sidney Morris (Fineberg) (1929-2002), the play follows couple Eric and Adam across three acts representing three decades of gay life and experience, entitled ‘The Fearful Fifties’, ‘The Seeking Sixties’, and ‘The Succulent Seventies’. As the men age, they respond to increasing societal liberation and changes in their own relationship. Morris, whose own youth was in the 1950s, wanted to ensure that the gay community did “not forget our dark and absurd past”. Morris wrote a number of other plays with gay male themes. Terry Helbing from JH Press, the play’s publisher, was also the general manager of the play’s first run. Morris died from AIDS in 2002.
• 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.