Items

• A thirsty evil : seven short stories
  Gore Vidal (1925-2012) was a writer of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and screenplays, on a diverse range of subjects, published across many decades. Some of Vidal’s works centre on gay characters or themes, including some of the tales featured in this collection of seven stories. This edition, which was seized in the raids, was published by Gay Sunshine Press, although it is a reprint of the 1956 first edition published by Zero Press. Additionally, some of the stories had originally been published in magazines. Readers, therefore, had twenty-five years of access to this book’s contents prior to the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids. The front cover shows an illustration by Joe Fuoco.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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’.
• Feminism in the 80's : facing down the right
  A Defend Gay’s the Word briefing document about the seized titles lists a book called ‘Feminism in the 80s’ but with no other identifying features. It is possible, but not certain, that the title is that of a series including two works authored by Charlotte Bunch (1944-) and published in the years preceding the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids – ‘Facing Down the Right’ (1981), shown here, and ‘Going Public With our Vision’ (1983). These pamphlet publications are based on speeches given by Bunch who was a member of the Washington-based lesbian feminist group The Furies. Bunch was also a writer, journal editor, and active in education, and is now a professor at Rutgers University, focussing on feminism, women’s rights and violence against women.
• 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.
• Human warmth : & other stories
  Twelve short stories featuring gay and lesbian characters, which strive for “some kind of universality, even when dealing with very specific homosexual content”, according to the author’s preface. Daniel Curzon (1938-) is a former journalist for publications such as ‘Gay News’, and a now-retired professor of English. In the mid-1970s, Curzon edited and published ‘Gay Literature – A New Journal’, a literary quarterly which folded after eighteen months. Following ‘Something You Do in the Dark’ (Putnam’s,1971), dubbed the “first gay protest novel”, Curzon wrote (and sometimes self-published) several other short story collections, novels, plays, poems and humorous titles, including ‘The Joyful Blue Book of Gracious Gay Etiquette’. His novel ‘From Violent Men’ 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.
• Now let's talk about music
  Riding high on his wildly popular Peter and Charlie trilogy (also seized by Customs), Gordon Merrick (1916-1988) continued to publish paperback romances with Avon into the 1980s. ‘Now Let’s Talk About Music’ gave Merrick’s fans more of what they wanted – exotic locations (Thailand, a yacht off the coast of Sri Lanka), rich, beautiful gay men, steamy sex scenes and page-turning drama. “Another winner from the gay Harold Robbins” proclaimed a reviewer for ‘Gay News’ in December 1982. As with several other Merrick titles published by Avon, the cover art is by Victor Gadino, a noted illustrator of romance and erotica.
• Shock value
  This first book from John Waters (1946-) is a memoir of his early filmmaking years from his childhood puppet shows to his 1977 feature film ‘Desperate Living’. As a gay man with a deep and abiding love for both low- and highbrow cinema, his films feature over-the-top LGBTQ+ characters (and actors) and set out to shake up the status quo and shock his audience. As Waters explains in the book’s introduction, “to me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about”. The memoir is illustrated with film stills and photographs of Waters and his friends and associates, including Divine (1945-1988), the actor and drag queen who featured in several Waters films.
• Surpassing the love of men : romantic friendship and love between women from the Renaissance to the present
  Academic Lillian Faderman (1940-) uses literary and documentary sources to present a history of romantic love between women, one of the first comprehensive studies of its kind. Following initial research on poet Emily Dickinson’s love letters to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, Faderman expanded her scope to consider a period of five hundred years and the lives of many women (including those featured in the ‘Scotch Verdict’ case explored in another Faderman work seized during the raids). The book describes how societal attitudes to love between women moved from tolerance (albeit not to women who dressed as men), to prejudice and eventually, to liberatory lesbian feminism. The book, dedicated to Faderman’s partner Phyllis Irwin, is shown here in the UK edition, although it is likely to have been the US William Morrow edition that was seized from Gay’s the Word.
• The boy who picked the bullets up
  Charles Nelson (1942-2003) served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and claimed that some of this novel was autobiographical. The story follows medic Kurt Strom during a year he spent stationed in Vietnam. Strom’s experiences as a gay Marine are relayed via letters he sends home to his family and friends. One reviewer described the novel as containing “endless humour and devastating realism”, while the gay perspective was praised for presenting “decidedly different” insights on war. The novel’s title is taken from the poem of the same name by Arthur Rimbaud. Published by William Morrow, the book’s dust jacket shows a soldier’s trousered backside, with a blue bandana in the left pocket, alluding to ‘flagging’, a coded means of expressing sexual preferences.
• Treasures of the night : the collected poems
  A collection of six long poems by Jean Genet (1910-1986), first published between 1942 and 1948. They are presented here in a bilingual French/English version for the first time by translator Steven Finch, with the authorisation of Jean Genet and publisher, Éditions Gallimard. The French original occupies the verso (left hand side) and the English is printed on the recto (right hand side) in a facing page layout. Finch describes Genet’s poems as “a rich contribution to the expression of the gay movement and spirit”. This edition also includes the cover artwork of the rare first edition of Genet’s ‘Poèmes’, published by L’Arbalète in 1948, as well as striking, graphic black-and-white drawings by Bill Sullivan.
• Treasures on earth : a novel
  This novel is a fictionalised depiction of a real expedition to Machu Picchu in Peru which was undertaken by Hiram Bingham in 1911. Running parallel to the main narrative is the story of the trip’s photographer, Willie Hickler, who discovers his sexuality when he falls in love with the expedition’s Peruvian assistant, Ernesto. Author Carter Wilson (1942?-), who later became an academic and Professor of Community Studies, described this book as “my coming-out novel”. The book was published by the well-established Knopf imprint and received good reviews, including from Christopher Isherwood who compared it to E. M. Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.
• Tricks : 25 encounters
  “Homosexuality”, Renaud Camus (1946-) reminds the reader of ‘Tricks’ in his foreword, “has a history, and of course, a geography”. These stories of sexual encounter, translated by distinguished gay poet Richard Howard (1929-2022), move from late 1970s Paris to Milan to the United States. In the preface, literary theorist Roland Barthes notes these short narratives’ simplicity, their repetitive nature, and also their status as literature rather than pornography. Each begins with a name and a date, before detailing a sexual liaison between Camus and a man he has never met before. Each ends with a note on their subsequent relationship (if any). Previously a columnist for ‘Gai Pied’ and a socialist, Camus is now a conspiracy theorist and white nationalist, who developed the far-right ‘Great Replacement’ theory.
• Who was that masked woman?
  Bertha Harris, co-author of ‘The Joy of Lesbian Sex’, described this coming-of-age novel as “an authentic slice of lesbian Americana”. The novel follows young lesbian Tretona Getroek, from her childhood on a farm amidst religious Revival meetings, through to university and travels that take her to Turkey and England. She also explores her sexuality while combatting the prejudices of the church, education and psychiatric establishments. Tretona is the masked woman of the title, hiding her identity. Noretta Koertge (1935-) wrote a sequel to this novel, 1984’s ‘Valley of the Amazons’, and was part of the Daughters, Inc. publishing collective. She is currently Emeritus Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at Indiana University.
• Witches heal : lesbian herbal self-sufficiency
  Billie Potts (1940-2013) was one third of Elf and Dragons, self-described “lesbian witches”, who were a Woodstock-based women’s land collective, a publisher, distributor of herbs and part of a wider feminist spirituality movement. Women’s rural collectives were common in the USA at this time. Potts’s book is a guide to herbalism and an “access tool”, promoting self-sufficiency and encouraging lesbian women to reclaim their role as healers. The book proved controversial as its publication coincided with an acrimonious split within Elf and Dragons. Susun R. Weed accused Potts of using her work uncredited and asked feminist bookshops not to stock the book. The ‘Operation Tiger’ raids were not, therefore, the first attempts to restrict this book.
• Women and fiction : feminism and the novel, 1880-1920
  First published in 1979, this academic monograph was reissued as a Methuen University Paperback in 1981. Somewhat enigmatically referred to in Gay’s the Word’s list of seized books as ‘Women fiction’, it is one of the more unexpected items to be confiscated by Customs, who seized four copies in October 1984. Patricia Stubbs discusses the relationship between literary depictions of women and the roles and possibilities available to them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the copy on display here demonstrates, the book was also available in academic libraries. This is Senate House Library’s own copy and has been heavily marked up by studious readers.