Paperback Originals and the Origins of Contemporary Gay Literature
Novels known collectively as “out gay pulp”—paperback originals published with accelerating frequency in the 1960s—have received increasing attention, from popular collections like John Preston’s Flesh and the Word, Michael Bronski’s Pulp Friction and Susan Stryker’s Queer Pulp to the circulation of pulp covers in postcards, address books, and posters. Scholarly attention to this phenomenon has been more sporadic; an excellent bibliography by Tom Norman, essays by David Bergman and John Howard, and those by the various contributors to The Golden Age of Gay Fiction haven’t yet spurred a deeper, more engaged critical interest. Sixties paperback originals have been seen as quirky cultural anomalies or even insignificant pornographic outpouring rather than a significant literary and cultural intervention.
This collection invites a broad range of investigations of Sixties gay paperback originals. We seek essays about writers like Victor J. Banis (Don Holliday), Carl Corley, Christian Davies (Chris Davidson), George Davies (Lance Lester, Clay Caldwell, Ricardo Armory), Jan Ewing (Jack Evans), Richard Fullmer (Dirk Vanden), Dean T. Goodman (Douglas Dean), “Jay Greene,” George Haimshohn (Alexander Goodman), Joseph Hansen (James Colton or James Coulton), Peter Tuesday Hughes, William J. Lambert III, Vincent Lardo (Julian Mark), Richard Love (Richard Armory), “Michael Scott,” Samuel M. Steward (Phil Andros), Larry Townsend. We are also interested in studies of paperback publishers and editors, adult bookstores, and Sixties gay readers and reading practices. We welcome investigations into other questions as well: What publishers and writers preceded Sixties paperback originals? What connections are there between gay pulp and lesbian pulp? What connections were there between “hardback” writers and paperback writers? What long-term effects—literary, political, and cultural—did these books have on gay liberation literature and the canonization of gay literature?
Please send 500-word abstracts or 25-30 page articles by February 15, 2011 to Jaime Harker, Associate Professor of English, University of Mississippi (jlharker@olemiss.edu) and Drewey Wayne Gunn, Professor Emeritus, Texas A&M University-Kingsville (sleuthhound@sbcglobal.net). Final essays are due by June 15, 2011.
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