Camp Art of Gay Pulps

“Twisted!” “Warped!” “Evil!” “Shocking!” “Perverted!” “Tormented!” Early 1960s gay pulp publishers rarely minced words when enticing readers to snap up their racy, erotic tomes exposing the “shadow world” of the “twilight sex.” The risque cover art, with provocative images of buff physique models and limpwristed fairies, captured the manic, repressed spirit of the era before pornography was legalized and the Sexual Revolution exploded. It’s that camp pop art look — sort of Roy Lichtenstein meets George Quaintance — that makes them immensely popular and increasingly valuable collector’s items today.

Literary worth was beside the point. These throw away tomes were “one-handers” — books to be read in bed or on the john. The style was a lavender shade of purple, overstuffed with throbbing euphemisms and penetrating double-entendres. And the plots were as predictable and tawdry as the graffiti one finds scrawled on the walls in a high school boys room. And yet today some of these trashy reads, including those by Phil Andros (the alias of Samuel Steward) and James Colton (the pseudonym of noted mystery writer Joseph Hansen) are considered underground masterpieces and have found new homes in America’s rare book archives and university collections.

The first time I laid eyes on a gay pulp was at an Army/Navy surplus store in Spanish Harlem in New York City. I was 15 and my mother had taken me there to buy a pair of sailor’s button-down pants which were every teen’s fantasy back then. As we were leaving, I spied a paperback novel nearly hidden under a pile of vintage postcards and old comic books in a box by the door. The title caught my eye: Pretty Boy by Jay Greene. And the photo on the cover of a husky Polynesian lad in a loincloth made my heart race. When my mother stepped outside to hail a cab, I grabbed the book and asked the man at the counter how much it cost. One dollar, he said. I quickly forked over a buck, stashed Pretty Boy in my pocket and didn’t mention it to Mom.

When I got home, I hid the paperback behind some others on my shelf. That night, I read it by flashlight in bed. Pretty Boy was pretty tame by most pulp standards. But I didn’t know that then. To me it was the Rosetta Stone; a whole lost civilization of exotic sensuality was deciphered and unlocked for me, albeit a distorted and neurotic one. The story concerned an idyllic island in the Pacific where nubile boys were indoctrinated in the joys of man-to-man love before they settled down in marriage. One day a ship loaded with sex-starved American sailors washes up, and the innocent lovemaking erupts into an orgy of violence and homophobic savagery. Jay Greene had a perverse genius for contrasting fantasies of gay utopia with the hypocrisy of civilized society. He wrote dozens of other pulps, each one more sensational than the last.

I bought them all, and branched out to other authors probing equally sensational themes. I became the keeper of the flame, combing junk shops, used bookstores, flea markets and antique malls. A homeless guy on Broadway sold them out of a suitcase with a snicker and a smile. And I stumbled upon a whole cache of them once at a YMCA tag sale. Eventually, in the ’80s, I graduated to serious catalog dealers Elysian Fields and Paths Untrodden, which sold them through the mail. With the advent of the internet, in particular eBay, my part-time passion has become an all-consuming obsession. I now touch base with collectors around the globe, trading pulps as if they were baseball cards or Hummel figurines. I have thousands, filling my bookshelves from floor to ceiling, spilling over into my closets and cupboards, a fruit salad of camp classics.

While collectors toss around the phrase “gay pulps” or “vintage sleaze” to describe the genre, there are different kinds of gay paperbacks. Back in the 40s and 50s, a few ground-breaking literary novels with homosexual themes appeared. Strange Brother by Blair Niles. The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland. Finistere by Fritz Peters. Gore Vidal’s The City and The Pillar. Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, penned several books which dealt with “sensitive” themes. His The Fall of Valor has a memorable cover of two hunks at the beach lighting each other’s cigarettes. McCaffery, by Charles Gorham, recounted the salacious tale of a cocky young fag-basher who becomes the kept boy of a queer millionaire.

As their popularity increased, these novels were reissued in paperback from mainstream pulp publishers like Avon, Dell and Ace, often with tantalizing covers that were far racier than their contents. Bud Clifton’s Muscle Boy, about the relationship between a humpy physique model and his photographer, is a highly sought after remnant of this pre-Stonewall era, with its beefcake cover and hints of sado-masochism. In 1960, Regency put out Ronn Marvin’s flamboyant expose of the dance world: Mr. Ballerina. Two years later, Wisdom House published All The Sad Young Men, whose tone of desperation and despair did little for the burgeoning gay liberation movement. Some early publishers, fearful of censorship, disguised their gay-themed books with bizarre female nude covers, such as So Sweet, So Soft, So Queer which dealt with a lusty stud who “soared into the ecstacy of love” with a drag queen.

By the mid ’60s, savvy publishers began to cater more openly to the out subculture, hiring struggling gay writers to churn out a flurry of campy titles. The most successful was The Song of The Loon, which Greenleaf brought out in 1966. It spawned countless imitations and led its author Richard Amory to concoct a trilogy, adding Song of Aaron and Listen While the Loon Sings. It was eventually made into a popular porn film.

For the next decade, gay pulps flourished. The titles often were more memorable than the stories themselves: His Sex, His Problem; The Killer Queens; Romeo & Romeo; Like Father, Like Son; Gay Like Me; Senator Swish; and Fruit Punch. A favorite of mine is The Man Inside Me, by who else — Jay Greene. The Man From C.A.M.P. series by Don Holliday combined clever titles with winning plot lines, spoofing James Bond flicks and sexy spy thrillers. Thirty years later, Austin Powers can’t hold a candle to this hilarious flamer.

Gay pulps carried on for the first half of the ’70s, with ever more explicit sex both inside and out, but lost out to the rise of uncensored smut, and the advent of video in the ’80s. Camp became a quaint vestige of a more closeted time. The off-color jokes of yesteryear seemed embarrassingly homophobic in a period when gays sought respect rather than tongue-in-cheek self-mockery. Like the screaming bitches in The Boys in the Band, they had become hopelessly passe. But for those of us who love a cheap laugh, gay pulps will never go out of style.

Note: This article originally appeared in Australia’s (Not Only) BLUE Magazine

Gods In The Backyard

Boys-next-door playing Cowboys and Indians with toy bows and arrows. Surfer dudes in posing straps dancing a hula. Macho men (in moccasins) caressing cacti in the desert. Anonymous Adonises, their backs turned away from us, facing the unknown, as cool as marble sculpture on pristine pedestals. Benign bodybuilders, girlfriends by their sides, dwarfing the garish trophies they cradle in their arms like newborn babies. Hard-bitten hustlers, fresh off their Harleys, holding court in cheap motels. Sun worshipers splayed out in the sand like supple sea lions, the ocean’s foam lapping at their finely polished limbs. Rodeo studs roping in their buddies, their tattoos glistening with hard-earned sweat.

Overwrought, kitschy, hilariously camp, the images of Bruce of Los Angeles are unforgettable — and irreplaceable. As time capsules of a more innocent era, they have aged extremely well. For all their quaint, and obviously self-conscious, humor, they remain aesthetic triumphs, of light and shadows, depth and symmetry. Just as Florenz Ziegfeld glorified the American Girl in his sumptuous and racy Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway at the beginning of the century, Bruce Harry Bellas, born in Alliance, Nebraska in 1909, transformed the American Male into a veritable work of art. (His name Bellas was an ironic misnomer since it connotes “beautiful girls” in Italian — that might have been an unconscious reason for dropping it.)

Having studied chemistry as a youth, before migrating to California in the 40s, Bruce turned his talented eye to photography, snapping candid pictures at bodybuilding events for Joe Weider’s fitness magazines Strength and Health, Muscle Power and Tomorrow’s Man. Weider was tapping into a surge of interest in the male physique after the Second World War, as the nation, flush with victory, idolized these icons of hyper- masculinity. Thousands of ex-soldiers, sailors and young single men migrated to southern California to find jobs, take a stab at the movies, or simply to bask in the glow of America’s new capital of fun in the sun.

Bruce nimbly captured the spirit of these times in his Weegee-like portraits of weightlifters at Muscle Beach. The photos are just as fascinating today for what they tell us about the crowds of wide-eyed young women and men who descended in droves each weekend to catch a glimpse of the supermen on display. Bruce had a pure, natural style that exposed the clean, wholesome appeal of the sport (although Muscle Beach would soon be closed down for attracting “undesirable elements.”) But Bruce also treated his subjects, from a distance, like objects of perfection, demigods on earth to be lusted after and catered to. He made stars of such popular fitness models as Ed Fury and the great Steve Reeves, who as Hercules in films, came to personify the mythic dimensions of bodybuilding.

Noted for his generosity and affable personality, Bruce became a popular photographer for the ever-growing number of homoerotic physique magazines — picture-driven revues filled with arty male nudes (or to be more accurate, semi-nudes, since federal regulations forbade any display of male genitalia being sent through the mails.) These risque rags (some were literally stapled together on dining room tables in the publishers’s homes) created a fanciful vocabulary of homoerotic imagery, transforming traditional gay icons: sailors, construction workers and leather studs into emblems of a healthy, free-wheeling new world order.

Capitalizing on his fame, Bruce founded his own magazine, The Male Figure, which set higher standards and introduced fans to young superstars like Joe Dallesandro who went on to greater notoriety in a rash of underground Andy Warhol films. Bruce also pioneered the use of color, creating images today that seem almost surreal in their use of vivid reds and blues and yellows. And he championed the use of black models as well as Asian-Americans at a time when racial equality was not yet a popular cause.

Bruce found a loophole in the restrictive postal laws by traveling across the country, selling nude photographs out of his suitcase to an ever-widening circle of customers. He was occasionally arrested for these “trunk shows,” but fortunately never had to serve time in jail. While many of these images, especially later as standards loosened further, featured men in acute states of arousal, there was never anything pornographic or sordid about Bruce’s work. That is one reason why his pictures are so highly coveted by collectors around the world. They are powerfully erotic without being the slightest bit vulgar. Bruce transformed what had been a sleazy underground business into a legitimate artistic enterprise, even if his loyal fans were focused on more pressing concerns than composition and classical rules of proportion.

There is a carefree elegance to Bruce’s spare, pristine images. Without the otherworldly glamour of a Hollywood photographer like Hurrell or the chic austerity of Horst, Bruce brought a homespun innocence to his art. Yet he imbued his discoveries with their own celebrity cachet. The images are deceptively simple. Few photographers can rival his deft use of props and scenery, or his knack at getting models to reflect a nobility they most likely lacked. These accomplishments are all the more remarkable considering that many of Bruce’s pictures were shot hurriedly in the garage of his suburban house, where he built a makeshift studio, or under intense conditions in the desert, without the benefit of a crew or stylist.

As with many lasting artists, whose reputations grow with time, Bruce suffered as tastes changed. By the 70s, after pornography became prevalent and openly sold through the mail, Bruce found his reputation diminishing and his income plummeting. His health failed him, too. A diabetic, he died of a heart attack in 1974 while on the road in Canada. He was traveling with his live-in companion, one of his favorite models. But Bruce of Los Angeles left behind a remarkable legacy that encapsulates a unique period in American history just as it evokes themes from the Classical Age. While he never achieved the recognition or respect he certainly would have working today, Bruce of Los Angeles left his mark in the style of many contemporary fashion photographers like Ken Haak, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber and artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Duane Michaels. With a smile and perhaps a twinge of desire, we gaze at his colorful cast of characters, and marvel at his uncanny gift for glorifying the American male.

(This month, I have been hosting my annual High Style sale at Brooks Books Etc on eBay. It is a celebration of all things glamorous and chic, focusing on books relating to the Beautiful People, High Society and American aristocracy: the Vanderbilts, Astors and Whitneys. Such divas of elegance as Diana Vreeland, Millicent Rogers and Slim Keith. I’ve also included a batch of tomes on interior design and architecture, offering works by Billy Baldwin, Elsie de Wolfe and Dorothy Draper (all sold by now, alas). I met Billy Baldwin back in the 70s while staying in Key West. I invited him and his friend Michael Jardine to dinner back at my guest house. I nearly killed them both with a jambalaya I concocted that was so heavily spiced, they had to leave the table and lie down upstairs in my bedroom. You can’t help but laugh about such things in hindsight.

Another of those stylish figures that I got to know back when was Mark Hampton, the legendary interior decorator. I wrote the following article about him in March 1988 for Quest magazine. It was an early piece for me and admittedly not one of my best. But I guess he didn’t mind it too much since he agreed to pose for the cover of another issue of Quest a few years later when I edited its New York Look special issue. Sharp-eyed visitors to this website might even notice that the trim on my front page is derived from one of Mark’s books. I later worked with his lovely wife Duane Hampton on a separate piece for Quest. She was a bright spot in a difficult time for me. I’ll always be grateful to both of them for their kind friendship and good will.)

Master of the Drawing Room

The first thing that strikes one upon meeting the celebrated interior designer Mark Hampton is that his personality is as lavishly decorated as any of the world famous houses, museums, clubs and public places he’s worked on around the globe. Like a character from a Wildean drawing room comedy, each comment he makes is deliberately phrased, furnished with clever bons mots, embellished by amusing anecdotes. One will note, too, a mellifluous Anglo lilt to his voice — an inflection that is definitely Upstairs, not Downstairs — that obscures his midwestern roots. His vocabulary as well is adorned with ornate expressions such as “wonderful,” “marvelous,” “fabulous,” and “gorgeous.” If, as Wilde insisted, life is an imitation of art, then Mark Hampton’s carefully constructed image mirrors his talent for design beautifully.

“I always wanted to be a decorator,” Mark Hampton says, sitting in a natty suit at a massive white marble travertine-top table situated dramatically in his attractive penthouse office. As he speaks, Mark sketches an imaginary decor on a sheet of white drafting paper. His pencil strokes are swift and effortless. A room takes shape, curtains are created, a tablecloth is added. One gets the impression he’s envisioned just such a room ten thousand times before. Without skipping a beat, the conversation continues. The drama of his childhood unfolds. As a young boy living in Indiana, Mark “grew tired of making jack o’ lanterns, valentines and seasonal drawings” like the other kids in school.
Forging a friendship with his teacher, he graduated to grander toys. “She taught me the difference between Greek Revival and Georgian,” he explains. Soon he was sketching “lots of Victorian houses with towers,” like those he saw in Charles Addams cartoons in The New Yorker. “I’ve always adored haunted houses,” he adds, especially the one Dickens so vividly depicted in Great Expectations. “I always wondered how Miss Havisham could be miserable living in that house!”

By the age of thirteen, Mark was eager to train his burgeoning aesthetic eye on his own surroundings — so with his parents’ permission he redid his room. “I installed wonderful antique walnut shutters which I lovingly stripped down and carefully refinished.” He’d discovered his medium of artistic expression. After attending De Pauw College in Indiana and spending a year studying at the London School of Economics, Mark received his masters in art history from New York University. Soon he was apprenticing with David Hicks in England and Sister Parish here in the States. The next six years he devoted to the firm McMillen, Inc., breaking away in 1976 to found his own company, Mark Hampton, Inc. During the last twelve years, he’s toiled on residential projects in West Germany, France, Ireland, Mexico and Venezuela. In America, he’s established his reputation by restoring many of the nation’s most important buildings: the Naval Observatory (home to the Vice-President and his wife), Gracie Mansion, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Design. A true professional, Mark is much admired for his attentiveness and dedication to his clients, although a former assistant nicknamed him Louis XIV because of his fiery temper.

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