Recent Blog
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Welcome
Hi. I’m Maggie, Victor’s great-niece and the Executive Director of the Victor J. Banis Family Foundation. Prior to Victor’s passing in 2019, I knew he was a writer and had read a few of his books. We had a few discussions about his books and writing but nothing in depth. It wasn’t until after he…
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LADY AGATHA
Who was Lady Agatha? They were first introduced in the pulp classic, The Why Not. According to Victor, they even came up with the name: “The Why Not was modeled after an actual bar, The Castaways, on Commonwealth Avenue, and in its heyday, it was perhaps the most popular gay bar in Hollywood. Incidentally, it…
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Nothing Succeeds Like Excess: Defining “Camp”
All of this talk about C.A.M.P. – but what is “camp”? The only hint we get from the C.A.M.P. series is that the “C” stands for “sucker”. But what about the “camp” phenomenon? The word isn’t so mainstream today but we still hear it. The theme of the 2019 Met Gala was “camp” (see Fabio…
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C.A.M.P. as told by Victor
I was first introduced to Jackie and C.A.M.P. in the late 1990s when Victor was working on Rebel Without a Pause. He asked if I would transcribe Holiday Gay. I found the book funny from the start! The main character, Jack Holmes, was such a cultured, intellectual, badass. I instantly adored him. I didn’t understand…
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The Man from C.A.M.P. 60th Anniversary
The story of queer liberation is often told as beginning in the streets. Near Christopher Street and Waverly Place, to be exact, where the police raid of a New York City gay bar set into motion a literal and symbolic fight for freedom. The Stonewall Uprising of June, 1969, wasn’t just about defending a favorite…
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“An Unlikely Pair of Pornographers”: Earl Kemp, Greenleaf Classics, and the Partnership That Made Gay Pulp
60 Years of 1966 So far, our blog has touched on Victor’s small handful of pre-’66 works and, as of last month, a few of Victor’s more obscure ‘66 novels. Now that we’re fully settled into 2026, I think it’s safe to say I can speak for both Maggie and I when I say we’re…
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Notes on The Bronze and the Wine (1966)
By total coincidence, Maggie and I both read Born to Be Gay + The Bronze and the Wine back-to-back—just in opposite order. I read Born in a single September sitting, and then, disappointed, remembered Randall Ivey calling Bronze “one of [Victor’s] most accomplished works of fiction in terms of characterization and plot structure” in The…
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Notes on Born to Be Gay (1966)
I’ll be frank: Born to Be Gay and The Bronze and the Wine are two of my least favorite of Victor’s gay pulps, but I’m going to try to do my best by them anyhow. I don’t have a ton to say in defense of content or quality besides providing the context that they’re also…
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Same, Same, Different (1966)
Same, Same, Different To understand Victor as a writer I began reading his books in alphabetical order. I had read a couple of his early pulps like AC-DC Lover and the C.A.M.P. series, but many were his gothic romance and gothic terror books such as Bishop’s Place, Blood Moon, Blood Ruby, Bloodstone, etc. Recently, I…
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How to Sit With Gay Pulp—Or Not
“Every man ought to be able to enjoy these stories. They were written for that purpose, and what they have to say is not much different from what any of us would say if we let go the ropes. Or, if you don’t want to read them to enjoy them, you can study them, with…
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Notes on So Sweet, So Soft, So Queer (1965)
With a title that would surely have done numbers on Booktok as a boring 2020s gay romance novel, Victor’s 1965 novel So Sweet, So Soft, So Queer was light years ahead of its time in more ways than one. As far as I can tell, based on its number (PE-344), it was officially Victor’s first…