Hello to one and all! This is an inaugural post to lead into a series of posts on pulp history + Victor’s novels that I’m planning to put together as one strain of the foundation’s blog. I want to take at least a moment first to acknowledge who I am and what I’m doing here.
My name is Ori. 👋 I love reading and writing about books and the history around them. I consider my passion for these things my most important credential, but there may or may not also be a relevant degree in my name. I was born in 2000. To borrow Victor’s turn of phrase, I am a homegrown Midwestern prude. I also could chat about representations of sex in media and popular culture for hours. See Chapter 12 of Victor’s memoir Spine Intact for a characteristically hilarious description of this phenomenon.
Now you know all my secrets.
My acquaintance with Victor was spawned by a more or less chance encounter with Maggie back in July. Since then, I’ve developed a deep passion for Victor’s work and ended up learning more about pulp history than I ever intended to in my whole life.
I’m approaching my work as a way to document my own journey acquainting myself with the history of Victor’s life and writing, building upon a smattering of firsthand accounts from Victor and his peers, academic work that’s been written on the subject(s), and my own poking around. I claim no authority, just an interest in uncovering as much as I can and making that knowledge as accessible as I can.
Working with such precariously-documented history and relying on the memories of those involved does mean that encountering conflicting info is rather common, and I can already foresee needing to make corrections here and there in my own work. It’s a process! I’ve encountered blatant misinformation on the academic side of things from those whose diligence in seeking out conversations with people like Victor was lacking, memoirs that didn’t quite align, etc… so the whole thing is ultimately a bit of a puzzle. But that’s half the fun!
When it comes to this particular subject, I think there’s also something to be said for acknowledging and celebrating the mysteries, gaps, and things left unspoken in a history which, by legal and social necessity, often had to limit the traces of its existence. At the same time, efforts to name as much of that history as possible in the space of the foundation’s work come in the wake of how monumental Victor’s decision was to insert himself back into the story of midcentury American pulp—not as Victor Jay, or Don Holliday, or Jan Alexander, but as Victor J. Banis from Eaton, Ohio. I simply cannot stress enough just how different the experience has been reading gay pulp scholarship from before and after key authors stepped forward with their personal histories and knowledge about the rest of the industry in the early 2000s.
There are no words to express how grateful I am for the support and encouragement I’ve gotten from Maggie to have an outlet for my craziness 🙂 I fear I may have strong-armed my way into creating a Victor Studies division of the foundation, but I think we’re also at an especially important moment for this kind of work. We are living in times of ever-increasing surveillance, censorship, and efforts to “nail doors shut” on all manner of individuals—voices like Victor’s, and mine, and maybe yours, too. We are also living in times when the powers-that-be have increasingly and unprecedentedly powerful tools to carry out those tasks. But Victor and all his fellow First Amendment advocates in the midcentury paperback industry remind us that this impulse is far from unprecedented, and that defenses of self-expression have been enduring.
But I’ll let Victor deliver the final sell:
And as to why you should care—well, the changes that were wrought in the sixties and early seventies were, some of them, bought dear. You ought to know that. And you ought to know too that they are far from etched in stone, however complacent we have gotten about them in the thirty years since. There are people out there who would like to see all of us—gays, hell-raisers, sexy book people, and why not Oprah Winfrey while they are at it—shoved back into our closets and the doors nailed shut. And some of those people are once again in positions of authority. If you think that sounds paranoid, just contemplate for a moment or two how quickly we have seen our rights and freedoms erode in the last year or so.
The next time, you might have to write the books.
– Victor J. Banis, “Virgins No More,” 2003
The time to write is nigh. See you on the other side!
xoxo,
Ori
