Victor J. Banis Family Foundation

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 very excited to transition to tackling some of Victor’s major ’66 works and the rest of his pulps from that incredibly productive year.

This piece was the first thing I ever sent to Maggie after my very first deep dive into the world of Victor and Greenleaf, so it only felt fitting to let it guide us into exploring Victor’s arrival on the gay pulp scene—and what an entrance it was.

Victor’s first gay male pulps may have been published in 1965, but there’s good reason he usually cites his gay pulp career as having started with The Why Not in 1966. The Why Not marked his first novel with sleaze paperback publishing house Greenleaf Classics and its prolific Editorial Director, Earl Kemp. Greenleaf would go on to publish all but two of Victor’s post-’65 gay pulps.

In addition to his influence on the pulp industry itself, Earl is probably one of the most influential figures in 60s pulp history preservation. From 2003 to 2011, Earl published his own e-zine of industry memoirs, eI (and that’s e-i, not e-L). Between his own recollections and the impressive array of industry peers who contributed over the years, it’s an absolute treasure trove of information.

To hear Victor tell it, Earl Kemp was nothing short of a hero in the history of gay literature, gay liberation, and freedom of expression in the America we know today, for better and worse. He was a fighter on the front lines of free speech, going places no others in the California pulp scene dared as the straight editor that first got The Why Not on paperback bookstore shelves, launching a creative partnership that would extend from their first fateful business contact in late 1965 to the twenty-odd contributions Victor made to Earl’s e-zine between 2003 and 2011. Victor even proposed a BE/AE (Before Earl/After Earl) split as a more useful dichotomy in gay publishing history than pre- and post-Stonewall.

… Of course, that view of Earl was by no means a universal one. A number of other prominent gay pulp authors infamously put their disdain for Greenleaf in the public record, denouncing the publishing restraints placed on gay authors in the straight-operated sleaze paperback sphere. In that light, while I absolutely aimed for as much historical accuracy as possible, I’d ask you not to read what follows as an industry history. This is, above all else, a history of recollections and a reflection of my own attempts to better understand one unlikely friendship between two unlikely pornographers.

The Crowning of a King

The story of Greenleaf ¹ begins in the early 1950s with writer and fan organizer William Hamling’s early sci-fi publishing endeavors out of his own basement on Greenleaf Street in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois. Along with a formal move to office space, Hamling first began to explore adult publishing in 1955 with the start of his “gentleman’s magazine,” Rogue, a contemporary and rival of Hugh Hefner’s up-and-coming Playboy, also based in Chicago.² Greenleaf’s first true predecessor came along with Harlan Ellison’s founding of Nightstand Books for Hamling in 1959, the first adult paperback publishing endeavor under his ownership. As a business venture with far greater legal risk than Rogue, the offices for Nightstand (and the many imprint names that followed) were established using the inconspicuously-named front of Blake Pharmaceuticals, a defunct Evanston-based business Hamling had purchased for use as a shell company.³

After nearly a decade of acquaintance with Hamling through sci-fi fan organizing and publishing, Earl first began his formal tenure in the “sleaze paperback” publishing arm of Hamling’s businesses in early 1961, now called Regency Books. Starting in a low-level editing position, Earl worked his way up under a turbulent handful of editorial directors before his own promotion to self-styled “King of Pornography” status in 1963⁴…. aka, head of Regency/Blake/Greenleaf, a position of power second only to owner and president William Hamling—one he would go on to hold until his resignation in April 1971 following years of increasing tensions with Hamling⁵ and an industry-infamous federal indictment.⁶

In 1965, following Hamling’s 1964 decision that it was time for him and his ventures to move on from Chicago to Southern California, Earl would be responsible for relocating the company’s publishing operations to San Diego and rebuilding it from the ground up as Vice President and Editorial Director, accompanied by legendary pulp cover artist Robert Bonfils as the company’s Artistic Director. At this point, the company officially took on Greenleaf Classics, Inc., as an official rather than informal name—or at least as the official name of the publishing division of Hamling’s business holdings. It remained carefully woven into a complex series of business titles, now a subsidiary of Phenix Publishers, Ltd., with Reed Enterprises, Inc., serving as the entity responsible for distribution, a notable shift, as one of the major developments of the California move had been to rid themselves of the need to outsource distribution services.⁷

They wasted no time throwing themselves into the rapidly growing West Coast pulp scene, and, by January 1966, Victor’s very first novel with Earl, The Why Not, was hitting shelves to critical acclaim.

Reimagining Gay Subjects in the Erotic Pulp Boom

The erotic pulp publishing boom came (and arguably went) spectacularly quickly in the 60s and 70s, both gay and straight, but, as Victor notes, while the in-print sexual revolution was far-reaching for heterosexual pulps, the gay erotic pulp publishing boom was far more limited in points of origin and owed a particularly great debt to Earl and Greenleaf as a result. From beginning to end, the vast majority of Greenleaf titles were and remained heterosexual erotic novels, but it was the volume of gay novels they released relative to the rest of their peers, and the early timeline on which they began to release them, that set it apart within the industry.⁸

According to gay pulp bibliographer Tom Norman, Greenleaf’s very first gay novel was actually Ronn Marvin’s Mr. Ballerina, published in 1961 when they were still working out of Evanston under the Regency imprint.⁹ The story of a young musician finding the strength to extract himself from the dark pull of the poisonous homosexual lifestyle, replete with substance abuse as frequent metaphor for desiring gay sex and doling out social, legal, and cosmic punishments to all its practitioners, Marvin’s snagging of that “historic first” spot from Victor (and Earl) ultimately only serves to greater underscore the historical importance of what they would go on to accomplish together. The wave in which they took part was not just about publishing gay novels; it was about publishing a different kind of gay novel.

While it’s true that Aday and Maxey published groundbreaking gay material in the span of their career together, the book that landed Aday and Maxey with their respective 25 and 15-year prison sentences (The Sex Life of a Cop), contrary to Victor’s account in eI and elsewhere, was thoroughly, if tepidly, heterosexual in nature. However, Maxey was a public figure within California’s gay community, and there nevertheless remains at least one legally-documented connection between that case and “homosexual content”: the fact that, pre-sentencing, their judge was provided with the information that Maxey had two previous arrests for “soliciting and committing homosexual acts.”¹¹ In other words, Maxey and Aday’s story was not one which warned against the publication of gay material, but rather the association with gay reality as a one-way ticket to being stripped of the right to defend one’s moral character in an already deeply tense political atmosphere.

It was in this world that Victor first set out to publish The Why Not and his subsequent early gay-topic novels, and it was in this world that Earl first took a chance on content Victor claims no one else was willing to—not because publishers had the shadow of a concrete legal excuse to hide under, but because… they didn’t want to. This correction seems notable for understanding exactly what decisions were being made at the editorial desks of Greenleaf that rendered their position so critical in the “gay pulp explosion” that followed. 

In Earl’s own 2002 recollection of encountering The Why Not, he remarks that out of the “approximate 4,000 paperback titles that we published I can remember around four manuscripts only of truly significant worth, both as literature and as a viable portrayal of our liberated times,” and The Why Not was one of them. He continues to explain that he found the manuscript “remarkable, timely, and apt to be rather popular” in addition to being a book that “opened doors too-long closed,” well-suited to “Greenleaf’s ongoing fight for First Amendment realities.”¹²

And so began Greenleaf’s foundational role in the history of contemporary gay literature.

Porn, Politics, Profit, and Fun

From looking back on his first evaluation of Victor’s work to the publication that was ultimately his and Greenleaf’s undoing, Earl’s 21st century reflections on the industry and the role he found himself playing typically possess a distinctly political slant. At the same time, his commentary on The Why Not would be incomplete without his editor’s remark that he found it “apt to be rather popular.” With gay pulps, Earl and Victor’s partnership tapped into a social and political need within the publishing industry, but they also tapped into a neglected consumer base.

The difference between the Mr. Ballerinas of the world and the Jackie Holmeses was not merely one of caricature degrees. It was a matter of marketing. Billing itself as an exciting window into the depraved and misunderstood corners of the homosexual mind, Greenleaf’s first foray into gay publishing was packaged for appeal to the morbidly curious heterosexual reader. But by the time Earl had taken over the reins in the mid-1960s, readers were talking back, and they weren’t just morbidly curious heterosexuals:

And of all those wannabe gay writers recalled in Earl’s “Strolling Through Tumescent Town,” the most fondly remembered was, of course, none other than Victor J. Banis. According to Earl, he would “[write] letter after letter about how he was the perfect person to write the perfect novel for us if we would only, well, listen to him rant on and on for ages, it seemed,” all culminating in the fateful day he finally included an entire manuscript with one of those letters.¹⁴

Victor went on to produce more paperbacks for Earl and Greenleaf than he himself even seemed to be able to count. Besides his own independent work, he recalls guiding a number of other writers through entering the industry—what Earl referred to as the opening of the “Banis School of Fictional Cruising.”¹⁵ Victor would aid them in developing the skills it took to knock out 40,000-word novels a week at a time, in turn enabling them to pass their skills on to others, and all the while serving as a publisher go-between for a growing crowd of scribes due to the increasingly strong personal working relationship he maintained with Earl.¹⁶

Victor alludes to the business-defined nature of their relationship at the end of his “Godfather Virgin,” where he jokingly makes an aside asking when his check’s going to arrive in the mail. Perhaps one of the most consistent defining features of Victor’s reflections on his time in the industry are his refusals to shy away from the messy intersections of art, porn, politics, and profit in pulp history. For him, a vindication of the history and value of the works it produced meant taking them exactly as they were. It was personal, it was fun, it was political, it was necessary, it was lucrative. He candidly recounts feeling like Earl never quite understood the whole gay thing, despite his best intentions, while Earl candidly recounts a truly eyebrow-raising tale of his degree of apprehension upon going into his first meeting with real live homosexuals, Victor and then-partner and frequent collaborator Sam Dodson, back in 1966.¹⁷

Their story is one of contradiction and symbiosis, difference and distance, friendship and solidarity, and, above all else, a truly legendary degree of creative productivity, spanning half a century in life and an eternity to follow as we now look upon their documented exchanges and the fruits of their combined labors as rich sources of historical knowledge. Naturally, the apparent depth of their friendship also requires one maintain at least a little skepticism when evaluating Victor’s glowing proclamations about Earl’s historic heroics, but that earnest fondness and loyalty tells a story, too.

1. Variously nested within and known as Blake Pharmaceuticals, Regency Books, Phenix Publishers, Reed Enterprises, Corinth Publications, etc. etc… I’ve done my best to incorporate name histories into the story itself rather than simply providing a context-less list. Here is a fabulous visual timeline covering numerous imprint names the company used between 1959 and 1975 (the dissolution of the company under its original management of Earl, Hamling & co.). ↩︎
2. Gertz, Stephen J. “Earthlings, Beware!” eI, 2002. ↩︎
3. Kemp, Earl. “The Ballad of Killer Kemp.” eI, 2002. ↩︎
4. Kemp, Earl. “Have Typewriter; Will Whore For Food.” eI, 2002.
   Schieskopf, Francine. “Midnight Readers on the Nightstand.” eI, 2003. ↩︎
5. Kemp, Earl. “A Stranger, and Afraid…” eI, 2003. ↩︎
6. The saga surrounding Kemp’s controversial project to publish The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, leading to Kemp’s 1971 indictment and subsequent 3-month incarceration in 1976, is a long and fascinating one. It is documented thoroughly across many of the shortform memoir pieces in Earl’s zine. His piece “Beating Off the Feds” and Stephen Gertz’s “The Apotheosis” are helpful starting points. ↩︎
7. Kemp, Earl. “The Leer of the Sensualist: The Face of Pornography.” eI, 2003. ↩︎
8. Banis, Victor J. “Godfather Virgin.” eI, 2003.
   Banis, Victor J. “Virgins No More.” eI, 2003. ↩︎
9. Norman. Tom. American Gay Erotic Paperbacks: A Bibliography, 1994.  ↩︎
10. Banis, Victor J. “Paperback Virgin.” eI, 2003. ↩︎
11. See the following excerpt, emphasis mine: “We applaud and share the desire of the learned District Judge in this case to strike at and slow down the ever-increasing velocity of today’s commerce in obscenity. The characters of defendants Aday and Maxey as shown by their earlier criminal conduct give little support to a plea for moderation. It may indeed be that each of them has already ‘exhausted his balance with fate.’” ↩︎
12. Banis, Victor J. “Paperback Virgin.” eI, 2003. ↩︎
13. Kemp, Earl. “Strolling Through Tumescent Town.” The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, 2009. ↩︎
14. Kemp, Earl. “Strolling Through Tumescent Town.” The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, 2009. ↩︎
15. Kemp, Earl. “Strolling Through Tumescent Town.” The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, 2009. ↩︎
16. Banis, Victor J. “Godfather Virgin.” e.I, 2003. ↩︎
17. Banis, Victor J. “Godfather Virgin.” e.I, 2003. Kemp also revisits this in his “Tumescent Town” piece. ↩︎