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 the historical significance of the books. At the time, I don’t think Victor did either! We just knew that they were fun to read.
Over the years I had read several books in the series, in no particular order. I read the books I had access to, Color him Gay, Gay Dogs, and Gothic Gaye. It wasn’t until I discovered the whole series on Victor’s flash drives that I was able to read and re-read all the books in order! And I’m so glad that I did. It was really interesting to see Victor grow as a story-teller and with each book his writing grew strong and bolder; increasingly addressing the issues affecting him and his community. As Victor would say, “is was some pretty heady stuff.”
Read what Victor had to say 38 years after the first C.A.M.P. book was published. Here is an excerpt from his memoir, Spine Intact, Some Creases…
“She’s late, isn’t she?” He said aloud. “I thought we were to meet her at ten, and it’s after ten thirty now.”
“Jackie will be here,” Upton promised him, still quite patient himself. “When the right moment comes, contact will be made.”
“I’ve got to go unload some of the beer,” Summers said, standing. “Never could hold that stuff very well.”
“I’ll save your seat,” Upton answered, with another of his puzzling smiles.
Summers edged his way through the Saturday night crowd that was beginning to fill up the bar, heading for the rear. Beyond a dingy curtain was a narrow hall, with doors opening into the Ladies’ and Men’s rooms. He smiled to himself as he passed the door marked Ladies, wondering which of the male customers at the bar used that door, and entered the other.
He had just stood up to the urinal when the door opened behind him and an effeminate blond stepped up beside him. For a moment Summers ignored the newcomer, thinking instead about the mysterious Jackie whom they should have met an hour ago.
He was suddenly aware of the fact that he was being stared at. He glanced angrily sideways. The blond, short and slender, was looking him over brazenly, an irritating smile playing upon his lips.
“Nice,” he said simply, raising his face to wink at Summers.
“Knock it off,” Summers snapped angrily, stepping back.
“Don’t turn away, Mr. Summers,” the blond told him quietly. “It gives us a good excuse to stand here and talk.”
Summers froze instinctively, despite his rather awkward position. “You know my name?” He asked, staring in surprise at the still smiling homosexual.
“I know quite a bit about you,” the blond assured him. He glanced meaningfully downward as he added, “Although they left the nicest things out of the report.”
Summers blushed and stepped back to the urinal, leaning close against it to prevent any possible observation of his endowments. “But who the hell . . . ?” He stopped in mid sentence and his jaw fell open. “Oh, no, you can’t be . . . “
The blond nodded. “Umm-hm, I’m Jackie.”
That was how I introduced Jackie Holmes in The Man From C.A.M.P., in 1965, under the byline Don Holliday, and though Treasury agent Ted Summers may not have been pleased to make his acquaintance, readers apparently were delighted.
For one thing, the concept of a funny gay novel was almost unheard of in 1965, and gay book buyers took to this novelty like ducks to water.
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The Man From C.A.M.P., introduced Jackie Holmes, a gay secret agent for an organization dedicated to “the protection and advancement of homosexuals.” This was pretty heady stuff for 1965, still a few years ahead of Stonewall, and a time when most homosexuals lived lives of repression and fear, even desperation. In today’s terminology, I suppose we would call the concept of C.A.M.P. “empowering.”
There were a total of nine books in the actual C.A.M.P. series, written between 1965 and 1968.
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Additionally, there were some spin offs from the novels: Sex and the Single Gay, by Jackie Holmes as told to Don Holliday (1967;) The C.A.M.P. Cookbook, by Lady Agatha, as told to Don Holliday (1968;) and The C.A.M.P. Astrology Guide, by Lady Agatha, as told to Don Holliday (1968.)
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Lady Agatha, originally introduced in The Why Not and later a recurring character in the C.A.M.P. books, was based on my friend, Elbert Barrow. Delighted with his character as presented in the books, Elbert adopted the name as his own, and with the success of those books, Lady Agatha became a popular fixture on the Los Angeles gay scene of the late sixties and early seventies. He was my secretary for years, and penned the C.A.M.P. cookbook and the astrology guide, and wrote columns for the local gay sheets. Incidentally, in a plumber’s costume, with a dark bobbed wig, which became his standard drag, he was a double for Josephine the Plumber, the Jane Withers character then popular in television commercials.
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It was all great fun, and no one took it very seriously, me least of all.
That was a long time ago, of course. Although I did a considerable number of other gay books at the time, I eventually went on to other things when the gay publishing scene drifted into the area of formula sex stories. My copies of most of these books, including the C.A.M.P. series, were lost in one of several moves I made over the years, and by the early nineties, the books had long been out of print and – so I thought – out of circulation; to be honest, I had all but forgotten them.
So, when someone suggested, in the late nineties, that I should think about reissuing the C.A.M.P. books, my first reaction was, who would be interested?
Quite a few people, as it has turned out.
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What I quickly came to understand, however, was that a great many people in and out of the book business were eager to talk to me about these old books, especially the C.AM.P. volumes. There had been, for one thing, the mystery of who actually had penned them. Plus, it seemed they had become collector’s material and the subject of a great deal of scholarly research on the part of social historians.
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And Dr. Fabio Cleto, in his authoritative volume, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Univ. of Michigan Press 1999) cited The Man From C.A.M.P. – and me – as illustrative of the camp phenomena of the sixties and seventies.
How on earth to explain this renaissance of interest in my darling Jackie Holmes and his confreres? The books were fun to write, certainly, and I’m told, …
But I don’t think even their most ardent fans would describe them in literary terms. The C.A.M.P. manuscripts were, to put it nicely, “rough.”
They were also, for better or for worse, a product of their times. The late sixties and early seventies were the era of – well – camp, with all its stylistic exaggerations. “Nothing succeeds like excess,” might well have been the motto of the time.
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Which brings us back to the question, why are they so popular thirty plus years later?
Most of the people to whom I posed that question had a very simple answer – they are fun to read. That’s a review with which I think most novelists would be entirely happy. And, yes, I found myself laughing aloud a time or two when I sat down to reread them.
In talking to others, however – historians, sociologists, scholars in the field of gay studies – I came to understand that the books have historical significance beyond their entertainment value.
In a way, Jackie Holmes was the first gay superhero. Oh, he couldn’t fly, exactly, and he shunned the funky costumes of Batman or Superman, though in Rally Round The Fag, he does don the traje de luces, the traditional “suit of light” of the matador, and more than once he opts for full drag to go undercover. Even better, in Holiday Gay, disguised as child actress Shelley Tipple, he convinces Rich to accompany him to visit a department store Santa suspected – falsely, as it turns out – of being part of Birdie Wing’s gang of jewel thieves. The signal is Deck The Halls, but instead of obtaining stolen jewels, Jackie succeeds only in rousing a horny St. Nick’s pedophilic interests.
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But matador gear and little girl’s dresses were costumes, not superhero drag, and except for being extraordinarily convincing as a child actress, Jackie performs no super feats.
Within the limits of human capabilities, however, there was scarcely anything Jackie couldn’t or didn’t do, and do better than anyone else. He was the world’s best shot and a champion with throwing knives. Pow! In his suit of light, he fought that bull – and won. Wham! He drove his collection of classic cars with the skill of the world’s best drivers, could run with the fastest stars of track, and lift several times his own weight. Kaboom! He was a trained expert in diamonds, spoke every language he encountered and . . . well, you get the idea. Flying with a cape over his shoulders was about the only thing he didn’t do with ease. At a time when gays were still being pummeled into the cellar of self-esteem, Jackie was gay, proud, and more than a match for any mere heterosexual. No wonder queens loved him.
And he even did his own translation of that classic of Chinese erotica, The Golden Lotus. Take that, Captain Marvel!
Nor did Jackie avoid the cliches that were generally leveled at gays. Avoid them? He went at them head-on. Top or Bottom? Jackie went at it every way, including sideways. Swish? Jackie could flip a wrist with the best of them – just before delivering a haymaker to an unlucky chin. He owned a white poodle – albeit, one with razor sharp teeth, and trained to kill. And that old canard about gays being out to seduce every straight man they meet? In book after book, Jackie always managed to get his man in the end – so to speak. He keeps a wooden phallus on a shelf, decorated with notches. Treasury agent Ted Summers earns a notch, and Andy Parks of the Secret Service, and Rock star Dingo Stark. An endless assortment. Better yet, it was they who inevitably came, panting and eager, to him. Talk about a queen’s fantasy.
C.A.M.P., too, was a delicious breath of fresh air in those dark, pre-liberation days. The first gay organizations had appeared on the scene few years earlier, discreet and fragile in political terms – The Matachine Society was started by Bill Hayes in San Francisco in 1951, One, Inc. and the Daughters of Bilitis soon afterward. There were a few publications, mostly delivered in “plain brown wrappers.” But today’s “in your face” activists – Act Up, Community United Against Violence, The Lavender Berets – were still in the future. Who knows, maybe one or two of their founders took inspiration from the all-powerful C.A.M.P.
But the real significance of the C.AM.P. series, according to a growing body of opinion among historians, is that these books and the many others that suddenly burst on the scene in that late sixties era, were among the first factors in creating a sense of community among gays and lesbians. And I think that point is well taken.
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As I’ve pointed out already, it is difficult for those who didn’t experience the time to appreciate how different things were for gays in the fifties and early sixties. The bars, and gay life in general, were mostly underground. There were already other gay books in print – a few of them, at least. Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (The New York Times had refused to publish an advertisement when the book was published in 1948); Niles Kent’s The Divided Path (where I first encountered the word “gay” as a homosexual term); and Jay Little’s Maybe Tomorrow and Somewhere Between the Two come to mind right off.
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Still, we were freaks or creeps, alcoholics or molesters. And the truth is, alas, it’s easy to list the books because there were so few of them. Often they were hard to find. Ideally, you had a friend in a local bookstore who would let you know when something “of special interest” came available. And even when you found the books, it was often difficult to find the homosexuality in them. Sometimes it was so discreet as to be nearly undetectable.
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Under the circumstances, Jackie Holmes’ frank and unashamed attitude toward his homosexuality was a dramatic change indeed. David Bergman (The Cultural Work of Sixties Gay Pulp Fiction, from The Queer Sixties, Rutledge, Patricia J. Smith, ed.) states, “What I find remarkable is the unapologetic way in which Holmes discusses gay people.”
So far as I know, Jackie Holmes was the first fictional character who was openly homosexual and proud of it. In that sense, gay pride could be said to have started with The Man From C.A.M..P.
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Not only was I now able to peddle gay books, but editors – again, Earl Kemp was a stellar example – were agreeable to the idea that gay novels could be romantic rather than tragic, could have happy endings, could be funny, could be just about anything, just as varied as the books published for heterosexual readers . . . and it was into that suddenly enlightened atmosphere that Jackie Holmes was born.
Over night, it seemed, there was an explosion of gay fiction and nonfiction. I’ve joked often that the revolution in gay publishing mostly happened in my kitchen and, in all modesty, there’s a great deal of truth in the statement.
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What’s really important in all this, though, was that the genre of gay publishing had arrived. Gay paperback publishing, at least – the hardcover publishers were slower to get on the bandwagon, though they got around to it in time. Suddenly, from being under the counter, gay fiction occupied entire walls in book stores – and eventually, entire bookstores.
It was a heady experience, to come out from under the covers, to be able to go into a store and buy not one, but two, three, a dozen books, of whatever sort we wanted. Funny books, scary books, cookbooks, westerns, mysteries – they were all there. And so were we. We shopped. And cruised. And chatted. And began to perceive that we were far less alone than we had heretofore thought.
And, yes, I do believe that it was here, as much as anywhere – among the beefcake covers and the campy titles and the astonishing variety of stories and themes that were suddenly there for us – that the sense of community, of oneness, that would soon lead to Stonewall and the Castro and the entire gay revolution, first took seed.
The C.A.M.P. novels were sewn together, admittedly none too expertly, from the fantasies and longings of homosexuals everywhere, openly expressed for the first time in those heady years, but not much changed decades later: to live free, without guilt or fear, unashamed to be who and what we are.
If Jackie Holmes still has a following, it is not because I created him, but rather because his readers recognize a part of themselves in him.
