Category: Banis Book Review
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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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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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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…
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Notes on AC-DC Lover (1965)
AC-DC Lover, AC-DC Lover, oh where to begin… This novel is not exactly for the faint of heart in 2025, but you can’t very well get into the subject of Victor’s early catalog without it. First of all, to place it in time: AC-DC Lover was released in 1965 by Private Edition Books, one year…
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AC-DC Lover 1965
AC-DC Lover, Victor Jay, Private Edition Books #PE 346, (1965); (Love’s Pawn, Borgo Press 2012). This is one of Victor’s earliest books and probably my least favorite so far. It is a good example of the pulp books being published before The Why Not; before Earl Kemp and Greenleaf Classics. It’s a really dark story…
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3 Poems in ONE Magazine 1961 & 1962
There is so much to say about ONE Magazine and the fact that MY Uncle was published in that magazine is beyond amazing!! He wrote a total of three poems that were published. First off, a little about ONE Magazine…it was founded in 1952 and born from the Mattachine Society. The magazine ceased publication in…