“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 a serious and scholarly intent. You’ll get one hell of an education. Of course, you’d have gotten that anyway. But it seems a shame not to have both. And if you can’t—or won’t—enjoy them right along while you’re studying them… well, maybe you ought to pause and ask yourself ‘why?’”
– Victor, intro to the 2012 edition of The Tijuana Bible Reader
The Tijuana Bible Reader is a beast all its own, and we probably won’t be tackling it for a while as a 1969 publication, but this is one of my favorite Victor quotes re: the nature of erotica consumption and, frankly, the entire field of erotica and popular romance studies. He’s clearly poking fun at rationalizations a person might give themselves for reading work that’s incredibly easy to label mindless porn—particularly in the case of The Tijuana Bible Reader, I might add—but… I do think there’s scholarly merit in it! Still, it’s always important to keep in mind the complexities of that pursuit when you’re talking about work that was designed, first and foremost, to elicit pure entertainment and pleasure, sexual or otherwise.
My journey towards acquiring something someday approaching Victor expertise has been a wild and somewhat frenzied one. I went from zero pulp experience to having read somewhere upwards of maybe 30 in the span of a few months, not to mention all the outside research that entailed. One of the most interesting phenomena to me in the reading-about-pulp sphere has been how much time gets devoted to justifying the study of pulp novels and the myriad ways in which people go about this. For some, the problem is the risqué and often disturbing content, for others the abstract menace of granting legitimacy to the lowbrow. So I want to take a minute to turn the tables a bit on analyzing the ways we talk about why gay pulp is worth reading and discussing.
The conversation tends to pair well with the necessary crash course on the history of censorship and obscenity laws in America that comes with sticking one’s nose into US paperback history. The history of American pulp fiction is the history of a puritanical culture underlying all media production and consumption in the US, one which demands we operate along inflexible sinful/righteous divides. Not a new observation. You can find this argument in any piece on sleaze paperback history. What I find striking then are the ways in which this divide still manifests in the work of the same people delivering these arguments, myself included.
The first essay in Drewey Wayne Gunn’s 2013 anthology of scholarly essays on gay pulp follows literary scholar James J. Gifford’s somewhat reluctant journey to coming to see gay sleaze paperbacks as worthy of attention. Succinctly titled “How to Read Gay Pulp Fiction,” his story focuses in particular on one tome that changed his perspective on the literary value of pulp. And it required contrast to emphasize its effect on him:
“Certainly many of these pulps bear lurid titles (Man Into Boy and Faggots to Burn!) and include melodramatic plots, but others, such as the Idylls [of the Queens] I was holding in my hand, are full of everyday people and everyday situations—only the heroes are gay” (32).
First came the pleasant surprise of seeing one of Victor’s more obscure novels mentioned, then the indignation: But wait, Man Into Boy—an admittedly odd but intriguingly experimental 1960s gay fantasy take on the myth of Eros and Psyche—is one of the most creative and least formulaic of all of Victor’s gay pulps! And anyone who’s read Man Into Boy knows that its lurid title is actually a sincerely funny spin on its fantastical premise—how could he choose that for this comparison?!
But once the initial impact cleared up, the reality of the situation set in. My first instinct to beef with that line wasn’t that Gifford had drawn oversimplified value judgments across pulp, it was that the lines he drew were different from mine. It would be absurd to ask a person not to make those kinds of judgments at all, especially when there is such an extreme spectrum of works that fall under the category of “midcentury gay sleaze paperback.” We’re only human, after all. I’m not here to advocate that we read coherently constructed mystery novels with a few explicit sex scenes in exactly the same way as explicit sex scenes strung together with almost no actual story attached, or books that do contain narrative efforts that are full of plot holes, or that we approach sci-fi and Hollywood romances as one and the same, and on, and on.
But what connects them isn’t trivial, either. There’s a reason these works were coming out of the same publishing houses, and one of the great advantages of a Victor-forward approach to pulp history is what it helps reveal about the complex connections among all those modes of writing. After all, he wrote in nearly every one of them!
I don’t think everything Victor wrote was a masterpiece. I don’t think Man Into Boy was a masterpiece. I do respect him as a writer, and I admire his ability to construct a sentence and his impressive adaptability. But all it takes is a glance at the right time, in the right way—or the wrong time, in the wrong way, as it were—for my “experimental take on gay pulp” determinations to become someone else’s emblem of what’s easiest to dismiss about pulps.
I wanted to post this in proximity to our posts about AC-DC Lover, a novel among the more shocking, disturbing, and shamelessly pulp-y of Victor’s works, as a way to formally make space not for a prescriptive guide to reading but for a reflective pause to think through what my work with the Foundation is all about.
I’m partial to AC-DC, an emotionally difficult read and not one of any astounding quality, as a kind of distilled representation of a place in literary history and the tropes it employed. I’m also not really an advocate for encouraging everyone to go pick up Victor’s old pulps ASAP. But I would encourage willingness to talk and learn about them and what they meant in their own contexts, and what those contexts could mean in our own. From that, I think there is always something to be learned.
One response to “How to Sit With Gay Pulp—Or Not”
Well said!