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 after Victor’s debut novel The Affairs of Gloria and one year before the place people usually begin their stories about Victor’s history as a gay pulp pioneer, starting with The Why Not’s release in early 1966. But before that pioneering project to document gay life came a gay novel of a rather different variety:
AC-DC tells the story of a young man made incapable of love after a childhood being sexually trafficked by his stepfather, now an adult determined to leave hustling behind for good by securing a sugar mommy. Just one problem—the woman he’s set his sights on is already attached. What’s a man to do but seduce her husband into leaving her?
Pain, suffering, and very heavy doses of karmic punishment ensue. At times the novel admittedly feels as though it’s determined to traumatize the reader to the greatest possible extent. Teen sex trafficking, exhibitionist gang rape, gay corruption gaslighting (or whatever you call that thing when you convince a straight man he’s gay and losing his mind), murder, suicide, the works. Let’s just say there’s a lot going on.
Lenny has sex with both men and women but seems to occupy a space beyond homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality. (See Chapter 14: “Other people, the men and women he used to gain his desires, were only so many tools to be employed as needed, and discarded when he was finished with them. There was no sympathy for Nick, or Sylvia, no affection for Gloria.”)
I would argue he’s a member of that very special and all too common class of characters who boldly traverse the line between somehow demonizing same sex desire and lack of romantic/sexual desire at the same time. He seeks out sex with men yet doesn’t seem to feel true attraction to anyone, both of which serve as indicators of instability, manipulativeness, and all around malevolence. Sex with men becomes emblematic of Lenny’s detachment from his own reality, alienation from society, and lack of any coherent sense of self.
So where does gayness as an identity fit into all of that? The idea of homosexuality is pervasive throughout—Lenny’s sexuality is defined by his rejection of any understanding of himself as gay/genuinely attracted to men, and the narrative arc of the male object of his machinations, Nick, is entirely based upon the premise that he’s being dragged away from a base state of blissful heterosexuality. Lenny’s goal regarding Nick isn’t just to make the man fall in love with him, it’s to convince him he has transformed into an entirely different category of human, one which would make it impossible to remain in his marriage—according to Lenny, at least. Lenny and Nick go to gay hangouts to emphasize how ill at ease and out of place they both are there. It’s men Lenny identifies as homosexuals, fags, and queers who he regularly beats to a pulp in imagined retribution for his own suffering. Etcetera.
Although there is violence and manipulation aplenty in pretty much all of Victor’s gay pulps, this way of conceptualizing same sex experience actually is pretty unique in his bibliography. While I find characterizations of Victor’s work as Happy Gay Central simplistic at best, what his works do generally accomplish is challenging traditional gay narratives of convenience or corruption, either by incorporating them with a twist (see next week’s entry on So Sweet, So Soft, So Queer) or dropping them altogether. When ideas about homosexuality being unnatural and destructive are voiced in his work, it is almost always in the context of either outside homophobic sentiment or protagonists who are clearly grappling with internalized homophobia, which then proves to be their true enemy.
Even in AC-DC, where I do think it’s fair to say there is a legitimate gay corruption narrative, moralizing statements about the poison of homosexuality are notably absent. Gayness is certainly linked with homophobic ideas about depravity in AC-DC, but (1) the violence is almost entirely literalized in this whirlwind melodramatic plot where everything’s insane anyways, and (2) the novel is premised upon Lenny’s perspective being a rather warped one, and his thoughts about gay people are not presented as reflecting Fundamental Truths about the universe and gay experience. It doesn’t make AC-DC less violently homophobic of a novel, but it is another piece of context that feels important to me.
And perhaps therein lies the key for reading AC-DC: besides the obvious Homosexuality-Bad angle, the eroticized subject also becomes violence more than men having sex with men, thereby excusing the focus on the latter.
I’ve got absolutely no interest in trying to make declarations about authorial intent, especially when it comes to playing arbiter of where agency fell for including the many, many troubling things found in AC-DC and other works of Victor’s. At the same time, one can’t ignore where AC-DC was situated within publishing realities at the time. Homosexuality more often than not equaled misery, coercion, and/or violence, and AC-DC Lover most certainly followed suit.
Interestingly, I do think Lenny’s penchant for gay-bashing does put an intriguing spin on the cosmic retribution he ultimately faces for his myriad crimes, the last of which is—spoiler—venting all of his anger and pain out on a random man at the closest cruising spot, to the point of death. Not that violently self-hating gays are a genre revelation, but there is, perhaps, something to be said for the fact that, in Lenny’s case, the punishment that must befall any man who sleeps with men also doubles as a kind of punishment for someone who’s made it his life’s mission to make the lives of every gay person he encounters a living (or not-so-living…) hell. Food for thought.
Anyhow, Victor was the first to say his path to becoming a writer was mostly about being able to use his talent for rapidly churning out competent prose to make a quick buck, and AC-DC was, ultimately, the kind of gay novel that clearly sold then—or rather, the kind publishers were willing to sell. After all, a key element of the historical importance of The Why Not and The Man from C.A.M.P is recognizing that, with those post-AC-DC books of his, Victor made revolutionary steps towards proving to the industry that alternative takes on gay storytelling could sell.
I’d also be remiss without noting that, in the world where this was just the story of an insane man trying to split up the marriage of his employer and her shy, anxious author husband, all so that he could kick back and live out the rest of his days coasting on this woman’s wealth as a trophy husband… Well, it honestly has the bones of a truly fabulous bisexual comedy, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there. Would that it had been written a bit later.
