Recent Blog
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Welcome
Hi. I’m Maggie, Victor’s great-niece and the Executive Director of the Victor J. Banis Family Foundation. Prior to Victor’s passing in 2019, I knew he was a writer and had read a few of his books. We had a few discussions about his books and writing but nothing in depth. It wasn’t until after he…
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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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“An Unlikely Pair of Pornographers”: Earl Kemp, Greenleaf Classics, and the Partnership That Made Gay Pulp
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…
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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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How to Sit With Gay Pulp—Or Not
“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…
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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…