Gay pulp fiction

Gay pulp fiction, or gay pulps, refers to printed works, primarily fiction, that include references to male

Many early gay pulps were reissues of literary novels with gay themes, such as this 1958 Pyramid Books edition of Never the Same Again.

Gay pulps are part of the expansion of cheap paperback books that began in the 1930s and "reached its full force in the early 1950s."

Still, some gay pulps were published by mainstream publishers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. These were often reprints of literary novels that involved references to homosexuality, such as Charles Jackson's 1946 novel, The Fall of Valor, and Gore Vidal's 1948 novel, The City and the Pillar, which first appeared in paperback in 1950. Likewise, Blair Niles' 1931 novel Strange Brother appeared in paperback in 1952.

First original gay pulp paperback

The first paperback original to deal with homosexuality was 1952's Men into Beasts, a nonfiction work by

Among "the more provocative titles and noms de plume" published in this decade include: Summer in Sodom, by Edwin Fey; Gay Whore, by Jack Love; Hollywood Homo, by Michael Starr; The Short Happy Sex Life of Stud Sorell, by Orlando Paris; It's a Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay World, by Guy Faulk; Gay on the Range, by Dick Dale; Queer Belles, by Percy Queen; and Gay Pals, by Peter Grande.[4]

Sometimes, these past ephemera can become useful community history resources. As Susan Stryker and Michael Meeker note in a new preface to Lou Rand's The Gay Detective (1965),

• Lesbian pulp fiction
• LGBT literature
• Yaoi

Footnotes

References

• Austen, Roger (1977). Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (1st ed.). Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
  ISBN 978-0-672-52287-1
  .
• Bronski, Michael (2003). Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (1st ed.). New York, NY: St. Martin's Griffin.
  ISBN 978-0-312-25267-0
  .
• Gunn, Drewey Wayne (2013). The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film: A History and Annotated Bibliography (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
  ISBN 978-0-8108-8588-2
  .
• Gunn, Drewey Wayne, ed. (2009). The Golden Age of Gay Fiction (1st ed.). Albion, NY: MLR Press.
  ISBN 978-1-60820-048-1
  .
• Gunn, Drewey Wayne; Harker, Jaime, eds. (2013). 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage (1st ed.). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
  ISBN 978-1-62534-045-0
  .
• Howard, John (1999). Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (1st ed.). University of Chicago Press.
  ISBN 978-0-226-35470-5
  .
• Norman, Tom (1994). American Gay Erotic Paperbacks: A Bibliography. Burbank, CA.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Rand, Lou (1961). Susan Stryker and Martin Meeker (ed.). The Gay Detective (2003 reprint ed.). San Francisco: Cleis Press.
  ISBN 978-1-57344-169-8
  .
• Slide, Anthony (2003).
  ISBN 978-1-56023-413-5
  .
• Stryker, Susan (2001). Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
  ISBN 978-0-8118-3020-1
  .
• Young, Ian (2007). Out in Paperback: A Visual History of Gay Pulps (1st ed.). Toronto, Ont.: LMB Editions.
  ISBN 978-0-9781765-1-8
  .