Vulgar Genres

Gay Pornographic Writing and Contemporary Fiction

Steven Ruszczycky

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226788890
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

Vulgar Genres examines gay pornographic writing, showing howliterary fiction wasbothinformed by pornographyand amounts to a commentary on the genre's relation to queer male erotic life. Long fixated on visual forms, the field of porn studies is overdue for a book-length study of gay pornographic writing. Steven Ruszczycky delivers with an impressively researched work on the ways gay pornographic writing emerged as a distinct genre in the 1960s and went on to shape queer male subjectivity well into the new millennium.?Ranging over four decades, Ruszczycky draws on a large archive of pulp novels and short fiction, lifestyle magazines and journals, reviews, editorial statements, and correspondence. He puts these materials in conversation with works bya number ofcontemporary writers, including William Carney, Dennis Cooper, Samuel Delany, JohnRechy, and Matthew Stadler.While focused on the years 1966 to 2005, Vulgar Genres reveals that the history of gay pornographic writing during this period informs much of what has happened online over the past twenty years, from cruising to the production of digital pornographic texts. The result is a milestone in porn studies and an important contribution to the history of gay life.

[ Chapter 1 ]

William Carney and the Leathermen

Revaluing BDSM in the Pornographic Counterpublics of the 1970s

This chapter explores how gay pornographic writing comprised counterpublics through a focused analysis of the print culture associated with the gay BDSM and leather subcultures of the 1970s and early 1980s. I begin here for three reasons. First, the amount of pornographic writing produced after the US Supreme Court decriminalized sexually explicit writing is vast, and so some focus is necessary, yet the writers associated with gay BDSM, leather, and other kink-centered subcultures also produced an extraordinary amount of discourse about their fantasies and erotic practices. In addition to the numerous pornographic novels featuring scenes of gay BDSM, that discourse also consisted of conduct manuals, newspapers, and lifestyle magazines, which featured a variety of genres including advice columns, editorials, feature stories, reviews of literature and film, public correspondence, classified ads, short fiction, and serialized novels. Second, the print culture associated with gay BDSM and leather was highly self-reflexive: far from being a mode of solipsistic enjoyment, writers and readers maintained a keen awareness of how print forms fostered imaginary relations between themselves and readers, even if one’s interest in BDSM never went any further than an interest in its pornographic representation. Third, in keeping with that self-reflexivity, writers and readers also understood how their fantasies and erotic practices left them doubly stigmatized: they not only faced persecution from police agencies and popular media outlets, which viewed gay BDSM as a source of rhetorically powerful and politically useful sensationalism, but also risked rejection by other gender and sexual minorities who understood kink itself as an inherently oppressive or pathological practice.1

Taken together, print mediation, self-reflexivity, and an understanding of one’s marginalization are features of the pornographic counterpublics examined throughout this book, yet their interrelation is particularly salient within those of gay leather and BDSM pornography. Counterpublics, as Michael Warner has argued, are forms of culturally and politically subordinated stranger sociability whose “protocols of discourse and debate remain open to affective and expressive dimensions of language.”2 In contrast to public sphere ideology that sets the bracketing of particularities and the use of deliberative reason as conditions for determining the validity and intelligibility of one’s discourse, counterpublics treat poetic language, gestures, embodiments, and affects, among many other things, as capable of not only having meaning but also aggregating social life in meaningful ways. Like other counterpublics, the counterpublics of leather and BDSM pornography violated the normative demand to bracket one’s particularities, yet they do so via fantasies and practices that are themselves a frequent source of controversy. While the exact terminology can and has varied over the past century, terms such as S&M or BDSM designate a range of roles and practices that employ power differentials in the service of pleasure, often to the point of troubling conventionally liberal notions of consent or erotic mutuality. For example, the letters in the abbreviation BDSM can refer to any one or more of the following: bondage, boy, daddy, discipline, domination, submission, slave, sadist, master, and masochist. An interest in “discipline and submission,” which emphasize power, does not necessarily entail a corresponding interest in “sadism and masochism,” which emphasize the giving and experiencing of pain. Moreover, the fact that a single letter might refer to two seemingly mutually exclusive roles hints at the erotic mobility such practices can entail. A man who begins a scene as slave might end up as the master by its end.

One of the primary ways that men have signaled their interest in BDSM practices to other men is through the semiotic codes of leather styles. However, while leather and BDSM are closely related, they are not synonymous. BDSM practices predate the twentieth century, yet they acquired their association with leather when the latter emerged in gay male subcultures in the US during the mid-1940s. Following the end of World War II, many gay men who had served in the armed forces found themselves at a loss for the kinds of male homosocial intimacy that had been a regular feature of their lives within a gender-segregated military.3 In the working-class bars where soldiers and sailors on leave had once mingled with the city’s sexual demimonde, leather styles broadcasted one’s interest in men whose masculinity had been shaped by similar working-class or wartime experiences. Leather’s association with BDSM developed out of that context. Part of BDSM’s appeal for leather men pertained to its intensification of, not only the order and discipline that characterized military life, but also the intimacy and vulnerability experienced during affectively intense combat situations. BDSM also provided an outlet for both the specialized technical knowledge gained while working with complex heavy machinery and the pride that came with it: it wasn’t enough to hold a whip; one also needed to know how to use it. Finally, the matters of technical knowledge and a desire for affectively intense homosocial intimacy were interrelated: BDSM entailed another man skillfully bringing one to one’s physical, mental, and erotic limits without inflicting permanent damage. Sometimes treated as an erotic sport, BDSM for some men more closely approximated a spiritual or aesthetic practice.

While visions of gay leather found their way into the queer avant-garde creations of filmmakers like Kenneth Anger, the growth of markets for pornographic writing during the 1970s would help drive the popularization of leather styles during that decade and beyond. Social scientists such as Gayle Rubin and Peter Hennen have performed invaluable work in tracing out the intertwined histories of gay leather and BDSM practices, yet the importance of gay pornographic writing, and print culture in general, for the development of contemporary gay leather subjectivity and BDSM practices has been underappreciated by scholars of the subculture. In fact, porn appealed to readers because it provided a language for them to manage the “historically sedimented connection between same-sex desire and effeminacy” that Hennen has termed the “effeminacy effect.”4 As a consequence, the close association between BDSM and leather styles would weaken not only as leather styles themselves proliferated, but also as many men found themselves attracted to leather’s “dark world of masculinity,” but with little corresponding interest in BDSM practices.5 At the same time that leather was giving many middle-class gay men a chance to be “real men,” its pornography also cultivated a way of relating to others that took far stranger forms, providing another perspective on the vexed relation between male homosocial desire and aesthetic innovation that Michael Davidson associates with the masculinist poetic communities of the Cold War.6 While often resembling forms of violence or gross dehumanization that contrasted starkly with norms of safety, consent, and erotic mutuality, porn provided a language for modes of sociality that resembled kinds of objectification, degradation, and dehumanization and whose logic was best expressed in a phrase that appeared in an advertisement for an anthology of pornographic letters: “I am not just a human being, I am a piece of meat.”7

In addition to showing how gay pornographic writing mediated forms of gay subjectivity and intimacy during the 1970s, this chapter concludes by exploring its budding relation to gay literary fiction through a study of William Carney’s debut novel The Real Thing. Published in 1968 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Carney’s compact novel told a story of intrigue and revenge set within a clandestine gay leather and BDSM subculture. While Carney understood his novel as a complex modernist work, Putnam framed it for readers as a mix of fiction, sociology, and psychological case study that promised a slumming tour through one of the nation’s most perverse and thus most fascinating sexual underworlds. Unfortunately, critics failed to take the novel seriously, and it likely would have fallen into obscurity if not for the enthusiastic reception it received within the burgeoning pornographic counterpublics. As one pornographer put it, The Real Thing was “a landmark book for the leather set.”8 However, more than simply providing a register in which to revalue a novel that had struggled against the heteronormativity of the public sphere, gay pornographic writing also drew inspiration from Carney’s depictions of a “dark world of masculinity,” and the novel inspired at least one writer to adopt the plot for his own pornographic novel. As the history of Carney’s novel shows, gay pornographic writing was, in a sense, marginal, yet as such it provided an alternative means to value representations of gay BDSM that fed the production of markets for gay literary fiction and laid the groundwork for its legitimization, such that new editions of Carney’s novel could reappear as a “gay classic” marketed to gay readers by the end of the twentieth century.

Handbooks, Classified Ads, and a Magazine for the Macho Male

Neither Carney’s novel nor the wealth of gay pornographic writing it inspired were the first instances in which gay leather itself went public. By the early 1960s, mainstream publications had introduced their audiences to the leatherman through reportage ostensibly meant to educate readers on the general danger that male homosexuality posed to the moral fabric of the nation while titillating them with firsthand accounts of its underworlds. Perhaps the most infamous example appeared in the form of a pair of feature stories for the June 26, 1964, issue of Life magazine under the headline “Homosexuality in America”: “A secret world grows bolder. Society is forced to look at it—and try to understand it.”9 As Lee Edelman has argued, the feature exploited the anxiety generated by “the cultural invisibility enjoyed by homosexuals” by taking readers on a slumming tour through gay subcultural spaces,10 yet it opened with a photo taken inside San Francisco’s Tool Box, glossed as one of many “S&M bars (‘S’ for sadism and ‘M’ for masochism),” thereby identifying the leatherman as the exposé’s central emblem of maladjustment.11 Playing on the theme of indiscernible danger, the photo depicted a group of young men dressed in jeans, white T-shirts, and leather jackets milling about the bar’s darkened interior, thereby infusing an image of rebellious White male youth with a sense of perversity. With their faces shrouded by cigarette smoke and shadows, the men exude a conspiratorial feel, yet the journalist Paul Welch tempered any anxiety the photo might generate by noting the “obsessiveness” of the men’s efforts to “appear manly,” reassuring readers that despite such posturing homosexuals were doomed to a “furtive, hazardous, and lonely” existence.12 When the leatherman stepped onto the national stage, he did so unintentionally, as an example of social menace at once terribly thrilling and utterly impotent.

At the same time that mainstream publications were enlightening readers about the varieties of sexual perversion infiltrating polite society, many gay men were taking advantage of the changing legal and social context in order to produce a range of publications by and about themselves, often with mixed results. As David K. Johnson has shown, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed the efflorescence of a gay consumer culture premised on readers’ enjoyment of the male physique. Originating out of the health and fitness publications that had been a staple of the male bodybuilding cultures of the 1930s and 1940s, physique magazines appealed to readers with an interest in the male form. Widely available on newsstands and through subscription mail order, physique magazines sometimes utilized bodybuilding culture as a cover for readers with decidedly more erotic interests, yet the magazines themselves were not always so shy about their endorsement and promotion of male homoeroticism. “Far from being in the closet,” Johnson explains, “gay men’s place in bodybuilding culture was part of public discourse—the subject of frequent editorials, pop culture depictions, and discussions in both mainstream and gay circles.”13 Moreover, physique entrepreneurs were also interested in facilitating connections and exchanges among readers, which readers heartily welcomed. According to Johnson: “Physique customers responded to and encouraged these efforts as they came to understand themselves as part of a community of ‘physique enthusiasts’ enjoying and being excited by the same images, and being marginalized for that desire—even if it went unnamed.”14

The physique magazines, and gay print culture more generally, provided more than just an opportunity to connect with other men over the enjoyment of the male form. They also provided a shared set of images and language through which to imagine a kind of transhistorical sexual and gender identity. With titles such as Grecian Guild Pictorial, the physique magazines cultivated a sense of imagined community by constructing a collective history for readers rooted in notions of Greek homoeroticism, which it merged surprisingly with contemporary notions of Christian fellowship that valued exercise, clean living, and spiritual discipline.15 The manly comradery among physique aficionados provided an alternative means for many middle-class gay men to imagine a mode of homosexuality distinct from, not only the pathologized version circulating in popular discourse, but also the effeminacy embodied by the pansies and fairies of the working-class bar scene.16 “While those communities centered around bars and other sites of urban leisure,” observes Johnson, “the more masculine-identified gay men of the post-war period found community through a network of gyms, physique magazines, homophile organizations, and other nonbar settings.”17 At the same time, physique publishers such as Bob Mizer often employed young working-class men as models but presented them to readers in terms of a middle-class wholesomeness.18 Such effacements of the models’ class position both consolidated the physique magazines’ imagined community of masculine-identified gay men and mitigated the stigma of working-class queerness. In doing so, publishers also protected themselves from the threat of censorship that such vulgar association might engender. By the late 1960s, physique publishers had scored a number of courtroom victories, including those associated with MANual Enterprises v. Day (1962) and U.S. v. Spinar and Germain (1967), thereby clearing the way for the generally untroubled proliferation of print cultures devoted to the sexually explicit elaboration of gay masculinity in subsequent decades.

The classically inflected fantasies of the physique magazines, as well as the various problems that characterized their production, served as a precursor to many of the gay publications of the 1970s and beyond, including those associated with the leather subcultures. John Embry’s Drummer, which announced itself as “America’s mag for the macho male” is perhaps the best-known example. The magazine began its run following Embry’s work during the early 1970s with the Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (HELP), an organization founded in 1968 to provide legal services to gay men arrested in Los Angeles.19 After briefly helming editorial duties for the HELP Newsletter, which Embry had renamed HELP Drummer, Embry left that project to found Drummer in 1975. According to Jack Fritscher, who served as editor in chief of Drummer between 1977 and 1979, Embry largely abandoned any pretense to serious political discussion and reframed the magazine as a lifestyle publication dedicated to the elaboration of “homomasculinity.” The magazine’s title announced that project in two ways: it was at once a nod to Clark Polak’s Philadelphia-based physique magazine Drum and to the famous passage from the conclusion of Thoreau’s Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” which editors regularly quoted in the magazine’s masthead.20 In doing so, Drummer sought to counter the pathologization of male homosexuality while retaining its sense of antisocial danger. In the wake of Drummer and other instance of leather print culture, men such as Fritscher could look back on Life magazine’s “Homosexuality in America” and find a radically different meaning: “Long before the gay press was ‘legal,’ Life had discovered the Art and Lifestyle boom that something butch this way comes demanding civil rights. What a shock to American culture: Sissies wer...