I’m looking for a new job. You probably already knew that. It’s time to spread my wings, and leap off the cliff. Don’t get me wrong: The ledge I’ve been perched on these apst thirteen years is a well paid ledge, and I know the other birds around here by heart. But there’s only so much of the same old guano you can take.
Someone in my office just suggested, in slightly acidic tones, that I might be rather too fond of “The Liberal Intelligentsia.”
My response? “Well, yeah, I do like discoursing with my friends in the Liberal Intelligentsia, because, they’re, well, liberal. And intelligent. What’s not to like? Mind you, I’m sure, if I could find the good in the Conservative idiocracy, if only I was to spend enough time hanging out with them. But life is short, and I have to go buy a hat and some hotpants for Geri Halliwell’s Jerry Falwell’s funeral. La di da!”
With a thousand thanks and a million acknowledgements to Susan Stryker at Chronicle Books
Percy Fenster. Hot Pants Homo. North Hollywood, CA: All Star Books, 1964. Wayne, a ruggedly handsome jazz musician, is seduced by a beautiful blonde woman in the opening chapter of Hot Pants Homo, but he can’t consummate his passion because, in the memorable words of author Percy Fenster, “Wayne is a faggot, a queer, a homosexual.” After many bisexual excapades in which he tries to determine his true sexual identity, Wayne finally finds a woman psychiatrist who sets him straight. An inscrutibly confusing cover treatment for an inscrutably confused book.
Bud Clifton, Muscle Boy. New York: Ace Books, 1958. “Most men fall in love with women,” says the back cover blurb on this trashy novel, “but some men fall in love with themselves!” For naive teenager Jerry Carpenter, it’s a small step from narcissism to exploitation by gay blackmailers who take pictures of beefcake bodybuilders and peddle them to an underground network of perverts. The book fictionalizes a real-life blackmail ring that existed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s.
And my personal fave:
Helene Morgan. Queer Daddy. San Diego, CA: Satan Press, 1965. The whole family goes to hell in this over-the-top Oedipal nightmare from Satan press. Dad’s a homo with the hots for a tranny nanny, and Sonny lusts after his sexually frustrated alcoholic mom while little sis gets it on with the gardener. They don’t make them much queerer than this. I can’t wait for the Broadway Musical.