Michael Bronski is one of the great unnatural resources of gay and lesbian letters. He’s insanely well-read in a wide range of areas: fiction, politics, history, and theory. And he loves not only the printed word but film, music, and theater as well. I’ve known him for many years and am accustomed to conversations that swing from the singing of Eddie Cantor to the writings of Herbert Marcuse to the subversive pleasures of Dude, Where’s My Car? His new book, Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, paperback, $14.95), is an ingenious work of social history, a picture of postwar America built out of selections from paperback novels of the era, a revisionist history of love and sex from World War II to Stonewall and beyond. With smart commentary along the way and an invaluable bibliographical essay at the end, Bronski turns many of our conceptions of the past on their ear, offering not just humor and sex but new complications in the shock of the old. — Christopher Bram
Christopher Bram: Have you seen Far from Heaven yet? I couldn’t help thinking of your book while I watched the movie.
Michael Bronski: I saw Far From Heaven just a few days after I received the galleys of Pulp Friction, so the anthology was very much on my mind. I’ve been obsessed with the 1950’s these past few years. Reading all these novels has placed me in time-machine mode. So I experienced the Todd Haynes film as an amazing parallel trip. I liked the film—although it didn’t pack the emotional wallop for me that Douglas Sirk’s films do—but the scenes of Dennis Quaid’s gay life were very, very resonant of the novels I had been reading. Not only were the visuals just perfect—the gay bar, the second-run movie theater, the glances around the swimming pool—but there was a very authentic sense of desperation. Not a desperation generated by self-hatred, but a desperation that comes from eagerly seeking freedom in a repressive culture. This is precisely the emotional tension that you find in books like Harrison Dowd’s The Night Air or Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor. What I found most interesting, however, were the film critics who complained that Quaid’s character was given an unlikely happy ending—as if all homosexual stories in the 1950’s were mandated to end unhappily. Most of the novels I read did not have tragic endings. It is really a myth that all these pre-Stonewall novels end in total misery. We seem to want to see the 1940’s and 1950’s as a time of unmitigated queer-hating, without social, political or emotional nuance.
CB: You include selections from eighteen different novels. How many did you read to get to that?
MB: Well, I’ve been reading gay literature since I was a young teen in the early 1960’s, when I discovered “avant garde” magazines like Evergreen Review. And I read books like Song of the Loon when they were first published. When I seriously got down to looking for new titles for this book, I probably read close to 150 mainstream novels and another 125 porn novels. Part of what was so amazing about this process was that at points I became totally immersed in 1950’s culture and began discovering how incredibly diverse and complex its attitudes toward sexuality, gender, and sexual orientation were. I read most of Stuart Engstrand’s work. The Sling and the Arrow is a fascinating study of a transgendered person trapped in an emotional world he doesn’t understand. But his other work, including Beyond the Forest, which was the basis for a bad Bette Davis movie, is very complicated and progressive in its approach to human sexuality and desire.
Another thing I discovered is that it’s a mistake to separate the “gay novels” from other 1940’s and 50’s literary production. In so many ways gay and homosexual themes are intricately interwoven in all of this literature. Ideas and themes about queerness are intrinsic to widely praised novels such as James Jones’s From Here to Eternity and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead—but who actually writes about this? I don’t want to make the wild claim that all 1950’s literature is “queer,” but I do think that it has been a mistake to identify and “canonize” certain books of this period as “gay fiction,” because this allows us to ignore the rest of the popular and literary culture, which was obsessed with homosexuality and what it meant to be a man.
CB: But there was a staggering number of overtly gay novels published after the War. Most readers know about The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room, but they were a small part of a larger phenomenon. It’s even more startling than the change in books after Stonewall.
MB: The postwar years were a time when U.S. culture was going through incredible changes: World War II had profoundly questioned gender roles; the economic boom of the period generated such new phenomena as teenage consumerism; rock and roll brought a new level of sexualization to popular culture; the Kinsey Report told everyone how much sex Americans were having and how many queers there really were; and there was the birth of many, many new lesbian and gay communities in large cities as well as the advent of the homophile movements. I think this all led to an atmosphere in which homosexuality was very discussible. Don’t forget, most of the “gay novels” published in the 40’s, 50’s, and early 60’s were from mainstream houses and aimed at a primarily heterosexual audience. Straight people were apparently very eager to read about homosexuals, and not just for prurient or negative moralistic reasons.
CB: You sketch a fascinating history of small publishers here. People like Panurge Press or a house like Greenberg Publishers, which comes across as an unsung literary force.
MB: I think this is a great lost history of American—not just gay—publishing. Presses such as Panurge, Falstaff, and others in the 30’s pioneered the publication of more advanced, progressive and sexually explicit writing. They also suffered under censorship, and their editors and publishers often spent long spells in jail. While only a few of their publications were overtly gay, they really set the stage for the freedoms that came later. Greenberg was a small New York-based company that seemed to have a commitment to publishing gay material—André Tellier’s Twilight Men in 1931 and Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s two-volume 1919 lesbian classic The Scorpion, which was translated by Whittaker Chambers! They went on to publish such important books as James Barr’s Quatrefoil in 1950, and Donald Webster Cory’s groundbreaking The Homosexual in America in 1951. A great history of Panurge and other presses in the 1930’s is Jay A. Gertzman’s Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920–1940. These publishers are, in many ways, foreparents of gay publishing today.
CB: I expected lots of purple prose, but there’s a broad range in the writing here. Only now and then is the language as lurid as the jacket copy or cover art: a boat whistle like an animal being stabbed to death, or a face like chicken bones in a bag of jelly—both in The Night Air. But then you get nice, surprising metaphors like the men at the baths in Sam, who wear short robes that make them look like French children in smocks.
MB: I actually like “face like chicken bones in a bag of jelly”— it’s, well, unusual. But you are completely right. The writing in Pulp Friction really varies, but is generally of decent to very good quality. I think this is because literary standards in the 50’s, even for popular fiction, were fairly high, much higher than now. Lonnie Coleman’s work—two chapters from Sam are reprinted here—is excellent. He was an acclaimed postwar novelist who dealt with serious themes and is now only remembered (when he is) for his Beulah Land trilogy from the 70’s. The later books aren’t bad—the sexual and race politics are fascinating—but they are nothing compared to his 50’s work about race and sex like The Southern Lady, Ship’s Company, and Sam.
CB: But just because a novel is bad—or badly written—is no reason not to read it. In Maybe—Tomorrow (I love that dash; it takes us beyond Susan Hayward), we get some sublimely bad writing. “With a sharp jerk he untied his pajamas. They fell breaking about his ankles like hungry ocean waves.” But the chapter is probably my favorite in the book. A nelly teenager is nearly gang-raped in a locker room, but is saved by the school hunk, who then takes him in his arms and kisses him. It’s a classic bodice-ripper turned into a gay high school fantasy. And it was published in 1952!
MB: I love it when he goes to New Orleans to find “others like himself” and we are treated to situations and interior designs that could only be found in a queen’s home or a Douglas Sirk film. This is a very queer Far From Heaven.
CB: There’s a giddy pleasure in bad writing. I thoroughly enjoyed The Strange Ones, which has some of the most wooden dialogue I’ve encountered outside a Berlitz phrase book. “Please don’t let the prices worry you,” said Bruce. “I have plenty of money, but I’ll sign the check, so my aunt will really be buying the dinner. Don’t hesitate to order anything you want.” “Then I’d like another scotch, and the large shrimp cocktail to start with.” I like your comment in your intro to this selection that a fondness for progressive jazz is always a tip-off in pulp fiction that a guy isn’t quite normal.
MB: Also, it is unheard of to find a psychiatrist who is not Jewish. And the descriptions of gay men’s apartments almost always contain modern art or a statue of Michelangelo’s David. I am not saying these are all accurate forms of reporting—these are novels, not sociological texts—but they are indicators of how people experienced the world around them.
CB: There’s much good prose here too. Despite its title, Whisper His Sin by Vin Packer, a.k.a. Marijane Meeker a.k.a. M. E. Kerr, is clear and sharp. And Lost on Twilight Road by James Colton, a.k.a. the great, prolific Joseph Hansen, is very nicely written, and nicely felt.
MB: All of Vin Packer’s novels—published as paperback originals in the 1950’s and dealing with “hot” topics such as lesbianism, race conflict, teen gangs, adultery—are extraordinarily well-written. They are vivid, well-told stories—”ripped from the headlines,” as the covers tell us—but they are morally nuanced and sophisticated and very progressive. I really think that Packer is one of the great—and given that her books sold in the millions, one of the most important—fiction writers of the 1950’s.
CB: These novels are like good B movies. They’re often a bit bare and deliberate. In the middle of Pulp Friction, I reread a chapter of The Lost Weekend just to get a different tune in my head. That’s A-minus fiction where this is strictly B. And yet, we all love an occasional B picture, where, in your wonderful phrase, “emotions run high and realistic narrative often runs out.”
MB: Yes, but it’s often the B movies that make the most lasting impressions upon us. Also, I think a good case can be made for popular fiction—and B movies—being in closer touch with immediate social and political events. They get made and written faster and often with a clear audience in mind. Great art is, well, great. But a B novel like Valley of the Dolls or Maybe—Tomorrow or The Lord Won’t Mind or Song of the Loon can hit us where we live emotionally.
Christopher Bram is the author of seven novels, including Father of Frankenstein and The Notorious Dr. August. His new novel, Lives of the Circus Animals, will be published in October by Morrow.
