So far my favorites have been the disgusting, lascivious male “madam” from Gay Whore, who mysteriously came out Southern. It can get tricky because I don’t read the books ahead of time-I’m reading it cold into the recorder-but I love doing voices for the different characters. Do you try to do different voices or otherwise “act out” the scenes?Ībsolutely. Making this podcast is a way of preserving these books and sharing them with people who would otherwise never have access to them.
They were the kind of thing that was hidden between your boxspring and your mattress and then when you died your friends threw them away with the rest of your porn and your dildos. These books were made to be disposable and most of them didn’t survive. There was a whole underground gay world that’s described in these novels, and that history is still barely being told. Stuff about the closet, about marriages of convenience, cruising for sex, cloak-and-dagger gay bars. Yes, there is a lot of sex, but there’s also a lot about what it meant to be a gay person in America in the 1960s, stuff that people writing it just took for granted. These books were written at a time when being gay was a criminal act and from a perspective that people born after Stonewall can’t imagine. They’re a time capsule, a primary source of an era in queer history. At the time, these were intended just as “spank books.” Why is it important we revisit them now? I read the chapters in order so that when each one is done it’ll become an audiobook. I choose which one to record by the salaciousness of the title and the blurb on the front cover.
Most of them are from a long-defunct imprint called French Line. She found out that I was interested in vintage gay erotica and entrusted me with a number of gay pulp novels she’d been collecting. I’m still in touch with the Assistant Dean of Students at my alma mater, DePauw University, who was also the queer-student liaison when I was there.