Looking For Gay Pulp Fiction? This Ivy League School’s Got It

While Ivy League university libraries are largely homes to scholarly works on the humanities, politics, and the sciences, the Brown University John Hay Library is also home to an archive of lurid paperback pulp novels dating back to the 1930s with such titles as Country Studs, Backdoor Boys, Arab Slave Boys, and Banged and Blown Behind Bars, to name just a few. The Ivy League school houses one of the largest collections of gay pulp fiction in the country—nearly 5,000 paperbacks, as The College Fix reported. The Brown University library gay pulp fiction archive started with a purchase of a gay pulp fiction collection, and later grew thanks to a donation from the estate of 1980s-era gay porn star Scott O’Hara, who was also the author of several books including the 1997 memoir of his career in the gay porn industry, Autopornography: A Memoir of Life in the Lust Lane. On his death at age 36 of AIDS-related non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1998, O’Hara donated a large cache of his personal papers and memorabilia to Brown’s John Hay Library. The bequest included O’Hara’s large collection of gay paperback novels. According to the gay pulp fiction archive’s curator, the collection of paperbacks in intended to preserve a time in gay history that was very different, and far more repressive, than exists today. “If you think about gay communities before the internet was around, before it was legal in many places to engage in gay relationships, in gay sexual activity, this was a way that they could kind of explore their interests, which is a pretty tame way of saying it,”  curator Heather Cole told WBUR Radio.  Though the gay pulp paperback genre dates back to the 1930s, the genre saw sudden growth in the post-World War II era, when the novels were generally referred to as “masturbation books.” Lesbian-themed pulp novels dominated the market in the 1940s, according to New York University, which also houses its own gay pulp fiction library.  But the 1950s “saw an increase in gay male pulp novels,” according to NYU, which were generally written by authors using pseudonyms—including several who went on to become leading gay and lesbian writers in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Ann Bannon, Phil Andros, and Jane Rule. Duke University is also home to a collection of several hundred gay pulp novels.  “These books, written primarily by gay men, offered readers insights into how gay men lived. They served as primers on gay cultural norms for newly coming out or isolated gay men,” the Duke University archive explains on its site. “At first, these gay-themed books did not acknowledge the possibility of a ‘gay life,’ just ‘gay sex,’ but as gay culture and politics developed, gay fiction reflected a new all-encompassing culture separate from the ‘straight world.’” Photo By Brown University Library