Are Old Queer Books and Movies at Greater Risk of Disappearing?
Thoughts on my father’s gay pulp novel
When my father died seven years ago, I decided to take charge of his intellectual property. He’d written numerous pulp novels in the 1960s, several non-fiction books in the 1970s and 1980s, and a book about Jesus in the early part of the 2000s.
He’d also written a gay pulp novel.
My father was straight and a writer-for-hire. He’d most likely responded to the phone call he’d received in the mid-1960s about writing a gay pulp novel the same way he had responded to requests to write pulps about women having sex with dogs. How much will you pay me for how many pages? The book Sticking it to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 described my father’s book, The Self Lover by John Dexter (a house pen name used by many writers), as “unambitious” and “not particularly distinguished.”
I set out to republish a handful of the books for which he had owned the copyright, including The Self Lover, a ramble through Chicago history, racism, sexism, and violence (you’ve been warned). As my father’s lesbian daughter I felt it was a part of gay history worth preserving and worth making more available. The original paperback appears periodically in online used book marketplaces for about $20 or $30, but I wanted it widely available as an ebook. I set out to digitize it.
Readers of this article can download it for free at Smashwords by using code: EF58D; expiration January 14, 2027.
Not every author, filmmaker, or other creative professional has someone like me, a lesbian daughter already versed in self-publishing and willing to take care of their work. It got me thinking: Are old queer books and movies at greater risk than non-queer movies and books of being less available as time passes or at greater risk of disappearing completely? I started to look for the books and movies that made me the middle-aged mildly cranky dyke I am today. I asked my middle-aged queer friends about the books and movies that they hold dear and started to look for them. In the internet age when everything is available at all times and nothing needs to go out of print, how accessible were classic queer books and movies?
I first looked for Making Love, a 1982 movie that was one of the earliest to present gay relationships sympathetically. I was 12 when it came out. The movie was rated R, and I snuck into the theater with a bus pass forged specifically to get me into R-rated movies. This movie meant Harry Hamlin didn’t work for two years because he played gay and confirmed my lifelong crush on Kate Jackson. When I searched for it on our Roku, it wasn’t even listed as “unavailable.” It’s not listed at all and isn’t streaming anywhere, although an old DVD is available for about $15.
I did a bit better with Annie on My Mind, a landmark lesbian young adult book by Nancy Garden published in 1982. An ebook, audiobook, paperback, and library binding version are all easily available. Loving Her, the first African American lesbian novel, which was published in 1974, has gone in and out of print over the years, but it is available both as an ebook and a paperback. The Boys in the Band from 1970 wasn’t available for a long time until it was remade in 2020 and both versions became available more widely. Bound, the greatest lesbian movie ever made, is available everywhere and in multiple formats.
The novels of Sarah Schulman, one of my favorite lesbian authors of all time, are mostly available, but many of Patrick Califia’s books are out of print. Another Mother Tongue by Judy Grahn doesn’t have an ebook. The description on Amazon is anemic, although there are a handful of paper copies available. Alison Bechdel’s books are widely available, most likely because she has been so wonderfully successful throughout her career. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is available as a free downloadable PDF from hir website.
Patricia Nell Warren’s the Front Runner, the first contemporary gay book to make the New York Times bestseller list, is available as a paperback and an audiobook, but not as an ebook. The syndicated comic strip “A gay in the life” by John Sieruta that was once enjoyed by so many seems to have disappeared completely, possibly because it doesn’t look like the strips were ever collected into a book, although the Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green by Eric Orner lives on.
This unscientific, random and far from exhaustive look at the queer culture that made us who we are does point to the fact that in many ways our books and movies are more accessible than ever, but there are bits that are missing. I do wonder if the fact that some of the companies that initially brought us our culture have disappeared. Alyson Books, founded in 1980, dominated the queer publishing world for a long time. It was bought and sold and then disappeared. Naiad, which published so many lesbian books, is gone, although many of its books were transferred to Bella Books.
Also, not all of us have someone like me willing to put in the time to make it happen.
Why is this important? Culture disappears all the time. It’s one of the ways a culture can move forward and not be weighed down by its past. Was the contribution of my father’s book to the gay community worth maintaining? Maybe not, but I created an ebook version anyway. A reviewer on GoodReads of the ebook version said this:
“This book should come with a warning for the possibly triggering rape scene, and drink spiking, along with the plentiful amount of typos, turgid prose and changing character points of view….The author appeared to have a thing (not in a good way) about women and their breasts.”
My concern, however, is that, particularly for historically marginalized communities, when culture is lost or forgotten, we may find ourselves constantly reinventing the wheel and not moving forward. When something or someone is always the “first” at something, a community cannot progress. It becomes stuck.
So, what do we do about this? There are several companies working to keep our books and movies available such as Valancourt Books, but in a world where creatives can have so much control of our work, we need to do just that. We need to be in control of our work while we are alive, and we need to designate someone to control our work after we are dead. My father in the years before he died set out to collect all of the books that he remembered writing, a challenging task because few of them were published under his name and titles were sometimes changed in between the time he submitted the manuscript and the book being published.
I believe he was proud of his work, and he wanted his family to know about it. I’m proud of him, too, and his efforts meant that I could maintain this one little gay book.
