Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps

by Michael Bronski

Long before the rise of the modern gay movement, an unnoticed literary revolution was occurring, mostly between the covers of the cheaply produced pulp paperbacks of the post-World War II era. Cultural critic Michael Bronski collects a sampling of these now little-known gay erotic writings—some by writers long forgotten, some never known and a few now famous. Through them, Bronski challenges many long-held views of American postwar fiction and the rise of gay literature, as well as of the culture at large.

Genres: LGBT, History, Queer, Nonfiction, Gay, Anthologies, Queer Studies

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Michael Bronski has written extensively on LGBT issues for four decades. He has published widely in the LGBT and mainstream press and his work appears in numerous anthologies. He is a Senior Lecturer in Women’s and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable anthology, criticism, and bibliography of nearly unknown works of gay literature from 1940-1970s. Highly recommended for collectors and general readers, too, for the lengthy excerpts from featured works. The Appendix, listing all the works known to Bronski for this interval year-by-year, along with a relevant sentence or two for each, is worth the price of the book itself, especially for collectors.

[Austin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad that I can’t track down most of the books excerpted here as they’re out of print and even the ones I could find were $100+. Enlightening and horny, a great combo for any work of queer research.

[Martin Fry · Rating 5 out of 5]

PULP FRICTION - Gay pulps- before and after Stonewall- are universally acknowledged for fantastic color images. I am hoping for an art book one day that will offer full sized high quality covers. There is a lot of material covered here briefly. If you are looking for an in-depth analysis this book doesn’t do that.
Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps by Michael Bronski

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and gay. Starting the year off right!

Bronski's anthology is more of an arc, safely channeling voices from a distant queer past to the present. Not all the selections are top notch (you saw "pulp" in the title, right?), but, for me, they didn't need to be. What I really appreciated was Bronski's appendix of gay novels from the 40's to the 60's. Serving as a reference work, this appendix has given me more reading material that I wouldn't have sought out otherwise.

[Ashley Lambert-Maberly · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars seems rather unfair, as if I'd hoped to pick up a tin of tuna and found sardines instead. That said, if the tin had "Sardines!" on the cover, I wouldn't have bought them.

So I rather expected this book to discuss in great detail "The Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps" as per the title, and there was some of that, but it really ought to have been called "Not Terribly Well-Written Excerpts from Books You've Never Heard of Featuring Gay Male Characters."

This book hits the anti-sweet spot in the world of excerpts ... rather than a paragraph or two to illustrate a point, it throws in entire chapters. So 80% of the book is you reading long, tedious excerpts (tedious because you don't care about the characters because you haven't been reading their book from the start, like when friends tell you commonplace anecdotes about their acquaintances whom you've never met. Tedious).

The author said they'd found hundreds of examples once they started looking—this isn't gay porn, this isn't even (again, despite the title), particularly pulpy stuff, as the 'pulps' would reprint tasteful hardcover books and overexaggerate any lurid elements for the sake of sales. I'd love to have read an account of those many books, perhaps with some assessment as to literary vs historical value (it might be nice to know that horribly-written book A features the first gay love scene, or that well-written book B is unfairly neglected as it rivals Barbara Pym at her best), but there's so little of that, and most of those hundreds of books mentioned only exist as data points to prop up that statement.

There is an appendix 90% of the way through (by which point I'd bailed) which lists significant books in chronological order, and is much more interesting than the many excerpts. He can absolutely write intelligently about the subject, he just didn't do so to the extent that I'd hoped.

To be absolutely honest, one of my all-time-favourite books was a series of excerpts: The Illustrated Treasury of Children's Literature by Margaret Martignoni. But there's a massive difference between what Bronski did, and Martignoni's approach: excerpting nursery rhymes (as this books begins with), poems (as it moves on to), tiny episodic stories from episodic children's books, and only as we reach the conclusion are there more substantial excerpts from novels, where the excerpts are carefully chosen to stand alone (for the most part, I'm not sure of the Dickens' excerpt, but it did make me want to try the original novel one day).

(Note: I'm a writer myself, so suffer pangs of guilt every time I offer less than five stars. These aren't ratings of quality, just my subjective account of how much I liked them: 5* = one of my all-time favourites, 4* = enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The sociology and socio-literary history in here is interesting, but hardly exhaustive. There are excerpts from representative novels mentioned but over all the book feels "lite". There's a bit of hard porn excerpted, but the most interesting parts are the way men and their interactions are portrayed and how different the social codes were in different eras. There is also the sad evolving of an understanding of homosexuality in the context of its historical marauders: the Church, psychoanalysis, and the ever present lowering visage of the law as interpreted and enforced by established & deeply malicious authorities.

[Robert Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very strange. It was brilliant when the author was speaking, but it was more of a showcase of the gay male fiction available from the 1940s to the 70s. It was about 80% excerpts from these book, with small bits of information from the author Michal Bronski. This book has its place, but I was hoping for more information about the industry and the struggles of the authors to have them published.

It could've been great and essential.

3/5

[S.E. Martens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gay and lesbian pulp fiction is this area where a bunch of my interests - queer culture, pop culture, literature, and history - all collide. The problem with this book is that it's given me such a long list of titles I want to try to find - many of which are of course out of print! I have a real fascination with forgotten books and I am in awe of the bibliography Bronski's compiled here.

Pulp Friction is very interesting as it gives lengthy excerpts - usually one or two chapters - from a variety of gay male pulp novels from the 1940s through the 1970s, as well as commentary and summaries by Bronski. Of course, the individual works vary in terms of "quality" and tone. As Bronski explains, many of these were written by first time writers and they didn't have editors. But I don't know that it's entirely fair to harp too much on the "quality" of the writing, given the time and circumstances in which these pieces were written. I'm just grateful they exist at all since, as Bronski notes in his introduction, they give us a window into another time.

The only thing I wish is that they could have reprinted the covers of these novels as well, since I love vintage book covers. And books that are collections of vintage book covers are one of my favourite things. Pulp Friction exclusively reprints the text, though of course the upside there is that you get lengthy excerpts and a real feel for the flavor of the writing. Since a lot of these are so difficult to find, it's much appreciated to get excerpts like those reproduced here.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have appricated more of an overview of the history then i got. The extracts were interesting to read but i wish there was more about the actual publication process

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The back half of this book is an EXCELLENT appendix/essay describing the notable and historic gay fiction of the last 100 years.

[Kurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the stories were kind of disturbing to me and some of them were just porn but I enjoyed this book a lot, reading gay stories writing from so long ago was fascinating

[Madison Huber · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting look at the evolution of gay pulps.

[Adam Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book but it took me many years to read it. I would start it and read a section and that would list ten other books I wanted to read and then I'd have to stop to read them. When I finally got this book in Kindle I was able to finish it, only stopping to read two pulps in the middle.
The great thing about this book is that it got me into the whole gay pulp phenomenon that I didn't even know existed before I read this book. The book is a wonderful gateway into a lost world of gay life and literature that many have over-looked and for that I'll be forever grateful. What I also liked about the book was that it included some post-1969 titles. After 1969 when the laws were relaxed about 99% of the books published became porn with a sex scene every three or four pages and not much plot, meaning they became almost impossible to read in later years. They served a purpose for the time but by having someone else go through them and pick out a few with literary elements or even exciting sex, the author has done a service.
I also agree that the notes at the end with a list of gay-themed books published by year is also invaluable. While I was reading it I was thinking how useful a list like this would have been to someone from the time period.
A final note on copyright, a few of these books have been reprinted now in E-reader form but many have not due to issues with copyright. I imagine that is the biggest challenge with putting a book like this together. For the few authors of these books that are still living the author obtained permission from them but for others the authors wrote under a pseudonym and either signed away their rights to book companies long gone or died without assigning rights to anyone creating a situation where the books become unpublishable. I note for a few of the books the author has permission to re-use the titles from two websites, one no longer in business and another that publishes a few erotic ebooks and doesn't publish any of the titles listed, so who knows how he got that to fly, but I'm glad he did.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a sometimes interesting, sometimes dull look at a neglected area of gay literature. The main thing about the provided selections that surprised me is how modern and non-judgmental some of them were. Several of the stories (especially the pornier ones) depict gay life (and sex) as normal, healthy, and enjoyable. Other selections that leaned a bit more toward higher literary aspirations even intrigued me enough to want to seek out the original novels ("Song of the Loon" is one example). Ultimately, however, a lot of the selections cover the same thematic ground, namely, being gay is a hard, lonely life and something that needs to be hidden, which I've heard quite enough of, thank you. Author/editor Michael Bronski's commentary is neither very insightful or interesting, mainly serving as an encyclopedic overview of the selection he's presenting, but he does point the interested reader in the way of other novels that one may not have heard about. Ultimately, Bronski's thesis seems to be that depictions of homosexuality in pre-Stonewall literature has been unfairly maligned as largely negative and depressing, and while a few of the selections he provides support that notion, the large number of them simply reaffirm what is already largely believed. An interesting historical document, perhaps even a gateway into gay literature for the interested reader, but nothing more.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first, I was a little disappointed with Pulp Friction. I was hoping for more of a historical perspective on gay pulps, and while there is a little of that, the book is much more anthology than historical exegesis. I got over that once I discovered how thoroughly entertaining the pulp novels themselves are. Bronski only gives glimpses of the novels, but he curates which portions to reprint exceedingly well. They give a give of the general plot and usually involved a sex scene, but they also ably demonstrate the diverse writing styles of the authors and how pulp content changed from the 40s to the 70s.

Just know what you're getting into when you start it, and Pulp Friction will be a great (and educational) read.

[eLwYcKe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although some of these excerpts made for interesting (occasionally quite horny!) reading, I do think what would've made it even more enjoyable is that the front covers of the books should've been shown too! After all, surely that's what first seduced the would-be gentle reader's gaze.
Some of the stories were terrific and I'd love to read the entirety of 'Gay Revolution'by Mr Miller, a witty take on 'Invasion Of The Body-Snatchers' seen from the view-point of the pod-people, only here 'pod' is replaced with 'gay'.

[Garnet · Rating 3 out of 5]

The tagline reads, "Uncovering the golden age of gay male pulp novels" This collection of excerpts from a variety of stories, is somewhat interesting in the fact that they are prefaced with an interesting introduction that attempts to place it in it's proper place in history. Having read the book, I realized that I now find reading passages of graphic sexual activity, strait or gay to be incredibly boring. I found myself skipping over several pages.

[Ruth Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this more than I expected to! Not all of the authors sampled here were gifted writers, but since the excerpts were only a chapter or two, they were still interesting as examples of various points the editor wanted to make. I totally want to find a copy of the pulp novel "Gay Revolution," about a scientist who discovers a drug that turns everyone gay and puts it in drinking water all over the world. The chapter included here was marvelous!

[H. Givens · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish he could've given us more than excerpts, but even those are interesting since these books are getting so hard to find. The commentary is excellent too, there's not a ton of scholarship on pulp, so Bronski is summarizing the history in a readable way but also offering details I hadn't found in any other book on the subject. I also love that he chose excerpts displaying both porn and politics, because they're intertwined in this genre.