But here, you have two Cockney lads in a motorcycle gang they have no concept of same-sex love, nor do they even have words in their vocabulary like gay or homosexual. Of course, there had been plenty of other gay-themed books before it, but their characters were usually wealthy and well-educated and had the learning and culture to be able to look back to Ancient Greece and Rome or to more modern instances of homosexuality in literature, etc., to help them to understand the nature of their identities, attractions and desires. Of course, there’s the fact that it’s probably the first book ever to portray an authentic same-sex relationship between two working-class youths. There are so many interesting things about it. Its inclusion on that list made me assume it was probably worth checking out. I came across The Leather Boys (1961) because it had been reprinted around 1985 or so as part of the (now defunct) Gay Men’s Press’ Gay Modern Classics series, along with a lot of other great authors and books. In fact, I think I read each of them pretty much in one sitting because they were such page-turners. I really enjoyed The Leather Boys,too, as well as the other two books we’ve published by the author, Gillian Freeman (b.
I really enjoyed The Leather Boys-the working-class angle wasn’t something I was expecting from 1961-and then I discovered that it was also made into a movie.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we’ve also published the sequel (how many Victorian gay porn novels were good enough to merit sequels?!) to Sins, which is called Letters from Laura and Eveline (1883), and which is also bizarrely fascinating.
Wolfram has a really good discussion of this in his introduction to the book, and as intriguing as the book is, it’s even more amusing when you compare it to the “spiced up” version churned out by the anonymous American rewriter a century later. They rewrote all the sex scenes so that instead of showing Jack’s experiences as a teen, or his later experiences with both women and men, all the sexual episodes are with older, burly, hairy men. What’s really funny, too, is to look at the bogus version of the text that was published by a company called Badboy twenty or twenty-five years ago. The narrator, Jack, will pretty much sleep with anyone who comes along-male, female, younger, older. And, as you mentioned, the fluidity of the sexuality is really interesting. I’m not a big reader of porn-Victorian or otherwise-but one thing that strikes me about Sins is that, aside from the occasional old-fashioned Briticism, a lot of the porn passages seem astonishingly modern for a book from 1881. I think he saw that we had published the more famous Teleny, which has been attributed to Oscar Wilde, and thought Sins would go well with that one. Well, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain is definitely a surprising book in a lot of ways! I’d never heard of it either, until Wolfram Setz, a German historian who introduced the book for us, suggested it. So I’m curious about what’s surprised you as you’ve unearthed some of these texts. Kinsey must have creamed his jeans over this one.
In reading one of the gay Victorian novels Valancourt has brought back into print, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, I was first of all surprised that I’d never heard of this book, but I was also surprised by the fluidity of the sexuality therein. I’ve since chatted up one of the publishers, James Jenkins (his partner in books and marriage, Ryan Cagle, handles the horror side of the business), to learn more about some of the gay titles they’ve brought out. I immediately went to their website and was startled at the number of books that they’ve resurrected, and the obvious care and diligence that went into those books’ recovery. My friend Trebor Healey interviewed them recently at the Huffington Post, where I learned that they’ve been reprinting gay classics and Gothic and horror books since 2005. Intuition, coded cover art and friendly guidance has led me to many a title, and I’m glad that there are still surprises on this journey, chief among them Valancourt Books. The Stonewall riot may have been the start of a civil rights movement, but it was not the beginning of our history. There was always the possibility that I would find a rarity, or even a book previously unknown to me.Īs an adult reader, I’m continually surprised at the breadth and depth of gay fiction. James Jenkins: Publishing Lost Gay ClassicsĪs a young reader, several of my favorite science fiction authors were lamentably out of print, so a trip to a used bookstore was a treasure hunt.