Queer Eye for the 50s Guy

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When my editor at St. Martin's Press asked me to do an anthology of pre-Stonewall gay male fiction, it seemed like an easy deal: How much could there be? Everyone knew -- or at least I thought I knew -- that the only gay literature that existed before the 1969 Stonewall riots and the advent of gay liberation were a few self-hating novels such as Gore Vidal's 1948 The City and the Pillar and James Baldwin's 1956 Giovanni's Room -- which end in either murder or self-destruction. Or there were trashy pulp novels with titles like The Tormented, The Divided Path, Lost on the Twilight Road, and Finistère that portrayed the worst possible images of gay life. I had been collecting these books -- with their lurid, campy covers and their outrageous cover copy announcing such sweeping themes as "A Surging Novel of Forbidden Love" and "A Homosexual Looks at Himself" -- for years, and making an anthology out of them seemed like it might be fun.

I began the project with a sense of ebullience -- after all, I was getting paid to read campy trash. But my research soon took me in an entirely unexpected direction. After a few weeks of finding and reading as many gay male pulps from the 1950s as I could, I realized that my basic understanding of gay male literary history was wrong. I had always believed that depictions of gay male life and themes were almost completely absent from mainstream publishing before Stonewall. I'd also believed that whatever literature did exist could be characterized as self-loathing. The more I read, the more I found novels like 1959's Sam, by Lonnie Coleman, which featured fully realized gay characters with complicated, productive lives. Sometimes these stories even ended happily. The first few times I found such books, I convinced myself that I'd stumbled onto a cultural quirk -- a novel that had been mostly ignored at the time of publication. But as I continued reading, the facts just didn't support this notion. Coleman, for instance, was a respected postwar novelist who later went on to write the best-selling Beulah Land trilogy in the 1970s. He could hardly be considered an obscure writer. (While many lesbian pulps were published in the 1950s -- the novels of Ann Bannon being the most famous -- these books were all paperback originals, written for a nonmainstream and nonliterary audience.)

As it became increasingly clear that my project, dubbed Pulp Friction by my editor, held the possibility of forging a new way of looking at pre-Stonewall gay literature, I stepped up my efforts to find more of these books. Feeling a little bit like Nancy Drew in The Secret of the Queer Plot, I followed up on every clue. A friend who is writing about labor history in Chicago mentioned that I might want to look at novels by Willard Motley. A few days later, I found a copy of his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door on the dollar cart at Boston's Brattle Book Shop. The book tells the story of Nick Romano, a Chicago kid who is born poor, goes bad, and ends up a cop killer. A best-seller when it was published, it was made into a popular 1949 movie with John Derek and Humphrey Bogart. When I began reading Knock on Any Door, I was amazed. Along with being a thief, Johnny is a hustler, and one of the book's other main characters is a gay man who pays him for sex and takes care of him. The novel is infused with a gay sensibility -- you can't beat Motley's lush, erotic descriptions of male beauty -- and the character of Grant Holloway, Nick's john, is the moral center of the story. A little research turned up the fact that Motley was gay, African American, and a leftist. He wrote four novels, two of which were best-sellers. He was considered a major American writer in the 1950s; today he is nearly forgotten.

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