The Meaning and Value of Homosexual Underground Literature

The word “pornographic” is one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. There are too many concepts and ideas, emotions and associations of ideas inherent in “pornography” for any clear definition to emerge. But we should not be frightened by this word, for it means many things to many people, but it is a very definite word. Let us think about it now.

The stories that follow this introduction would be called pornographic by most people. Pornographic literature has to do with literature that is intended to arouse sexual desire, to stimulate the sex instinct. It might be assumed by intelligent people that human sexual desire and the arousal of that desire would be considered good. But such, unfortunately, is not the case: the very fact that we have sexual feelings and thoughts is an acute source of embarrassment to many persons. There is, for them, the necessity to suppress these desires for the body of another.

Reason says that sex is a part of God’s creation; human beings have this urge because it is given by God Himself. Therefore, it cannot be “bad,” or “evil.” But, again: reason is not abundant in the world or among human beings. We are creatures of irrationality as well as endowed with the capacity to reason. It is this terrible fact that makes pornographic or erotic literature the scapegoat for ignorance and prejudice.

Erotic literature, then, does nothing more or less than serve to arouse the sex instinct. How long has the world had such literature and writings? The answer is: since the beginning of time. When we see the erotic drawings on a caveman’s wall, we know that he, too, had the need to express his lust in terms of words and drawings. So, the urge is as old as man himself.

In every culture since the dawn of history, man has inscribed on any surface, flat or round, his sexual feelings. Pornographic literature has never been defined to the satisfaction of any two people.

Disagreement is common; a common ground where jurists, lawyers, the public, the artist, the educator can meet does not exist and it never has. In the United States, as we approach the Seventies, there is a greater permissiveness and liberality toward erotic literature than ever before, but there is still great misunderstanding and persecution.

The publisher of homosexual literature has suffered greatly because of society’s anxiety over the existence and propogation of this kind of writing and photographic and artistic depiction. The question is: why should homosexual erotica be any less valid or acceptable than heterosexual erotica? Of course, reason clearly says that all erotica is human, and the fact that there may be less persons who happen to be homosexual than otherwise, does not serve as an excuse to condemn homosexual erotic writing.

In this collection of classic homosexual fiction (Black Knight Classics), the purpose of publication is quite obvious: this kind of erotica deserves to be published and read and appreciated. Those persons who believe in the validity of writing which expresses and causes sexual interest and arousal will applaud the publication of this volume. Those who do not or cannot believe in the freedom of the human mind to express its sexual life in writing, will condemn this collection.

For many years these stories could not be published in the United States without fear of imprisonment and harassment.

Many of these stories have found their way into private hands and collectors.

Many were smuggled from Paris and other underground sources. But the point is that these stories should have always been available precisely because there is nothing evil or wrong in them. The only thing these homosexual classics did is to express genuine human, inverted experience in terms of fantasy.

Is human fantasy to be outlawed by the state or by the individual? Of course not. But this is a world in which the human mind and the works of literature that flow from the mind have always been harassed and persecuted.

Let us think about the cultural background of pornography. The very word itself derives from the Greek word meaning “the writings of prostitutes.” Unfortunately, most prostitutes are not especially literary or literate. We do not have many who either had the time or the talent to hand down to us a literature of their sexual experience. And if it is to be truth-telling, we might also sadly realize that the one element of pornography, that it be imaginative in order to be arousing to the reader, is largely missing in most prostitutes.

Perhaps because they would rather “do” than “write” explains their inability to take up pen and pad. Pornography is based on the sexual instincts of man, his sexual fantasies about himself. All cultures in history have had a pornographic literature, whether open or in secret. This in itself proves that pornography or erotic literature is a necessary expression of human existence and creativity. That the law and the public often denies the validity of pornography only indicates the extent to which both the law and the people for whom it is supposed to serve are depraved, not pornographic literature in itself.

This introduction to our collection of classical homosexual literature is not meant to be didactic or “preach.” Neither is it intended to be defensive of pornography or of homosexuality. It is meant to show the humanity behind all pornography and to assert the essential goodness of this particular kind of literature. If this constitutes a plea or a need of justification, so be it.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were masters of pornography. We have ample proof of that. This fact is natural: they loved the human body and respected the human mind. Fantasy, for them, was a good and gracious gift, a gift that separated the animals from man. In our own time and in our own country, America, we have gotten away from the Greek’s respect for both mind and body. Our irrational attitudes toward pornography reveals our essential rejection of the Roman and Greek genius for life. It is toward respect for human life and its manifestation in homosexually oriented erotica that this volume is dedicated. If the problem of evil in this world seems to overwhelm us and distract us from the stories themselves, then this is further indication of our own rejection of human values.

The Romans and Greeks placed sensual pictures in their temples and bedrooms, which heightened their sexual activity.

Remember, such literature and art is meant to excite, to arouse human desire.

Even when the Church came to dominate the life of the Middle Ages, pornography still was being produced as part of the creative urge of man. Monks in their cloisters produced pornography which was enriched by the sense of evil and suppression which surrounded it. The mind of man was stimulated by the spirit of doom and suppression which characterized that time.

Many monks were known homosexuals. Their life together was often enriched by the so-called lewd stories they told to each other. Their erotic tales were singularly worshipful of men and of man’s penis. The fantasies of homosexual pornography always necessitated organs which were prodigious, untiring and huge. How else could man be stimulated except by writing of the ideal, whether that ideal was grotesque or not?

Much of the pornographic writings done by the monks in the Middle Ages was burned in public ceremonies, but some was preserved by hard-working monks who, knowingly or not, preserved it for history.

During the Renaissance that followed the Dark or Middle Ages, literary figures such as Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais, used that most magnificent of man’s inventions… the printing press. But the Reformation, spawned by Oliver Cromwell and Puritanism tried to put an end to the sheer sense of fun that those artists generated with their bawdy art. In 1661, Charles II, the “merry monarch” was crowned and pornography flourished during his reign. This lasted two hundred years! Printed material became more abundant than ever before. So much was produced that most of it is now lost, so great was the abundance.

In 1969, we in America are living in a similar period in which erotic literature or pornography is again flourishing. Obviously, this is so because the people make it so. There is too much human creativity to be stifled by outmoded laws and repressive laws. Booksellers and publishers meet the need for erotica because there is a market for it. Some demented souls in positions of power, the Anthony Comstocks and censorial hacks, call this market exploitive and evil. They think the sex instinct itself is evil, something to be suppressed. Therefore, the writings and visual arts which have as their base the human sex instinct are in themselves evil to them. But the evil is in the one who sees human sexuality as evil; it is not and never has been in the sexual experience or the depictions in literature and art of that instinct.

Henri Toulouse Lautrec once was confronted by an enraged woman who complained to him at one of his Paris exhibitions that a certain painting of his was pornographic. “Look at that man watching that voluptuous woman undress! And see those impressionable children also are exposed to her lewdness! I am ashamed for you, Monsieur Lautrec!” The artist reproached her: “Madame, how remarkably ignorant you are. The subject is a woman who is dressing in front of her own husband. Her children do not yet know that the human body is something that some evil persons want them to think evil. They are innocent. The woman is preparing herself for a birthday party for her youngest son. That is what my picture is about. Madame, I must ask you to stop looking at my pictures! I have always contended that evil people will see evil things.”

The artist was rightly outraged. Even Lautrec’s father saw his studies of Parisian night life in the famous Moulin Rouge as “obscene” and “indecent.” It has taken the judgment of literary and art history to make plain that father’s profound foolishness.

Western governments have always persecuted the public and the publisher of pornography. But pornography will not go away. Collections and volumes such as this one will be printed and will be bought, read, studied and appreciated because erotic art is art. The arousal of the sex instinct can exist alongside artistic considerations. This fact brings us to the subject of “redeeming social value.” Most judgments in “obscenity” cases involve a legal definition of pornography as literature or visual matter “utterly devoid of redeeming social value.” Such a definition betrays one misapprehension: even if there were such “redeeming social values” in erotica, or in a given book, photograph, carving or what-have-you… the very fact that the given allegedly obscene work arouses sexual stimulation and has that sole object as its function and result, does not and should not mean that the work is undesirable or unacceptable or to be outlawed. For we still hark back to the truth that human sexuality and all depictions of it are decent and honorable, not to be suppressed because they represent that which is both natural and good.

Still, the U.S. Supreme Court finds pornography to be a whipping boy and an excuse to persecute those who produce pornography. A Ralph Ginsberg is sentenced to prison for the manner in which he distributes and advertises his pornography or erotic works. “Pandering” of erotica suddenly becomes an evil thing when the truth is that all businessmen must “pander” their merchandise and make it desirable for customers to buy.

An automobile manufacturer panders when he advertises a car in a photograph in which a beautiful girl is shown caressing a young man. It is the car that has led the girl to dispense her sexual favors to the car’s owner. Buy a car like the one in the photograph and you, too, will get laid. This is the simple but unstated message which the automobile manufacturer gives. This, too, is pandering. What is the difference between that kind and the kind for which Mr. Ginsberg was sent to jail?

Nothing. Ginsberg mails his Eros magazine from Intercourse, Pennsylvania and this is pandering! The absurdity, the total viciousness and hypocrisy of the thing is almost too obvious for comment, is it not?

These stories in this volume cause no one to degrade himself. If a man is stimulated by them, well and good. If he goes out and finds a male sexual partner after reading one of these tales, that proves only that the writing stimulated his imagination and desire. The point is: his sexual desire, inverted or “normal,” is part and parcel of his humanity and cannot and should not be legislated out of existence by any censor, prude or literary sniper looking for “prurience.”

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that he could never succeed in intelligently defining what pornography is, but he adds somewhat ridiculously, “I know it when I see it.”

Pornography, to be “obscene,” and therefore prosecutable, must be, according to the most recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, “prurient,” or appealing to prurient interests; it must have “the leer of the sensualist” about it.

Analyze these strange criteria and you must reject them because they deny that pornography is acceptable merely because it arouses sexual lust. Fortunately for all those who sell or buy pornography and erotica, these works not only arouse, they tell us about the world we live in, they identify attitudes, describe society, and represent human problems and aspirations. Pornography, and these stories in this volume, also suggest social injustices that need correction. These stories are not devoid of social importance, and they were not padded with “social significance” in order that they might be legitimately sold. They always had something important to say about the human condition, even while they also aroused and amused, titillated and stirred the human imagination, the sexual fantasy, the erotic appetite.

The man on the street will tell you that pornography is “sexy.” He does not care that it is also educative or illustrative of man’s imaginative flight through his sexual world. But the Puritan and the censor rejects sex and sex depiction except where his own sex life is involved.

The man who cuts up the lesbian motion picture, “The Killing of Sister George” so the explicit sex scene at the film’s end cannot be seen by others… this is a man who has no right to prevent sex from being seen, however artistically, from public view. This hack, this morbid moral freak, treks back home to his dreary suburban wife at night, after his ax job has been accomplished, and he thinks he has done his job. Sex should be between married couples… period, he thinks. Who is he to outlaw lesbians or male homosexuals, or stories, films, plays, and other depictions of this sexual minority? The answer is obvious not only to the liberal but to the literate.

These bawdy stories have a Rabelaisian wit about them. Surely, they will become a part of the Vatican’s vast library of pornography. Betrand Russell once said, “Even frank pornography would do less harm if it were open and unashamed than it does when it is rendered interesting by secrecy and stealth. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young: the other tenth is psychological, and will occur in one way or the other whatever the state of the law may be.”

In 1967, the Danish government removed all restrictions on what could be printed and read by anyone over sixteen years of age. The result has been that sales of pornographic literature and art has decreased. The same trend has also been evidenced by the fall in the incident of sex crimes. Contrary to prudists, pornography does not stir up people to commit sex crimes. To the contrary, as in Denmark, the open availability of pornography calms the people and meets a need which is both social and constructive.

These homosexual tales will be read only by those who want to read them. No one is forced to buy this volume or to read the works herein. No one can prove that these stories will cause sex crimes. Indeed, we think that the stories will be utterly harmless even to those who find them stimulating. No one’s personal psychic structure will be altered by reading any book in this series of homosexual underground classics.

The U.S. Supreme Court on April 7, 1969, decided that it was unconstitutional for the State of Georgia to prosecute a man for mere possession of pornography in his own home. The man in question had reels of stag movies showing oral and anal sex acts between men and women in the drawer of his desk in his home. The First Amendment was invoked by the Court as the guarantee against infringement of this freedom.

The publication of works such as these is a joyous occasion for all who love freedom and want America to be a society in which the rights of minorities as well as the rights for a literature of the erotic are upheld. We are proud to present this epic work and hope that the spirit of man’s imagination, which is so richly contained in these prized classics of homosexuality, will burn brightly in future volumes we will publish soon.

Voltaire’s statement that “I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” has seldom been more applicable than it is on this rare publishing occasion.