June 2003

--e*I*8-- (Vol. 2 No. 3) June 2003, is published and © 2003 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved.
It is produced and distributed at least quarterly through http://efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

By Earl Kemp

The 2003 Fanzine Activity Achievement Awards were presented in April 2003 at Corflu Badger in Madison, Wisconsin.

I didn't even know I was in the running for anything, so the announcement of the awards and the runners-up came as a total surprise to me. I felt very flattered indeed.

In the category "Best Fanzine," won by Randy Byers, Andy Hooper, and carl Juarez for Chunga, with 98 points, eI by Earl Kemp placed 12th, with 9 points.

In the category "Best Fan Writer," won by Randy Byers with 68 points, I tied with 6 points with Lenny Bailes, Alison Freebairn, Arthur Hlavaty, Jo Walton, and Kate Yule.

In the category "Best New Fanzine Fan," won easily by John Teehan with 36 points, I tied with 4 points with Julianne Chatelaine.

It was, as the cliché rightly states, a great honor to be included among the list of those recognized for their publishing efforts in the year 2003.

My ezine eI began in January 2002 and, after one and one half years of continuous publication, is now in its eighth issue. We are proud of ourselves and our early recognition as a promising neofan.

We thank everyone who voted for us and promise to try to do better this year. Watch!

#

IN THE LAST QUARTER, in the midst of losing a few stellar science fiction lights, among others, I lost two very good personal friends.

Henry Beck and I go back to the 1950s before the beginning of time. He was husband to the fabled Martha Beck and brother to the incomparable Sally Rand. Those of us who knew and loved Hank wish him well. We'll catch up later.

This is one of the few pieces of original artwork by Harry Bremner that I managed to save after it was used on the book cover of GC240. It represents Harry at his very best.

The second personal friend that I lost was my old working buddy, Harry Bremner. Harry actually died some time ago but they failed to notify me until now. From the mid 1960s and on into the 70s, Harry Bremner was Design Director of Greenleaf Classics, Inc. And he was one hell of a line artist. He could do just about anything with pen and ink and he had a great sense of line and balance, of color and perspective.

Working closely together with Robert Bonfils, the world's greatest cover artist, Harry's hand-lettered book titles and overall designs trademarked the Golden Age of Greenleaf sleaze, which, naturally, meant the Golden Age of Sleaze, Period.

Harry was an R collector…his secret middle name…and he used it everywhere. He was the Rt Department, for example, and he gathered his Rs where he found them and claimed them as his own and brought them home to his enormous R collection. And, Harry did something very personal for special occasions like birthdays…he would hand-make something quite special as a gift.

I have a number of those gifts and I treasure them very much…one or two of them will be used throughout this issue of eI in tribute to Harry's vast talents.

#

Lance Casebeer, The Godfather of Paperback Collectors, died in May. He was the Prime Authority on and Collector of complete runs of paperbacks of all paperback publishers, by publisher. He was also owner of The World Class Collection of paperbacks containing many known and verified one-of-a-kind items.

Then, too, the quarter saw the loss of John Foyster, Ben Jason, Roy Tackett, and Harry Warner, Jr., the senior historian and fanzine collector…

I have known Harry Warner, Jr. for over half a century, and found him often very helpful to me, including with my ezine eI itself. Way back when, in the 1960s, he was already recognized as the ultimate authority on science fiction fandom, fan editors, fanzines, and anything related. Along the way, he wrote thousands of articles and even more thousands of letters of comment to eagerly expectant faneditors, and authored two very essential books about the genre, All Our Yesterdays (Advent, 1969) and A Wealth of Fable (SCIFI Press, 1992). His unequalled collection of science fiction fanzines has been designated for the science fiction collection at the University of California, Riverside.

#

THIS ISSUE OF eI is dedicated to my good friend Louis Katz…attorney for the defense…man among men; Give 'em hell, Lou!

And, as always, everything within eI bearing my byline is part of my in-progress, rough-draft memoirs. I would appreciate any corrections, expansions, illustrations, photographs, jpegs, etc. that you would care to pass along to earlkemp@citlink.net and I thank you in advance.

My insufficient gratitude, as always, goes to my partner Bill Burns who not only makes eI possible but also manages to make me look good at the same time. If there was ever a man who has more than earned his awards for significant efforts on behalf of fandom…he is Bill Burns.

For this issue, I am pleased to announce the addition of a new staff member. Dave Locke has joined the eI staff in the position of Grand Quote Master. His subtle handiwork can be found separating the articles throughout this issue and they are well worth the price of admission alone.

We are very pleased, this quarter, to bring you Victor Banis' third installment in his "Virgin" series plus the long-withheld second and final part of Stephen J. Gertz' "A Galaxy of Porn in San Diego."

Many people made this issue of eI possible. Here are a few of them: Victor J. Banis, Robert Bonfils, Harry Bremner, Bruce Brenner, Stephen J. Gertz, Alexis Gilliland, Dwain Kaiser, Terry Kemp, Tom Lesser, Lynn Munroe, William Rotsler, Robert Speray, and Charlie Williams.

In fact, Charlie's artwork, "Gotcha, Fucker!' Portrait of The Evil One as Richard Nixon, in "Taps," merits special mention and a long, hard look into the face of the criminally depraved past.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
                  --Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg Trial

All of Us Virgins*
Or I Lost It at the Book Store

By Victor J. Banis

Victor Banis in 1996.

Years, years ago, in a world far, far away, I wrote a query letter to Publishers' Weekly suggesting an article on the California paperback publishing industry. Naïve, perhaps, but bear in mind, I was only recently bereft of my virginity.

"We are not interested in material on California's sex publishers," that magazine sniffed in reply.

Well, yes, Auntie Em, there was sometimes a sexual element to what was being published in the sixties in California, though I don't think it behooves you to be too disdainful. Let's see if I have your family story right: a tornado picks up the clan's manse and drops it into a strange place thousands of miles to the west. Within minutes your niece has encountered an old bag with a shoe fetish and a suspiciously happy fairy, she is glorified by the "little people"-who, after all, define "star"--and before the day is out she's on a trip with a heavy metal dude who pesters her for lube jobs, a guy with no brains, and an enormous, if timorous, pussy. Tell me we're not talking California.

Let's face it, if the Constitution had been written in California, the Bill or Rights would have addressed a number of sexual questions directly.

Nevertheless, Auntie, the California publishers of the sixties and seventies did not invent sex and they surely weren't the first to think of using sex to peddle their books. There are some covers on Fawcett and Gold Medal books from the fifties and sixties that make the covers of Greenleaf and Brandon House Books look like kindergarten primers. And Greenleaf Classics and Brandon House had better artists, too.

What the California guys did that was different was they just said that sex was okay (I know, you are saying even now, "So California…") and then they refined it a bit. In case you didn't know what to do with those old leather portieres, for instance, Larry Townsend was now available to give advice.

But the real point was, no more skulking and hair shirts. Well, yes, I can see that there might have been one or two individuals with hair-shirt fetishes, and I have no doubt that somewhere along the way a book or even two addressed that particular subject-I shall have to ask Earl.

I will confess, I myself never got much past Gay Sex 101, but there is a limit to what you can expect of a fifties boy from the Midwest Bible Belt. I was well into adulthood before I even learned what "shrimping" was. Hmmm. All right, I can see that my little toes resemble shrimp, sort of; in any event, as closely as they resemble piggies. And it was just last year that someone explained "figging" to me. Now, for those of you scratching your heads (or wherever), figging involves slices of ginger and anal cavities and I shall leave you to figure out the details for yourselves. Who thinks up these things anyway, is what I want to know? I mean, there you are in your kitchen, whipping up a stir-fry, and…well, it seems like quite a leap of imagination if you ask me. And please don't talk to me about bell peppers.

Somebody explain something to me. I can sorta understand homosexuals who are into being feminine and, in essence, adopting the traditional female role. But I don't understand homosexual men who are into sex with virtually female men. Why not just get a woman? Or sex with a man. I really don't understand it.
I mean, I know people do it and God knows I've known all kinds of explanations, rationales, or whatever over the years. Am I strange or something? Perhaps not empathetic? I can understand sex with another man (as a man) better than I can synthetic females.
I suppose it is mostly mental, i.e., different attitudes. A woman wants, expects certain things, tangible and intangible. A man, as a woman, perhaps wouldn't. There is enough sexual variety in my readership that I know someone will have some kind of explanation for me.
                  --William Rotsler 19 Mar 84 Masque

But I was discussing the East Coast prejudice toward California publishing, wasn't I? I don't know exactly how anal cavities got into it, these things just have a habit of getting away from me.

Anyway, I want to tell you that by this late date that anti-West-Coast bias has disappeared from the publishing world.

I really would like to tell you that, but alas, it isn't true, the eastern publishing scene is still as New-York-centric as it ever was.

Cover design for Victor Banis' Only A Boy by Harry Bremner.

I recently read, for example, Pulp Friction by Michael Bronski (St. Martins/Griffin Press). Bronski is unquestionably today's premier chronicler of gay culture and gay history, which I feel makes it all the more unfortunate that his take on the subject is so geographically lopsided.

For instance: to attribute One magazine (which was published by One, Inc. in Los Angeles) to San Francisco's Mattachine Society (who published their own Mattachine Review) is an unfortunate mistake that at the least ought to have been caught by his (New York) editor, or certainly mentioned in one of the many and glowing reviews by (New York) critics. Those two organizations and their publications-the first in this country--were important, indeed major elements in gay history, and deserve to be treated with a tad more respect.

More telling, however, is the emphasis on early East Coast publishers of gay material coupled with the almost total indifference to anything west of the Pennsylvania turnpike. Greenberg Publishers, an early operation in New York City, and H. Lynn Womack's Guild Press out of Washington, DC get a page each. (As an aside, I might mention that I was approached in the late sixties by Womack, to see if I might be interested in writing for him - alas, Womack was notorious for not paying his writers, and I declined the honor.)

I don't mean to disparage those Easterners whose early efforts made a real contribution to our eventual freedom. It is just that, in contrast, Fresno publishers Aday and Maxey, whose 25-year prison sentences for publishing gay paperbacks remains one of the most infamous chapters in our story, get no mention at all. Not a word about Milton Luros. Sherbourne Press gets a single nod, and Greenleaf Classics is named only as the publisher of several of the books from which Bronski quotes.

By the by, Bronski also denounces as a myth the long held view of pre-Stonewall gay fiction as guilt laden and tragically ended, without making clear that this becomes a myth only when one includes the gay material published from the mid-sixties on…which is to say, mostly the products of the West Coast pulp publishers, and most of that from Greenleaf Classics.

The difficulty, of course, comes with that "pre-Stonewall" point of demarcation. I've touched on this subject before and, really, the dividing line as I've already suggested should be Before Earl Kemp and After Earl Kemp. If you look at these pulps from that angle, you will find that the earlier novels-and there were no more than two or three dozen of them-were indeed crammed with guilt and shame, and with rare exception did end in tragedy.

While publishers of the fifties and early sixties were not bound by anything so rigid as the movies' Hayes' Office code, neither did they exist in a vacuum. You could write about or publish all sorts of "sinful" behavior, and make a case that you were simply educating the reading public to the existence of such wickedness-presumably so they might be motivated to stamping it out.

You could not, however, be seen to espouse such behavior-say by showing happy homosexuals, which would have left you open to legal difficulties, even criminal charges. And, yes, Dorothy, that did happen. The postal authorities refused to mail an early issue of One, for instance, because it had an ad for the Swiss magazine Der Kreis. The trial judge read that particular issue of Der Kreis, which included a story by Rudy Burkhardt named "All This and Heaven Too" (with no actual sexual content), and declared, "Such stories are obscene, lascivious, and lewd."

So, it was not just a tradition, but an important legal defense, in publishing gay novels, to show that these were bad people doing naughty things, for which they must be punished by book's end, either by cure or kill.

I've already pointed out at length that it was the arrival of Greenleaf Classics-and more specifically of Earl Kemp-that so dramatically and forever changed the nature of gay publishing. Writers like Chris Davidson (A Different Drum, EL381) and Marcus Miller (The Mother Truckers, CB558) now wrote about characters with complex emotions and sexual desires whose stories often do indeed turn out happily - which makes it I think peculiar that Bronski, otherwise so erudite, seems not to know of Greenleaf's role in this subject - or, chooses to ignore it, which may be that ol' East magic at work again.

What is odder still, at least to me, is that there is probably no publishing house with such an intriguing history. Earl has already told that story elsewhere, at length and far better (and, let's face it, with more insight) than I could. But the very secret "black box" nature of the enterprise is wonderfully intriguing, isn't it? So secret society. Not to mention the coming together of big name literary agent Scott Meredith and sci-fi/fantasy Wunderkind William Hamling, for the specific purpose of creating a "porn factory."

And I am quite sure that no one else in the pulp field had such an A-list of authors who became overnight porn virgins, a status that seems to me to merit mention. Though to be honest, if John Jakes ever pens an autobiography, I doubt very much if he is likely to mention writing steamy paperbacks for Greenleaf as J.X. Williams, or Hal Dresner as Don Holliday. Likewise Evan Hunter, whose left-handed material was published under the Dean Hudson pseudonym. Donald Westlake wrote as Alan Marshall, Lawrence Block was Andrew Shaw, and there were others (Richard Curtis, Robert Silverberg, Marian Zimmer Bradley, etc.) who would surely raise an eyebrow.

My point is not outing these authors, but that there surely wasn't another "porn" publisher with an author's stable like Greenleaf's. I should think if you were going to write of the pulp fiction scene, those names would be irresistible.

Well, I wasn't among that august group myself-I was more the B list, or maybe J or KY - and I've already written elsewhere of the loss of my virginity - a tragic tale and one which really needs a Bronte or a Flaubert to do it justice. But I was not alone in my loss. Sam Dodson (Donny and Clyde by Sam Dodd), John Maggi (Go Down In The Valley by John Maggi), Harold Harding (Murder On Queer Street by Gene Evans) George Davies (Lights Out, Little Hustler by Lance Lester) - in a sense, the suddenness of Greenleaf's impact on gay publishing had made virgins of us all.

We were in uncharted territory certainly, and it was indeed a heady experience. If we mostly didn't start out to be heroes, we certainly knew that we were changing the publishing world - and most decidedly the gay publishing world - in ways that only a year or two earlier we could not have imagined.

It wasn't only me and my writers, of course, nor was it only Greenleaf. Despite the scarcity of gay material and the risks of publishing it, Barney Rosset published John Retchy's City of Night in 1964, a landmark not simply in gay publishing but in gay literature. And Lonnie Coleman's Sam did indeed have a happy ending, all the way back in 1959 (a fact celebrated in Der Kreis). But these were exceptions.

From the mid-sixties on, Earl and Greenleaf were committed to stretching the boundaries so far as printed material was concerned. Richard Love's Loon Trilogy, for instance (Song of the Loon, Song of Aaron and Listen The Loon Sings, by Richard Amory) created a sensation when they appeared in the late sixties, as much for their cowboys-and-indians-in-the-bushes subject matter as for the state-of-the-crotch sex. Song of the Loon was made into a 1970 movie, certainly a breakthrough in gay history (it was not the first gay film, however; that distinction belongs to The Gay Deceivers from 1969) and the books inspired a spoof, Fruit of the Loon by Ricardo Armory, none other than old friend George Davies - though it seemed to me that the original trio were spoofy enough on their own. In West Hollywood circles, the novels' characters were affectionately known as The Loon Ladies.

At the same time, others were challenging the old rules in various fields. Now, the restrictions on gay stories were nothing at all compared to the terror inspired in governmental quarters by the depiction of any sort of male nudity, gay, straight, or sideways. I have never quite understood this. After all, the body is where we live, like it or not. Some call it our temple (though I may as well confess, a friend accuses me of treating mine over the years as more of an amusement park). And if you are going to be entirely frank, the penis is what the male body is all about, isn't it? I mean, the whole point? Face it, a man can do whatever he wants with his toes or his nose, but unless the big sausage is involved, it isn't going to result in any little wienies.

The ancients understood this. The Egyptian God Atum boasted that with his fist as a spouse he had created every being. No penis panic there. And the Greeks weren't the least bit shy about male nudity. They saw the erection as a symbol of the spiritual life force - remember those dinner plates in La Cage Aux Folles? It is worth mentioning, I suppose, that the Greeks mostly admired the small and delicate appendage, a preference that got turned about somewhere along the way, I'm not sure where, but certainly before that enormous spewing all over Pompeii.

Size aside, the Romans mostly took their cues from the Greeks, only they got even bawdier. Charlton Heston notwithstanding, it wasn't all chasing one another around the Coliseum in fancy buggies and making eyes at childhood boyfriends.

It was the Chinese who messed things up with that wall of theirs (now there's an erection!). Stymied, Mister Atilla told his followers to "Go West, young Huns." They ended up in Rome and that toga party came to an end. The hangover that followed is called the Dark Ages, and not because they lacked lamp oil. St Augustine declared the penis "the demon rod," and seemed to think of semen as some sort of "toxic glue" that made all sex just plain dirty. How much fun could you have with that hanging over you, so to speak?

Now, since I have mentioned the dark ages, I suppose this is as good a time as any to make a confession. In the late sixties, inspired by the success of Fanny Hill, publishers turned their attentions to classical erotica. The very fact of their age gave these writings a cachet that made proving obscenity difficult, and it was not much of a problem to find experts willing to testify to their literary worth. Trouble was, there were only so many of these old gems lying about.

This fantastic cover design was done by Greenleaf Classics Design Director Harry Bremner.

Then one day I had much the same thought I had had a few years earlier, when I first started looking at these sexy pulps in a Hollywood book store: "By golly, I could do this." So I reread Fanny Hill, The Memoirs of Cesare Borgia and a bit of de Sade, and wrote Friar Peck and His Tale - by anonymous.

In a scholarly introduction, Douglas H. Gamlin, Ph.D. [Donald H. Gilmore, Ph.D.; see "The King of Somewhere Hot," by Earl Kemp, eI2, April 2002], compared the book to Spenser, Chaucer, et al, and hedged his bets by stating that writing suggests "deep research on the part of the author or, indeed, that the author did exist four hundred years ago."

Despite such a coy hint, Friar Peck quickly became accepted as an authentic piece of 16th century erotica, and still appears as such in book catalogs. So I did make a contribution to the literature of the Dark Ages, although I'm not quite old enough to have lived through them.

But I have once again digressed. It was the male body about which I was writing, and its virtual banishment in those Dark Ages. Well, heck, practically everything fun disappeared at that time, didn't it?

The body made a sort of a comeback with the Renaissance, but then things got worse with the Victorians. By this time masturbation had become an "illness," and the doctors of the time were wont to treat it with leeches. So, if your doctor asked how you felt about getting sucked, it wasn't an invitation to romance. Freud managed somehow to hang everything but the family wash from that convenient pole. The only good thing was he passed on the leeches, but nevertheless you were damned if you had one and damned if you didn't.

By the nineteen twenties and thirties, everyone had relaxed a bit. In the movie Ecstasy, Hedy Lamarr romped in the raw, and the Elmo Lincoln film version of Tarzan showed not one but two frontally nude Tarzans - an uncredited boy of twelve or thirteen and Elmo himself, both showing off their monkey business.

Of course, in no time at all, the Hayes Office had put a stop to that kind of show and tell, and once again we went back to considering our all-together as all together naughty. Or at least being told by those who supposedly knew better than we did ourselves that this was how we were supposed to consider it.

The point I am making here is that male nudity has had a confusing history. The ancient Greeks showed their women tastefully draped while the boys got to show it all. Somewhere along the way, that got completely switched about, so that by the fifties and the sixties, female nudity had become mostly acceptable to the watchdogs of our morality, but it was still a no-no to show the boys hanging around.

In the early sixties, Bruce of Los Angeles - otherwise known as Bruce Bella, who asserted that any man could be persuaded to pose naked in return for a few of the pictures - had the ingenious idea of picturing fully nude males with a posing strap or bathing suit painted on in water soluble paint. Thus the pictures as mailed to you were not nude, and when you had them at hand you need only run them under the faucet in the privacy of your kitchen and voila, the meat is delivered, so to speak. Unfortunately, you were left with some peculiar wrinkles just where you were expected to burst into, "Mine eyes have seen the glory."

Anyway, the postal people weren't amused. Bruce actually spent time driving around the country peddling his wares from the trunk of his car, and so avoiding the postal system altogether for a while, but there were plenty of other watchdogs determined to keep us safe from the visual threat of Mister Woodie.

In 1964 Conrad Germain and Lloyd Spinnar, the owners of DSI, a mail order operation based in Minneapolis, decided to set Mister Woodie free and began mailing full frontal nude photos without any painted panties to mute the Hallelujah chorus. There was certainly nothing sleazy about their products, high quality photography printed on top grade paper, much of it in book form, bound in faux leather and interspersed with educational or amusing articles - as, for instance, my "Johns I Have Known and Loved," a collection of restroom graffiti.

It was predictable that Lloyd and Conrad would go to trial for their daring, and something of a surprise that they won their case. For the first time, the courts had conceded that male nudity was not in and of itself obscene.

Things were changing. We were there in all our glory - well, not all our glory, the question of the stand-up model still waited to be resolved, but we had gone from doing it in the dark to doing it in the light, and from covering it up to showing it all.

And talking about it in print. Only a few years before, book editors had been careful to avoid even the slightest hint that we spice things up a bit - a suggestion that might have worked against them in an obscenity trial.

Now our editor at Brandon House, Yvonne McMannus, was exhorting us, "I want to taste that dick, I want to smell that pussy!" Which you have to admit is relatively unambiguous.

AC-DC Stud, by Victor Banis; cover painting by Robert Bonfils.

Again, it was of course Greenleaf that led the way, but as I have said before, pulp publishing in California was like a small town, everyone knew everyone, and what everyone else was doing.

As writers, we made it our business to keep abreast. Each month my friends and I would dash up to Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Circus Books was our neighborhood paperback store, where you went, for instance, to pick up the latest Jackie Holmes adventure.

We browsed, we peeked at the latest releases; we noted every "cock" every "pussy," every "fuck"-and then rushed home to see if we could push the boundaries just a teensy bit further. By the end of the sixties, there was scarcely a one of the heretofore-taboo words that we weren't using regularly. "Motherfucker" was, I believe, the last hold out.

Now, I know that some may wonder if it is really necessary to use "motherfucker" in a book. Perhaps not, though as a writer I can easily imagine that there might be a scene in which that would be the ideal word to convey what the author wanted to show.

Of course, the point isn't really whether "motherfucker" matters as a word, it is about freedom of expression, freedom of speech, which is the foundation of all free society, isn't it? Quite honestly, I look back at what I did then and it seems to me now that some of those books of mine might have been better with less sexual frankness. I think that I simply got caught up in the exhilaration of doing what it had not been possible to do before, in the feeling of liberation.

I have read criticism, both direct and implied, of the profits that publishers like Hamling and Luros made from peddling sex. The guardians of our morality never missed a chance to stress their "obscene profits." I have no doubt that Hamling and others did make money, perhaps lots of it, though they never showed me their profit-and-loss statements. I can assure you, by the way, that they also spent a pretty penny defending themselves in legal battles. Anyway, in a capitalistic society, it seems to me that making money is the point of going into any business, whether publishing sexy paperbacks or peddling girl scout cookies.

I can't say either that I didn't make money. Some years I made quite a bit of it, and I assure you it was every cent guilt free. The concept of starving artists may appeal to the book reading or movie going public, but it is considerably less attractive to the starve-ee.

I can honestly say, however, that in all my years in the pulp business I never met a single individual - publisher, editor, writer, artist, photographer, model - who was in it solely for the money. Without exception, all of them - all of them that I met, and that was quite a few - believed sincerely in the ideal of freedom of expression. We saw ourselves as fighters in a battle for the rights of all artists, of all Americans. And we were committed to the winning of that war. It would have been insanity to continue as we were otherwise, living as we did with the daily risk of arrest, trial, and imprisonment.

Elsewhere in Pulp Friction, Michael Bronski makes the statement that "by 1967 the battle against censorship had fundamentally been won." Hmm. Well, if that were so, why were all of us in California walking on eggshells? I think that is just another example of the New York perspective. I suppose viewing the battlefield from Greenwich Village it might well have looked as if the war was won - by that time, the federales were concentrating on rounding up those of us out west. Certainly in 1967 the trials went on as did the day-to-day harassment, and we were all of us ever mindful of the risks we were taking.

So, no, Michael, it wasn't over in 1967. And yet, so swiftly were things changing on every front that only a few years later, by the early seventies, it actually did seem as if we had rounded the corner and were in the home stretch. Fortunately, because I was getting a little saddle weary.

By 1972, the Chinese year of the cock, Burt Reynolds had bared it all in Cosmopolitan. Or nearly all, and what he had coyly covered could be seen openly in clubs and bars in practically any city. The April 1970 Penthouse eschewed Playboy's carefully airbrushed centerfolds and showed pubic hair for the first time; within months Penthouse had graduated to split beavers.

Sam Dodson in Monte Carlo. Photo by Victor Banis dated 1966.

In 1971, Sam Dodson and I were guests at a San Diego party hosted by Greenleaf. The purpose of the gathering was to present certain writers with royalty checks and or accolades. I'm sorry to tell you that, though I brought with me bank deposit slips and a prepared acceptance speech, I found I had need of neither.

I did have the always pleasurable opportunity, however, to chat with Earl, and as it invariably did, the subject turned to the ongoing struggle for freedom of expression. I asked Earl at the time if he agreed with my assessment that perhaps the worst of the battle was behind us. He was very up then, riding the crest of the wave left behind by his massive slam at Nixon, The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography that had closed out the previous year like Dorothy's tornado ripping through the political countryside.

"Damn right," he told me. "We finally got those crooked bastards up against the wall."

#

Unfortunately for all of us, that party was in February, only weeks before Earl's indictment announced by the Justice Department, Mr. future criminal John Mitchell in person, in early March. But we didn't know that yet, and we were all feeling pretty proud of ourselves at that gathering of gay sleaze elites.

The mood was optimistic. Certainly the early seventies were the golden age of porn movies. Those grainy 8-millimeter films of the fifties and early sixties had become relics of the past, seemingly overnight. Porn movies now played in real theaters, often very plush ones like the Pussycat Theater chain. Directors put their names, though not always their real ones, on their films. Lighting, costumes, sets, camerawork, all were the work of professionals, often very good ones.

Behind The Green Door opened to standing ovations at the Cannes Film Festival. Crowds flocked to theaters to watch The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat, both ranked with the top-grossing films of all time. Movies like The Opening of Misty Beethoven and The Legend of Lady Blue, with intelligent, witty scripts, starred drop-dead gorgeous actors and actresses-some of whom, like Jamie Gillis, came from the New York theater scene with legitimate acting credits.

The sexual revolution was in full swing and the gay revolution that had begun in Los Angeles and San Francisco - and climaxed with those first few dancing feet outside Stonewall - was now a major chorus line, and a high stepping one indeed.

In the publishing world, there were still trials in progress, but it had begun to seem impossible for the prosecutors to win convictions, or to sustain them through the appeals process.

The Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, issued in 1970, pooh-poohed the idea that heaving bosoms and swollen manhood was in any way threatening our American way of life.

Now, I might as well tell you the truth, up to this point those East Coast boys were still lagging behind, though they were many of them quick to cash in once we had won a battle for them. DSI's victory launched a thousand dangling fancies, and publishers like Maurice Girodias were quick to echo every "cock" or "pussy" that appeared in a Greenleaf book. Chickens that they were, though, they waited to be sure the cocks weren't going to lose their heads in the courtroom. Let it be said, the front lines in the war were never over crowded.

Even the noblest institutions trailed shyly behind the West Coast warriors. It was 1976 before The New York Times convinced themselves to use the word "penis" in print, and as late as 1985 the Times still would not use the word "gay" to denote homosexuality.

July 10, 1969 was a red-letter day for me. I marked it so I would never forget it. That was the day when I first saw the word "fuck" used in a major metropolitan newspaper. Not only that, it was on the front page…of the staid and thoroughly respectable London Times. Admittedly, it was the front page of the literary supplement, but it was still the front page. I remember waiting in anxious expectancy for any substantial newspaper in the USA to follow suit. It's been a long time; I'm still waiting but my anxious expectancy has faded considerably as time passes.
                --Earl Kemp, November 1999

This silliness of censorship resulted in one of the most notoriously botched examples of Times reporting when Nixon's agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, made the racist statement - intended, one supposes, as a joke - that the three things most wanted by blacks in life were "loose shoes, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit."

It was a story that had to be reported, needless to say - but how to report it without using those naughty words? Finally, the Times changed "a tight pussy" to "good sex." You don't have to be a professor of journalism to see the loss in impact - a powerful argument for my view that censorship - even self-censorship - is generally more harmful than the words being censored.

Still, as I have said, by the early seventies it did seem as if the fat lady had finished singing.

How were we to know she would insist on an encore?

#

As a postscript it occurs to me that I have been a bit harsh on Michael Bronski's book, Pulp Friction, and I want to say that I consider Michael a fine writer and a serious scholar, and one of the best - hell, one of the few - working to preserve the history of the gay community. Did I not have such respect for him, I would not have taken his lapses so seriously. It is because he is so well regarded, and the book is so generally excellent, that it will take its place on the shelf and be referenced by generations of writers to come. Which makes major shortcomings of otherwise minor ones, alas.

Nonetheless, despite my criticisms, I can recommend it heartily to anyone interested in the subject of gay pulps. It does indeed offer sample chapters from a wide range of books, from a number of different writers, and from differing time periods.

For those of you who want to find some of these pulp books for yourselves, I am sure there are many sources. Three with which I am familiar are:

If for whatever reason - intelligence, say, or good taste - you are particularly interested in finding one of my books, you will probably have the best luck with Lynn Munroe.

You won't get the red shoes, I don't care how many monkeys you've got backing you up.

- - -
*Copyright 2003 by Victor J. Banis. All rights reserved.

You can see how far we've come Dept.: "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today."
                -- Theodore Roosevelt

Who Dat? 2

In the last issue of eI I announced a contest open to all persons. The object was to see who could name the most people shown in a series of six old science fiction fan photographs. I am pleased to announce that the contest was a resounding success.

Two people each identified one person in one of the six pictures…and one of them identified themselves.

Judging by that I have decided to abandon the contest, after awarding the tie winners identical prizes of lifetime subscriptions to eI. This, the second installment of "Who Dat?" will be the final installment and, because there is so much interest, the pictures will run without captions like the previous ones did.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
                -- Theodore Roosevelt

Dina! You Got Me, Babe…. *

By Earl Kemp

Early on at The Porno Factory, I discovered that a wide variety of people wanted to make up close and personal contact with us for a wide variety of reasons, some of them understandable. The majority of them, however, fell far beyond the boundaries of ordinary reality. Some of them were just plain sick. I decided that whatever arrived from all of them should be lumped under the heading of "Funny Letters" [See "Dear Mr. Porno: Send Me A Hoar C.O.D.," eI8.] and that those letters should be identified, isolated, and directed to my attention. There were vague, long-range plans to produce some type of "Dear Mr. Porno" book forming in the back of my mind.

As these letters began accumulating in a file, I quickly noticed that there was one single significant standout included among them, a very vocal, very active, genuine pornography fan. Our very first sex groupie.

Dina.

Fuck by Harry Bremner. This was a birthday gift for me and hung on my office wall at Greenleaf Classics for years. n.d.

Her letters arrived once a week or thereabouts. Dina was apparently a very avid reader. Naturally there was no return address on any of her letters or envelopes. No form of identification at all except her name. She used ordinary 8-1/2" x 11" white typewriter paper. Her letters were typewritten, single spaced, and normally were only one page long. Every one of them was postmarked Washington, DC. We knew she was either some type of undercover operative or another type official of the federal government, only that didn't matter. They were entitled to be human also.

What struck you the most about Dina's letters was how articulate and purposeful her messages were. Clearly she had very deep-rooted feelings about herself and things sexual and, especially, about what she liked to read in that regard. She would outline whole scenes that would do it for her, sometimes explaining why and how she reacted to certain stimuli.

One of Dina's favorite scenarios, or at least one she kept asking for repeat versions of, involved Dina and two horny men and all the incredible things she had become adept at doing to both of them at the same time. Naturally, Dina's choice wasn't limited just to this, but clearly she favored it.

In no time at all, Dina had become an office favorite. Everyone there was involved with her, her letters, and trying to figure out her motivations and…most of all…who is this mysterious and close Washington, DC person? It became an office project to establish direct contact with Dina.

We took lots of her suggestions seriously and had her desires written into some of the books. Often we would rename the central female character Dina; this really pleased her and it seemed that she could spot each one of the things we inserted into the books for her, sometimes as many as a dozen different novels in the same month. She would shower us with praise and thanks and offer more, deeper, scenes to undertake.

And all the while we were trying to make direct contact with her, and all efforts in that direction were met with total failure…absolute silence.

We even put things on the back of book covers like: "Dina says this is a great book!" And, inside, we would have the central character in the book be opening his mail and have the action go something like this in a blatant, heavy handed manner with the real message sticking out like a sore thumb:

"Reginald picked up the plain envelope and examined it. No return address as usual. Postmarked Washington, DC. He quickly ripped the envelope open and pulled out the piece of paper, unfolding it as he did so.

"Reginald began reading: 'Dina! Urgently important that you please phone me collect. Signed Earl.'

"Reginald, annoyed, crumpled up the letter that was obviously not his and tossed it into his scrap box. I sure hope Dina gets her urgent and important message and phones Earl collect right away, Reginald thought."

We did everything except hit Dina over the head with the message that we really wanted her to touch bases for real, and we would have done that as well could we have identified her. (Of course there is the possibility that Dina was a he; it was her choice to be female and nothing she ever did or said indicated differently.)

Dina's input was genuinely valuable. Somehow she had an insight into the business and into sensuality that was very difficult to ignore. We would have put her on staff instantly had she been available.

Her presence was strongly felt for several years, growing more valuable as time went on then abruptly, with no warning of any sort, Dina's letters stopped arriving.

We waited and waited and hoped for each mail delivery.

Nothing!

After the long, lustful years we had spent together, like a good lover, I somehow expected Dina to just go on being there, doing that…calling the shots and getting off on doing it at the same time.

In real-time-real-life, though, we wrote a different ending for Dina's saga, one that adequately explained away her absence. It was really very simple, actually; Dina's term of office was over. She hadn't been re-elected. She was going home to disappear like the vast majority of public servants who did their time and, somehow, managed to do their own thing while they were at it.

- - -
*In memory of Dina; see what a lasting impression you made? You were a star, baby. Could have had your name up there in lights. Love ya still! Dated September 2000.

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
                --James Madison, fourth US president

"Dear Mr. Porno: Send Me a Hoar C.O.D."*

By Earl Kemp

We received a tremendous amount of mail at The Porno Factory on a routine basis. Large segments of it had little to do with business. It was easy to spot the difference and sort out the valuable items from the piles of clutter. The leftover material was unbelievable.

For want of a better label, all this oddball accumulation was relegated to a special file designated "Funny Letters." Not that they were particularly humorous, but rather they were peculiar; odd, abnormal, etc. I wanted to categorize, analyze, and assemble them into a Dear Mr. Porno book of some sort. In fact, I carried that accumulation of letters around with me for years, adding on to it continuously. Nothing ever happened with it except that it grew and grew, finally occupying an entire archival file storage box. None of my plans to turn it into a book ever bore fruit. Some many years later, weary of the simple burden of the weight of the letters alone (I had been carrying them in and out of dead storage in more than one country for decades), I made a ritual bonfire out of the collection and burned every scrap of it.

Wrong, of course, but I've never been much known for doing it right anyway. True to form, I guess. Those letters, the categories alone, were an invaluable source of information and inspiration, of fact and fiction. All alone they could have inspired hundreds and hundreds of compelling novels almost about nearly real people. The psychological insights alone were invaluable; detailed views into people and their most desired most secret most sexual aspirations.

Let us stroll down memory lane for a bit, reexamining some of the categories at least:

#

DINA! [See "Dina," eI8.] The Porno Factory's very favorite, very own sexual groupie. She deserved a special category all her own, and to be separated from this list by a memory piece devoted exclusively to her and her impact upon all of us in Smutville.

#

CLERGY: This category was by far one of the largest and most active designations. The letters just kept pouring in from churches and clergymen of all denominations from all over the world. More often than not letters in this category were written on various ecclesiastical letterheads. They were signed by Fathers and Sisters and Reverends and Bishops and Etcs. And there were a certain amount of them on plain paper with attempts made to disguise the writers, but the message was still the same and just as loud from the "closet" as if shouted from the pulpit.

Dear Mr. Porno:
Everywhere I look I see your filthy, degenerate, anti-religious books. Fuck you very much…!

Most of them wanted to be fixed up with a sex partner for a quick roll in the hay. "Mercy fuck," we called it around the office; the subcategory of most requests of this nature.

"I will be in San Diego on March 5th at the Holiday Inn. Please have a horny (male/female designated) meet me there at 10 p.m. It will be okay because I won't be wearing the collar at the time."

Long, agonizing diatribes about how obsessed they are to have sex because having sex is forbidden to them. Details as to how they would do it or have it done to them. Details as to personal choices of body types, hair and eye coloring, size and stature. Detail descriptions of clothing that turns them on and how and why it works so well for them.

Cloistered nuns sneaking out and mailing want-list letters like kindergarten kids demanding items from Santa Clause.

#

RELIGIOUS NUTS: Writers of letters in this category were literally bouncing off the walls. They were so excited, so amped up, so shifted into overdrive, as to appear completely nonhuman.

Dear Mr. Porno:
My wife wants me to have sex with my best friend so she can watch. That's a disgusting idea, and I told her so, only she still wants it.
I don't know if we could do it with anyone watching. We always make sure no one can….

"I pray that God strikes you dead…."

"You have sinned against man and God…."

"You should be erased from the face of the Earth…."

"….because of your horrible deeds…."

"You and your kind are not welcome here…."

And on and on. Long, many paged, single spaced letters of rambling incoherency about righteousness and redemption and "The Way of the Lord…" Whatever that might be. These letters almost without exception had no return address, no identification of any sort, and were signed by people with names like Avenger, Saint, Cleanser, Etc.

For the most part, they couldn't spell worth a damn and wrote most of their own scripture as they thought they needed it.

#

LAW ENFORCEMENT: This category ran a surprising second to the Clergy. And, except for the letterheads and ranks of the signatures, could have all come from the same book.

These people, plain and simple, expected to be fixed up for a quick no hassle sexual assignation. Like the clergy, they would write specific details as to when they would be in San Diego and expected servicing, how it was to be done and by what type of what gender person.

They would also ask for far out things like stag films, adult videos, bizarre and weird sexual apparatus, and, only from this category, people willing to do kinky things over, around, near, and thoroughly inundating them with copious wastes.

Every such inquiry, as was every other similar Law Enforcement request from anywhere regardless of how it arrived including walking in the front door, was referred directly to the FBI since we provided no such services.

#

PROSTITUTES (Including hookers, hustlers, escorts, dates, or whatever label who has sex for money): These members of the world's oldest profession, in gender, are female, male, and every increment between. There is no element of society, no place on Earth, which does not contain them and keep them well and thoroughly employed.

Dear Mr. Porno:
My husband has just run away with my best friend. I am shattered. I don't know what to do. I have never missed anyone as much as I miss her….

They come from all walks of life and span every spectrum of experience. Many of them are very articulate, well read, out spoken, with valuable and significant opinions.

Every element of their lives would, eventually, reading between the lines across the letters, become apparent. Almost every one of them knew why they were doing what they were doing and what they got out of it. Most of them were smart enough to get out of the business if it got bad for them.

They would write of their kinky customers, the regulars, who expected really extra special services and what they were and how they were performed. Some of them told outrageous and repeatable stories about encounters with celebrities and other recognizable people at movie star parties, and what went on afterward.

#

William Rotsler from Masque. n.d.

A-, BI-, AND HOMOSEXUAL: Contributors to this category were among the most articulate and could explain almost anything. They had spent years figuring out many of the answers that plagued huge numbers of the rest of us.

Heterosexuality was excluded from this category on the assumption that it represented most of us and we know who we are.

Dear Mr. Porno:
I am a retired Air Force Colonel. I really like your books. Please send me these titles: Jism Trail, Young and Hard, Men into Boys, and Club Member. Also please send me a catalog of your homosexual titles. I'm not sure I have them all.
It is very important that you send the books in a plain paper wrapper without any markings. I live in a retirement community and wouldn't want anyone, especially my wife, to know….

A large number of persons in this category were very young and naïve and struggling mightily with their own thoughts, concepts, and desires. Almost all of them wanted some form of advice but none ever received it. There were a scattering of Polaroid self portraits of selected portions of bodies with peculiar questions like, "Do you see anything odd about my dick? My girl friend refuses to touch it."

#

INCEST: This category contained by far the biggest collection of long letters. Page after page of single-spaced typewriting going into the most minute details of the writers' affairs.

It was noticeable that incest between parents and their own children almost never came up except in the form of disgust and condemnation.

Dear Mr. Porno:
I have just read your book Suck Sluts and liked it very much. It is exactly the book I want to write for you. How much will you pay me to write Suck Sluts…?

The one that jumped off the planet was brother/sister. Letter after letter, often signed by both parties, saying: "…we've never told any of this to a soul. We even moved here in remote Africa so no one could ever find us. Our children are perfectly normal in every respect….

"We are twins, you see. We were lovers in the womb, in our crib, in our beds, and for all of our lives; we'll keep at it until we die."

Some of these letters would detail lifetimes of hiding and furtive assignations until, finally, they just did it and their lives changed for the better forever. Or so they say.

#

TRANSVESTITES AND TRANSSEXUALS: Pretty broad category, all the way from compulsive cross-dressers to "I'm going to get it cut off and pretend I never had one."

Both these categories were rich and rewarding in information, perhaps because each lives most of their lives in a fantasy world. This gives them time to dream and to think long, deep thoughts about simple things like sensuality, especially sensuality since it's the thing they have the most of.

They could really set the stage and line up the entire scene for some fast and hot action that almost never happened, but by damn the stage sure did look pretty.

Dear Mr. Porno:
I read a lot of your books and really like them. In my head I have hundreds of books just like them only better. We need to work a deal.
I'll tell you the stories and you get some clerk in your office to write them up only you send me the money. That way we'll all get rich….

A standout feature of this category, and one that gave the office many unusual thrills, was the big number of photographs accompanying the letters. This was especially true of the transvestites who, it seemed, had to send us "glamour" shots of them in each of their best outfits that were accompanied with their verbal descriptions of how very exciting and sexy they looked. In reality they looked like a bunch of long-haul truckers in K-Mart drag.

#

EXOTICS, ONANISTS, AND EXHIBITIONISTS: These are the odd type humans who think of themselves as being complete and totally whole and without any room or need for another person anywhere in their emotions, their genitalia, at all.

Many of these people dress funny; it's part of their camouflage. Flamboyant and embarrassing with glitter and capes and maybe even ostrich plumes and not at all draggy.

Dear Mr. Porno:
Please reply to Prisoner 124C41+. I'm doing five for child molestation and I don't think it's fair. She told me she was 16. No way could she be 10….
So, I'm in the shower with my buddy and he leaned over and when I got a look at his pucker like that, I couldn't resist, and I liked it. I'm ready for another shower already.
What I need to know is, am I turning queer or what? Is this temporary…?

They had certainly rather do it themselves than get close enough to anyone else to let them even think about helping with the chore at hand. The beat-off burnouts. The muscle-building jocks. The really dedicated career military men. The religiously pure and simple.

The exhibitionist who lets lots of it, if not all, flop out into plain view. Tops or bottoms, it makes no difference, the effect is the same as is the intent. They can go on for page after page about what a turn on it is knowing it can be seen right there if they'd only look at it or touch it or something.

#

MARITAL AIDS (Husband and wife fantasies): This category was also a rather large one and, much to my surprise, most of the writers were deadly serious.

Some of these letters were written by husbands who did not share their feelings with their wives.

Some of these letters were written by wives who did not share their feelings with their husbands.

Some of these letters were written by husband and wife together.

Dear Mr. Porno:
I am obsessed with lesbians and dream about them all the time. My favorite is of me watching my wife getting it on in our bed with the baby-sitter or one of her girl friends. I even have my camera hidden where I can take pictures and they wouldn't know I was doing it.
I told her a few times what I want, only she isn't interested, she says. How can I convince her to do it for me? I won't tell her about the video camera; the tape will be our special secret….

This is the scenario wherein the husband (or the wife) secretly watches his wife (or her husband) having sex with someone else (more often than not of the opposite gender but not exclusively so).

It comes in all variations possible: both husband and wife know of this and are participating in a fantasy for the pleasure of both of them. The person she (or he) has selected for her husband (or wife) to have sex with is her (his) best friend.

He (she) watches from various locations: within the closet with the door slightly ajar. From a dark corner of the room. Right up close with his (her) face in it and the flashlight holding steady.

He (she) is getting off by watching as much as his (her) buddy is by participating.

It is an endless game for three or more players that, almost without failure, eventually turns into whatever they were looking for in the first place.

#

DEPRAVITY: This category was saved for last. Imagine if you can the ugliest, foulest, most offensive things that pop into your mind. Color them. Layer them with odors. Texture them with slime and ooze.

Numerous letters containing semen specimens smeared all over the pages, along with brief thank yous. Folded up and mailed from the other side of the earth, from the other side of the country, from the other side of the state, from the other side of the county, from the other side of the city.

Dear Mr. Porno:
When we go out we like to double date. We're the double and whatever gal we can talk into it's the date.
Sandwiches are our thing. I'm the back door man. She eases onto me then flattens out so Will can move on from the top. That way I get to feel everything.
He likes for me to call him Will when we're doubling, only it's all right, she don't know he's my dad….

Shriveled up and stank filled used condoms "I couldn't have done it without you."

Excrement smeared toilet paper.

Make-up saturated facial tissues.

Letters of brief, cogent meaning: "You fuck, asshole!"

"…cut your dick off just like that…."

"…you goddamned sonofabitch…."

"…shove all eight inches right up your butt…."

#

And, when it was all over, and the last of the Funny Letters burned in a ritual fire high up the side of a bleak mountain in Baja California, I knew that I would never ever really be free of them, of the specter they had held over me for so very long.

One important afterthought: As outrageous as most of these letters might appear to have been, almost every one of them, in some fashion, was thanking us at The Porno Factory. The number of outright nuts with empty, unarticulated threats was insignificant.

We had, in some manner, as outrageous as it seemed, touched these people's lives in such a manner that they felt the need to thank us for having done so.

All of us who toiled so diligently at the Porno Factory thank them for sharing their feelings with us.

#

*In loving memory of all those-and you know who you are-who worked side by side with me during those halcyon years. Dated September 2000.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
                --Attributed to Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948)

[Peter V. Cooper was my first assistant. He was also incidentally Editor In Chief of Greenleaf Classics, Inc. He was my right hand man and I knew I could trust him completely and he covered my ass exactly as he should…always a first priority over all other considerations. Pete would travel with me to Europe and manage the local staff while we would be exhibiting at international trade shows. He was right at the top of his game and things couldn't possibly get any better.
[Except, unknown to any of us in the office, Peter was very unhappy at home and began a vicarious love affair with one of the writers and the writer's wife through the mail and phone calls. It was just a fun thing at first, but it got serious. So serious that Pete began devoting great amounts of his time and attention to them. He wrote them many pages of top to bottom, margin to margin, single spaced typed pages of minute by minute happenings inside the office. Plus they had even more devious plans afoot….
[As we left San Diego for the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, we left really loaded. I was going first to London and Pete was going to make a quick fly-by in Florida to visit his favorite writer and the writer's wife. Nothing unusual about that. Sure, Pete was carrying all my Show clothes for the entire trip. Much of the last-minute printed throwaway material…in four languages…half the bottles of special-label California Sherry for snob appeal in Germany…and worse yet, half the expense money.
[And Pete never returned again. Ever. But he did leave behind, perhaps not by accident, hundreds of pages of carbon copies of the daily letters he sent the rest of his menage. It is the oddest thing, reading through those letters and reliving such minute sections of my daily life for almost a year.
[Because Pete knew me better than any other person in the office, it is only fitting that I allow Pete to speak for himself about me.
[I excerpted the juicy parts just for eI. -Earl Kemp]

Earl Is One Cool Head*

By Peter V. Cooper, Editor In Chief, Greenleaf Classics, Inc.

Peter V. Cooper, Editor In Chief, Greenleaf Classics, Inc. is featured on the cover of this paperback. Painting by Robert Bonfils.

(6-17-70 7:35 a.m.) Earl, my immediate boss, editorial director, indescribable here, but later maybe.

(7-7-70 4:25 p.m.) I know a bit about Frankfurt streetwalkers. One evening my first year there, I think 1968, Earl, our hired tour guide, and I strolled into the appropriate district; the girls showed lively interest in Earl, who dresses rather flashily and is slim and maybe a bit horny-looking, and no interest whatever in me, though I wore a business suit and had been told by other Europeans that I was identifiably a non-European. (I got the same reaction the following week, by the way, from the clerks in Carnaby Street clothing stores when Earl and I visited them….)

(7-20-70 12:10 p.m.) Earl would accept if I told him everything (about our affair), but he'd express dismay, on both business and personal grounds. He'd probably offer to buy me a trip to the nearest high-class whorehouse. I believe his view of love is rather sadly shallow. He has five kids too, and they seem to be turning out well (one over 20, one about 16, then 13, 8 I guess), and I know that he lives rich, is an entertainment buff - especially movies, a frequent explorer of Mexico - usually without his wife, but he's neither gay (looks like he is; dresses the part somewhat) nor heterosexually unfaithful as far as I know. His wife's a very nice, very ordinary housefrau; not at all the type you'd expect him to be still married to. More on Earl: he comes on cold, and very taciturn, but people love him, he has a kind of magnetism, particularly for swingers, liberals. A great contact man, for our business. Damn poor on detail, sloppy on staff morale matters.

(7-27-70 3:35 p.m.) I was at my desk when Earl came to the door. He had looked in and begun to turn away before I realized he was there, and in a startled reflex I jerked your lavender (love letter) off the desk and dropped it into the open…. Oh, to hell with it! He keeps secrets…makes secrets of things that should damned well be communicated-business things; he has a habit of such secrecy from the days when smutters were truly persecuted, and it was a favor to employees to let them know as little as possible. And it's his natural bent anyway, to share as little of himself as possible; even his wife suffers from this tendency in him. But in turn he respects the secrets of others. Likes a good bit of gossip if it comes his way, yes; but never snoops or pries or questions third parties… As long as I don't screw anything up badly, or get visibly behind in deadline-type jobs, he'll make no waves. (Indeed, he may have wondered for years how long I'd be able to go without some sort of rift with my wife. Earl is quite decidedly anti-Catholic, anti-uptight generally,)

(7-29-70 9:05 a.m.) Let me try to elucidate the office clothing thing. The general manager was Hamling's brother-in-law, a rather paranoid office-Machiavellian who loved to talk of his early executive days at Ford, under McNamara. He was very concerned with corporate image, and did do Greenleaf a lot of good in this area - the offices, no San Diego distribution, Chamber of Commerce membership, etc. He came to us after a long period of no general managership, and found us wearing casual clothes. With Hamling's agreement - for Hamling thinks this way too, and "can't understand" such things as beards, for instance (though he wears yellow shoes and drives a pale green Jaguar supersedan) - he instituted a white-shirt-and-tie policy, binding on everybody male except Earl, whom Hamling insisted upon excepting. Earl fought it to no avail, but Earl long went on wearing the very mod, flashy stuff he prefers. (Earl's very slim, intently youthful, often mistaken for gay.) I wasn't unhappy; had fairly often worn a tie anyway, until it became an issue and Earl asked all of us not to, to fight the general manager's desires…before the ruling came down irrevocably….

(8-7-70 4:35 p.m.) Earl, I've come to suspect, would be horrified (for Earl) if I told him the truth about US. Even though I'd remind him of his Sex 69 Introduction. And it wouldn't be about the business implications he'd be horrified; he has a higher opinion of me than that, I'm sure. And it wouldn't be out of any particular affection for my wife, or lack of understanding of our incompatibility; as I think I've said, he's a bit more than rationally anti-Catholic, and he's a nut on staying young and slim, and…well anyway, it wouldn't be on her behalf that he'd be horrified. I guess what I feel is that he'd be horrified on the grounds of his image of me as a square but of the best kind. 'Fraid I can't put it - can't even think it out - any better than that. Earl doesn't like to listen to gory accounts of accidents or operations, doesn't like to listen to people's troubles….

(9-8-70 5:38 p.m.) Christ, I'm gonna have a heavy briefcase to lug (to Frankfurt). And Earl has asked me to lug his hang-up suit-bag, too. I did that last year, and learned only a few weeks ago that I smuggled back several items of contraband in it when I returned! The bastard! I love Earl….

(9-9-70 5:10 p.m.) Earl's still writing last-minute notes, conferring with hanging-around bigwigs about this and that, and is about to go up to the penthouse for a drink with a couple visiting dittos….

(9-11-70 4:00 p.m.) Earl, incidentally, worked several evenings last week, plus doing an entire special book edit over the long weekend, at home. And when he's here he does work as steadily as the fragmentation of his duties - even greater than is my case-allows….

(9-15-70 12:01 p.m.) I would not tell Earl or anyone about US except in the love context. And strangely, I feel Earl would accept the love more easily than the sex, if they could be separated. I don't plan to test him, though….

#

*Peter Cooper, The Letters of. Excerpts dated in parenthesis.

A true patriot would keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances, and not allow them to rest till the causes of their just complaints are removed.
                  -- Sam Adams

Beating Off the Feds*
Making a change of venue to Prime Time

By Earl Kemp

Lust is a relentless bitch.

She sits on you and in you and surrounds your mind and takes over completely and only allows you to think about what she wants you to think about. She keeps at it until you're almost writhing in real agony and there's no relief in sight.

The only thing you can think about is getting your hands on it and dominating it completely. Of smelling it and caressing it and licking it…and of tasting it.

Damn you, Lust! Why are you withholding that chopped liver sandwich?

#

In the early 1950's, in Chicago, boy genius Sidney Coleman (he was perhaps 15 at the time) hooked me on chopped liver sandwiches. Mind you, they weren't ordinary chopped liver sandwiches, they were genuine, authentic, Chicago style ethnic Jewish chopped liver sandwiches.

Sidney gave me many other things that only a boy can teach a man about life and living and religious differences. About people's inherent rights.

When, in 1965, it became time for me to leave my beloved Chicago for a world of pornography and righteousness, the single thing I missed most was that chopped liver. Every decade or so I would even think about Sid.

#

Two of us moved with The Porno Factory from Chicago (Evanston) to San Diego. Besides me, the default editor, there was Robert Bonfils, an incredible artist. At the time Bob was a new hire, brought onboard to establish and operate our very first in-house art department. We really didn't know each other then but because we had so much in common, we quickly bonded and began spending all our free time together familiarizing ourselves with our new home and its environs.

Bob and Mary Bonfils are in the front seat of Little Red. Earl Kemp, the botamaster, is in the rear seat. Photo by David Lieberman dated 1965.

Bonfils, a city boy (first Kansas City and then Chicago), wanted most what he hadn't ever had any of…the great outdoors. Me…I was a country boy from way back there; Chicago was fantasyland to me but I still remembered how it felt to run barefoot and bareass through the toolies and cannonball into the creek.

Bob loved nothing better than to get so far away from civilization that you forgot it was there waiting to get you when you least expected it. It was a simple task for him to lure me along. Those were heady days offroading it in "Little Red," the name Bob gave his Jeep. As time progressed there was also a Jeep Cherokee and then a Land Rover after that, but the thing they all had in common was the 4-wheel-drive ability to gafiate (get away from it all).

Very early on in those days of our travels, a young law student from Chicago named David (always pronounced as two words "Daah Veed" ethnically) Lieberman would accompany us. His parents in Chicago had asked us to look after him occasionally.

We found him to be enthusiastic, eager, and an earnest student of honesty and honorable law. This is important. It was a pleasure to have him go along with us on some of those east-county backwoods safaris. We especially sought out sites where native Indian tribes had lived, scrounging up arrowheads and pottery shards. And climbing on huge boulders and sunbathing at tree-top level. Babes in the woods.

It was Daah Veed who reintroduced me to chopped liver sandwiches. He had discovered Blumer's Delicatessen in San Diego where you could get a reasonable facsimile of a Chicago style chopped liver sandwich. It was wonderful having that lust reignited within me and being able, almost, to satisfy it.

A year later, Harry Bremner would hire on at The Porno Factory as design director and, much to my surprise, reintroduce me to Blumer's and to Chicago style chopped liver all over again. It just keeps getting better.

Years later I was to find yet another deli that served the same sandwich, only this one was in Mexico City.

Naturally, all of us changed over time and other pursuits took over much of our free time. David moved on into his studies and into his contemporaries and Bob and Mary and me, while we still were permanently attached, found less time together away from work. Bob and I found more time together at work where we were both constantly shaking our asses trying to turn out an impossible amount of sleazy, erotic work every day.

#

Within our administration there are vast numbers of petty employees who actually do most of the work and far too many extremely elevated bosses who do none of it. These are the political payoff cronies or the very rich who buy ambassadorships and people like that who receive vast rewards from our administration in exchange for the vast personal rewards they force upon those who are supposed to protect and serve us instead of their purchasers. Ho-hum…yes…again and again until you finally get it right.

Many of those petty officials don't like those nonbosses who rule over them regardless of how detrimental that is to our nation. Then you toss into that mix just the right amount of my political party is better than your political party and either of us will screw all the citizens to protect the party from any one of them and you're starting to understand how it works.

I have often had occasion to wonder if my old first-porno lover Dina [See "Dina," eI8.] was one of them.

Only thing is you forget and, from Nixon to Bush it all starts over again, and the cliché about history repeating itself becomes meaningless. Again. And again.

A bunch of those petty officials adopted some of us at The Porno Factory over time…and there was plenty of that. We were a fixture, The Porno Factory was, and one that was there to stay and there had never been such a clamor for anything before. Damn near every time any federal agency began doing something they shouldn't do regarding us or most anything else, one of those petty officials would find a way to find us.

They were stand-out different from the usual federal employee in many ways. To begin with, they appeared to be honest and trustworthy, two qualities one would find difficulty relating to the US federal administration. And more important, not one of them ever wanted anything from us, but only to give to us. Not one of them demanded a payoff where that was customarily honorable law-enforcement's opening gambit. And, much more important than that was the fact that we never interfered with any of their business, never suggested a route that would lead to our personal betterment, didn't do a single thing that anyone could ever interpret as having been influential in any of their deliberations or official duties. It was strictly smile, say thank you, grasp the goodies, and keep on keeping-on.

These were secret routes that they devised to reach us, of course, because there was a bunch of paranoia in play in those days and all kinds of criminal cop illegal activity going on like wiretapping and secret filming and…. Nevertheless, secret routes began evolving and a regular group of contributors began feeding data into the pipeline. Nothing like being prepared, I always thought. The thing was, you could never tell when one of those angels would turn up and what kind of goodies they would be bringing with them.

These were unsung heroes, uncredited, no medals, not even a footnote. They were predecessors to Deep Throat, the petty official who eventually brought down Nixon's house of shame and evil. Not one of them did whatever they did for money. Not Deep Throat, not Martha Mitchell, and not the third assistant secretary of the… They all did it because each of them thought a crime was taking place and they were powerless to do anything about it except alert the target victim to prepare for the worst.

#

In 1967 I began traveling rather extensively throughout Europe, and then later Asia, looking for public domain erotica to use as reprint material by Greenleaf Classics. The Police Action that had been raising hell in Vietnam was still raging at a mass-murdering pace and people all over the country were starting to bitch about its unreasonableness and to question the morality of the US even being there in the first place. It was with the nation…most of the world…fully involved in the notwar the US administration was engaging in for the benefit of the military-industrial complex and all the big businessmen who needed those killing contracts for chemical weapons like agent orange thank you Dow hope you got the check and all those weapons of mass destruction the most powerful country in the world owned and operated to wipe out those $200-a-year-per-capita destitute peasants with $1 million each bombs. Damn, war sure is good for big business and all the professional politicians it owns and maintains.

So naturally I had to go there and see for myself what was going on…Vietnam that is. Because it was not a war and the world was not on a war-time footing, almost all normal, routine business continued to operate. That meant, especially, all the regularly scheduled airline flights that continued business as usual during the entire nonwar. [Unfortunately most of them fully booked, thanks to all the US military flying in and out all the time. It was impossible to get a ticket in tourist class but you could always get a first class ticket and ride up front with the FBI and the CIA and the high ranking officers in charge.] On a dare and as part of a challenge, I went there…as the officially accredited foreign correspondent for the fabled anti-establishment Los Angeles Free Press. And I had all proper US military credentials to go along with it…I spent some time just moving around, looking for myself, seeing what I could see. Saigon, Phu Bi, Chu Lai, Danang…evening news places that were warm and snuggly to every Frenchman's heart.

And while I was at it I managed to flip off enough high ranking military, to say nothing of the ones I told to fuck off because I was a civilian and they couldn't do a damned thing about it. I was threatened at least once, by a major, who kindly pointed out that if he killed me right there in that moment absolutely no one would ever know and nothing would happen to him, and he was right. I had heard that old story before from FBI and CIA toadies…and it never failed to scare the shit out of me but that was the one single thing I felt I could never allow them to realize about me and the way I could, apparently, confront them, regardless of rank, with such absolute authority considering how I really felt inside.

Somewhere, back in DC, the secret, nonexistent, national security dossier on me just kept getting fatter and fuller. They had many reasons to dislike me…and a few reasons to fear me.

By 1968, The Porno Factory had acquired numbers of federal groupies who had, on more than one occasion, proved to be true, valuable, and consistent. In January, an incident occurred in the Far East involving the USS Pueblo, a run-down, amateur-crewed spy ship on its maiden voyage, that was captured red-handed with a smoking gun and held by North Korea. In an unmatched comedy of administrative fumbling, that amateur crew and run-down boat was held for a long time and treated rather uncordially. None of them forgave the administration, so they began looking for us through the groupie route.

This incident serves perfectly to illustrate the extent and nature of people seeking our help to Fuck the Feds. Representatives from the officers and crew of the USS Pueblo came to us begging us to produce a retaliatory book for them. They came armed with photographs and documents and first-hand testaments and just about everything anyone would need to do a real butcher job on the feds. There were several meetings with committee-like groups of six Navy men at a time trying to get this project off the ground. For some reason we decided not to go with it and left it for someone else to do later. And magnificently too, I might add.

Peter V. Cooper (right), Editor in Chief, Greenleaf Classics, is shown managing the Greenleaf exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Dated October 1968.

A whole bunch of other ugly things were happening in 1968, like bombing the crap out of Vietnam. There were 525,000 red-blooded American heroes over there blasting away at every woman, child, geriatric, and infant in sight, working at something called "body counts" for Westmoreland's version of the evening news. United States Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned just before his chits could be called in and his good buddy Lyndon Johnson appointed the members to form a Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

That's when the idea for the book was born…the book to be the damnedest thing you ever saw that would at the same time teach and shock, and be praised and condemned, and to live forever.

#

Earl Kemp at the Sex 69 World's Fair of Sex in Copenhagen, holding up a poster for the following year's show. Photo by Bent Naesby dated 1969.

On July 10, 1969, the world stood still for just a moment for me. On the front page of the London Times, I read, "Mr. Richard Hoggart [was]…the first to use the word 'fuck' in court…."

I simply could not believe my own eyes, I read it again, and again. Yes…it clearly said fuck. Right there on the front page in the first column of type [of the Literary Supplement] of a major metropolitan newspaper. A pity it was the London Times and not the New York Times. In fact, as of this date, I am still waiting to see the word fuck in ANY major US newspaper anywhere, much less on the front page.

Then, among other international trade shows where Greenleaf Classics, Inc. routinely exhibited as a world-market provider, there was the stunningly exciting World's Fair of Sex in Copenhagen that eventually wound up as a Greenleaf Classic paperback named appropriately enough Sex 69 [GP535, Sex 69 by Erik Dahl (Earl Kemp) and Bent Naesby]. And, in the same year, Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated movie, was awarded the Oscar as Best Picture of the Year. Washington DC, especially Richard Nixon, trembled in fear of what that indicated.

Advertisements like this one for EKIBA A/S were regular features in Greenleaf Classic paperbacks and they reached millions of readers all over the world. "The most famous mail order firm in all Europe," EKIBA A/S, was a legal Danish corporation aka Earl Kemp, Ib Lauritzen & Associates. Dated 1968.

Edith Killrich (left) is owner of A/S Bookman, Denmark's oldest, biggest, and most prestigious literary agency. Ib Lauritzen (right) is her son, my partner, and managing director of A./S Bookman. Photo by Earl Kemp, Copenhagen, 1968.

#

When Richard Nixon first became president that year, far too many criminal activities to catalog were put into play and not the least of them was to scuttle that obscenity commission any way possible. Nixon had his own peculiar beliefs about sex and sexuality…just ask Pat (or "Mrs. Nixon" to Mr. Nixon)…and how they should be done according to his dictates. I was certainly not the first person to christen him "Dickless."

His first overt move happened in June when Commission Member Kenneth Keating resigned under pressure. In his position, Nixon appointed his good buddy Charles H. Keating, Jr. (no relation), of the Citizens for Decent Literature, and sent him into the fray to destroy the ongoing deliberations.

Keating, a well-known Nixon toadie at the time, was so well protected, so completely isolated from mundane people, he later felt he could get away with any crime, however horrendous. That's when he ripped off thousands of retirees of their funds when he looted Lincoln Federal Savings and Loan to build The Phoenician, an ultra deluxe pleasure palace for his political cronies (numbers of them were Republicans, go figure)…leaving the entire savings and loan industry in the whole USA in shambles.

#

1970 was a bumper bloody year for the administration. First there were those embarrassing and distasteful murders of the students at Kent State College to contend with, and then Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. Massive demonstrations against the administration's adamant activities in Vietnam were ongoing everywhere…and not just in the US of A.

Between all the killing and the double-talk in the media, it was difficult for me to drag myself away long enough to attend the Amsterdam Suck Film Festival where a Greenleaf Classics financed movie was entered in competition.

Adultery for Fun and Profit was awarded the feature-length trophy and we were all very proud of our accomplishments. We could hardly wait for Nixon to get a look at the flick.

#

August 11, 1970, President Nixon's press secretary Ronald Ziegler said, [If the Commission's Report on pornography ] "recommends what newspapers say it will recommend, the White House would be opposed to that."

The Wall Street Journal, in mid-August, began publishing leaks from the Commission indicating the results would not be to Nixon's liking. {It sure made me wonder who was doing such an awful thing as leaking that data to the media. Probably someone I knew pretty well.]

Eleven days after Ziegler's comment, Attorney General John Mitchell said, "the Commission is not associated with the Nixon administration. If we want a society in which the noble side of man is encouraged and mankind is elevated, then I submit pornography is surely harmful." In addition he added that pornography should be banned even if it is not harmful.

I don't suppose there is any way one could possibly apply that "society in which the noble side of man is encouraged and mankind is elevated" to Nixon or any of his criminal henchmen including most especially John Mitchell. It if wasn't for his courageous nutcase wife Martha, perhaps none of us would have really ever known…or been able to grin in self-satisfaction watching Mitchell himself go to prison for a few of his crimes as Attorney General of the United States of America under ("Reelect the") President Nixon's direct criminal orders.

In September, Charles Keating went to court and got a restraining order preventing the publication of the Commission's Report. By mid-month, Keating made an agreement to drop the court case in exchange for being allowed to write a dissenting opinion that would be included with the Report.

On the very same day, speaking for and through Citizens for Decent Literature, he bombarded Congress with letters asking for "a prompt and full Congressional investigation of the Commission."

On September 30 the final Report of the Commission was sent to the President, the Congress, and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

In October the Report was denounced by several persons representing the White House.

On October 23, President Nixon declared, "So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation oft the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life…the Commission contends that the proliferation of filthy books and plays has no lasting, harmful threat on man's character… Centuries of civilization and ten minutes of comm9on sense tell us otherwise… American morality is not to be trifled with. The Commission on Pornography and Obscenity has performed a disservice, and I totally reject its Report."

Detroit Free Press, September 4, 1970.

On November 11, the Greenleaf Classics, Inc. illustrated edition of the Report was published.

#

Behind the scenes, all the time since the Commission first began gathering and analyzing data, they were plugged into us, not us into them, though we were well aware of that fact. They kept us continuously updated on any happening of any significance. We were supplied with copies of work-production notes, all manner of memoranda, working-copy in-progress documents…you name it.

We had every draft copy of every edition of the Report before it was distributed to the Commission members. And then, eventually, we got the big one, the tentative final draft copy of the entire Report.

We thought we had the whole thing greased and it slid along the assembly line just like clockwork.

Harry Bremner had plotted the physical package out ahead of time, and did a pretty tight design job on the book itself. All the original artwork was Harry's, the cover design itself, the inside frontispiece, down to the interior layout of the book. Harry was as proud as a peacock with the way it all turned out just the way he planned to start with.

With our hands on that draft copy of the Report, it went instantly into actual production. Several typesetters were working on it simultaneously on different sections. All of it was standing in type by the time the actual final version of the Report was agreed upon.

The pictures used to illustrate the text were assembled and keyed into the exact spots in the text. They were all set aside, waiting their moment in the sun.

The 20-something son of one of the Commission members was given the first available copy of that final manuscript. He took it directly to the airport and onto the next plane to San Diego, hand-delivering it to me, in the same manner many of the other documents had arrived.

Now all we had to do was to compare the two versions, make all the changes necessary in the standing type, and move right on into the good part, putting the iceing on Nixon's Fuck You! nonbirthday cake…hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the kind men like…many in true flesh-tone color at that.

The damnedest legal unactionable book ever created. What's not to love?

#

A Mr. Masaaki Hironaka, a Post Office suit, came to visit me one day out of the blue. He asked to see me without an appointment to ask me to kindly sign something for him. What he handed me was a fully filled out application form to rent a post office box. We had quite an interesting session with me telling him what a fuck-up he was coming at me with that blatant crap and ordering him out of my office.

The man cried real tears. He whimpered and pleaded with me and would have writhed upon my carpet had I not restrained him. Then I signed the card just to get rid of him.

Only thing was…I would see him again…in court…and I didn't know a thing about that at the time.

#

In March 1971, in an unusual occurrence that had never happened before, Attorney General John Mitchell (before his criminal conviction for his actions in office and while still in office), on the steps of the Justice Department, held a news conference to announce the indictment