Eve Linkletter (1918–1999)
Author of The Gay Ones
About the Author
Works by Eve Linkletter
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Linkletter, Eva Irene
- Other names
- Makagon, Eva Irene
- Birthdate
- 1918-04-21
- Date of death
- 1999-10-23
- Gender
- female
- Birthplace
- Southampton, Hampshire, England, UK
- Place of death
- Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, California, USA
- Relationships
- Makagon, Thomas Kelly (husband)
- Short biography
- Born Eva Irene Linkletter, she wrote many adult-themed pulp novels: "Our Flesh Was Cheap" (1959), "The Gay Ones", "The Taxi Dancers" (both 1958), " B-Girl Decoy" (1961), "Flying High" (1964), "Sex Substitute (1966), and "Dime a Dance Hustler" (?) under the name Eve Linkletter. In 1997, she co-wrote "From Heroin to San Quentin" with Clinton T Duffy (the Warden of San Quentin (1940 - 1952)).
Members
Reviews
Lists
Statistics
- Works
- 7
- Members
- 18
- Popularity
- #630,789
- Rating
- 3.0
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 2
Like other exploitation "smut" books and films of the time period, The Gay Ones masquerades as a morality tale against the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle, although it does manage to do so without the level of preachy sermons that would encroach on all of the scandalous (for the time) fun of trolling through the gay underground of New Orleans and Hollywood, complete with drag queens, hustlers, and lesbians, oh my! Instead, Linkletter focuses on the societal oppression and victimization of the gay community and damage such discrimination could do to one's life and livelihood, and allows the reader's own empathy or discrimination to interpret what happens to many of the characters as tragic events or divine punishment. Even though in the end the novel's dubious hero is eventually "cured" of his homosexuality by his psychiatrist wife, the conversion is done so with emotion and affection, and the tone of the authors writing at other points in the novel make one believe that this part of the story is included purely for commercial reasons.
As I mentioned previously, The Gay Ones was most likely a scandalous work of fiction in the late eighties, but both the language and description of sexual situations is tame enough by today's standards that a film adaptation would easily garner a PG-13 rating, and what was outrageously flamboyant and taboo back in the fifties is prime-time television fodder nowadays, as a typical episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race is more over the top than anything that occurs in the novel's New Orleans "Fairie Bar" sequences. An interesting peephole into what was worthy of peepholes way back when.… (more)