The Gay Ones

British born Eva Irene Linkletter wrote several racy pulp novels in the fifties and sixties under the pen name Eve Linkletter, including this 1958 novel, The Gay Ones. Switching locations halfway through between New Orleans and Hollywood, California, The Gay Ones follows confused young runaway Jerry Kenmore as he desperately tries to figure out if he is, in fact, one of the "Gay Ones."

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 show more 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. show less