Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps

I wish he could've given us more than excerpts, but even those are interesting since these books are getting so hard to find. The commentary is excellent too, there's not a ton of scholarship on pulp, so Bronski is summarizing the history in a readable way but also offering details I hadn't found in any other book on the subject. I also love that he chose excerpts displaying both porn and politics, because they're intertwined in this genre.

Long before the birth of the modern gay movement in 1969, a literary revolution was occurring between the covers of the cheaply produced pulp paperbacks of the post-World War II era. In Pulp Friction, cultural critic Michael Bronski collects a sampling of these now-little-known gay erotic writings-some by writers long forgotten, some never known, and a few now famous. Through them, he explores the ways in which these expressions of the erotic imag-ination ultimately led to the idea of a gay identity and the creation of gay culture. An entertaining, enlightening, and groundbreaking work.

A revealing look at the history of the gay male pulp from post-WWII through the sexual revolution of the 1970s.