Bail Out! (Black Knight Classics of the Homosexual Underground) by Anonymous - 1969

Bail Out! (Black Knight Classics of the Homosexual Underground), Published by Guild Press, 1969, Paperback, 7x4 Inches ---- Excellent Vintage Condition. The book is clean, covers attached, secure binding, crisp inner pages, unmarked, no writing, no highlighting, no stains, no fading, no ripped pages, no edge chipping, no remainder marks, not ex-library. Very faint signs of wear from age, use, storage and handling. The front title page has a light corner crease mark. ---- Free USA Shipping ---- The first paperback original to deal with homosexuality was 1952's Men into Beasts, a nonfiction work by George Viereck. Viereck, a poet, was sent to prison during World War II for his work as a paid propaganda agent of Nazi Germany. Men into Beasts is a general memoir of the indignities and brutalities of life in prison, but a significant part of it deals with situational homosexuality in prison. Beginning around 1964, the more than a decade of challenges to U.S. censorship laws applied to literary novels such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Portnoy's Complaint, and Naked Lunch had redefined legal standards for obscenity. Susan Stryker cites Tom Norman's bibliography of American gay erotic paperbacks to note that thirty gay paperback books were published in 1965, and that over a hundred were in 1966. Many of these publishers had their roots in publishing beefcake, or "male physique" magazines in the 1950s, precursors to explicit gay pornographic magazines. Most of the new gay paperbacks were explicitly pornographic, writing designed to provoke sexual responses, rather than literary writing, and they came from small, gay presses, such as the Guild Press, Greenleaf Classics, and the Publisher's Export Company, rather than from mainstream national publishers. For example, Greenleaf (under editor Earl Kemp) published a series of erotic spy parodies called The Man from C.A.M.P., written by Victor J. Banis. Banis says once Kemp and Greenleaf proved how much of a market there was for this type of fiction, other publishers soon joined in. Sometimes, these past ephemera can become useful community history resources. As Susan Stryker and Michael Meeker note in a new preface to Lou Rand's The Gay Detective (1965), San Francisco area LGBT historians found that the paperback in question turned out to be a valuable document in describing past prominent if closeted social figures, ethnic conflicts over police corruption and the emergence of a narcotics underworld in their city, as well as referring to bygone LGBT venues. Some of the titles issued by these presses in the late 1960s blurred the lines between literary gay fiction and pornography. While all of them include more explicit sexual content than literary novels or mainstream, non-sexual paperback fiction (Westerns, romances, etc.) of the time, some aspired to higher literary merit and include attempts at more careful characterizations, settings, and plots. Susan Stryker cites in this category Chris Davidson and Richard Amory, who both wrote for Greenleaf Classics.