Viereck, a poet, was sent to prison during World War II for his work as a paid propaganda agent of Nazi Germany. The first paperback original to deal with homosexuality was 1952's Men into Beasts, a nonfiction work by George Viereck. Likewise, Blair Niles' 1931 novel Strange Brother appeared in paperback in 1952.įirst original gay pulp paperback These were often reprints of literary novels that involved references to homosexuality, such as Charles Jackson's 1946 novel, The Fall of Valor, and Gore Vidal's 1948 novel, The City and the Pillar, which first appeared in paperback in 1950. Still, some gay pulps were published by mainstream publishers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. There was no burgeoning market for gay male novels in the 1950s because they apparently had little crossover appeal for a substantial heterosexual readership." According to Bronski, "The trajectory of the gay male pulps is very different.
Michael Bronski has noted that lesbian pulp fiction were far more numerous and popular than those that dealt with male homosexuality he attributes this difference to the fact that while both lesbian and heterosexual women read the lesbian pulps, a major part of the market for these novels was heterosexual men. Designed to catch the eye, the paperback books featured vivid cover art and often dealt with taboo subjects: prostitution, rape, interracial romances, lesbianism, and male homosexuality.
Gay pulps are part of the expansion of cheap paperback books that began in the 1930s and "reached its full force in the early 1950s." Mainstream publishers packaged the cheap paperbacks to be sold in train and bus stations, dimestores, drugstores, grocery stores, and newsstands, to reach the market that had bought pulp magazines in the first half of the twentieth century.
Many early gay pulps were reissues of literary novels with gay themes, such as this 1958 Pyramid Books edition of Never the Same Again.