Hidden History: Pornographers and Poets

Hidden History is my new Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in gay and lesbian history, especially those with a connection to our fair city of Washington D.C.

Fall 1996:
I’m 16 and attending Washington D.C.’s Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL), with the tentative blessing of my parents and the forthright encouragement of two bisexual female friends, who take me down for the first time on the metro. While I’m about to meet a whole cross-section of D.C.-area gay youth, that turns out to be only the second most important development from my heading to SMYAL. Wedged in the corner of the organization’s upstairs rooms at 333 and 1/3 Pennsylvania Avenue are hundreds and hundreds of books.

Although I find lots of writers on those bookshelves, I gravitate to the poets. Writing angst-filled and mostly bad teenage poetry myself, largely about being gay, I discover the books of Walta Borawski, Dennis Cooper, Ed Cox, Jim Everhard, Essex Hemphill. Here are writers working with heady subjects, with ideas about sexuality, justice, relationships, race. They play with language and do it well. It’s a revelation.

I pick up a book called Entre Nous (pictured above). The poet’s name is Tim Dlugos. There’s a large photograph of Dlugos on the cover, and he looks like me: straight brown hair, pale skin, big plastic-framed glasses. In the biographical note at the back, it tells me that he was born in Massachusetts, but that he grew up in Arlington, Virginia—right where I live. The poetry turns out to be great, but I’m already hooked after that biographical note. So it’s possible to grow up in Arlington and become a writer? Who is this guy? What is Dlugos doing now?

The Internet barely exists in the mid-‘90s, so I check libraries, indexes, poetry anthologies, and find nothing more. I’m grasping at wind. Any trace of Tim Dlugos has disappeared—at least that this 16-year-old kid is able to find.

Summer 2005:

I’m playing around on E-bay, trying different keywords, hunting for bargains on gay novels and antiquarian books that my research has told me have gay content. Now here’s a title, along with what sounds like a pseudonymous author: Of Hot Nights…and Damp Beds by J.J. Proferes. I click on the auction, and the book’s cover shows a drawing of two highly muscled guys looking at each other and standing almost in shadow. The one in front wears a posing strap, the tiny piece of white cotton used to cover the genitals in the days when depicting naked males could get you thrown in jail. Just that cover indicated that the book was probably pornography, or what passed for it in earlier decades.

The item description is what really catches my attention: published in 1966, by Guild Press…out of Washington D.C. There’s a press publishing gay pornography being run out of Washington D.C. in the mid-1960s? Really? Well, that settles it: the book is cheap (in more ways than one!), and I buy it.

When I receive the book, the back of the title page trumpets: “A New Author Presents Five Stories of the Homosexual Scene.” There’s another clue below: readers of the stories are encouraged to write to the Guild Book Service at a PO Box in Benjamin Franklin Station to receive a 120-page book catalog. One hundred and twenty pages? They must have published a heck of a lot of books. And Benjamin Franklin Station is in the heart of downtown D.C.

My first Internet search—basic facts can be a lot easier to find than in 1996—doesn’t help much. “Guild Press” returns tens of thousands of Google hits. “J.J. Proferes,” on the other hand, isn’t that common a name, and the few hits that come back lead me to the name H. Lynn Womack, the founder and publisher of Guild Press. I’m off and running with my usual question at the forefront: who is this guy?

July/August 2008:

I take back roads and small highways to drive the 8 hours up to Ithaca, NY, passing between fields dotted with cows and tiny, depressed rural towns. Although a lot of information has been filled in, I’m still trying my best to find out: who were these gay people who lived years before me, oftentimes in the same city I frequent?

Cornell University in Ithaca holds the business papers of H. Lynn Womack and the Guild Press. By now, with the idea of writing a book, I’ve bought more of their pamphlets and magazines, tracked down authors and photographers who worked for them, and read the scant readily available articles about Womack. I’ve arranged with the rare book and manuscript library at Cornell to spend three days poring through boxes of advertising flyers, letters to photographers and authors, legal documents from Womack’s numerous court battles, and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings chronicling Womack’s rise and difficulty with the authorities. Some of these clippings are from now-defunct local newspapers, like the Washington Daily News and The Evening Star. It’s a rush to handle history like this.

The most poignant items in the crush of materials are handwritten notes from readers. One of the innovations in Guild Press-published magazines like Grecian Guild Pictorial and The Male Swinger was the advent of male-to-male pen-pal clubs. Readers used these for their stated purpose of finding correspondents, but also as a way to learn of a gay man or two living in their state, perhaps to share photographs or to meet for friendship or sex. The thin veneer of the pen-pal club allowed just enough cover that Womack and his associates could not be arrested for pandering: providing men with an opportunity to meet for then-illegal activity.

The members’ notes provide a few personal details, maybe include a picture. Faces, serious and sly, stare at me across the decades. The attached letters lavishly thank Guild Press for the opportunity to potentially meet…someone, anyone who had at least one crucial detail of their life in common with the writer. Are these men alive? Did they find a friend, through this pen-pal club or at some later time? Did they discover a way to live and achieve happiness as gay men through the years when their lives were illegal and hated? Or maybe some were outed, arrested, and shamed, their names and addresses published in the newspaper. They could have married, had children, destroyed any trace of their gay identity. At this point, there is likely no way to know. As much as I’m learning from this archive, even more questions arise. The rabbit hole of history opens and swallows these men up whole.

Finishing at Cornell, I continue my journey, eventually traveling to Toronto. There, I stay at the home of Ian Young, a longtime gay poet and publisher, and his partner, Wulf. By now, I’ve been able to find out what happened to most of the poets whose work I drank from during high school. Some seemingly disappeared, some went on to greater renown as writers. Many died from AIDS. In the basement of his home, Ian keeps a grand, sprawling archive of gay poetry books and chapbooks, history texts, and letters from authors. We spend one morning together in that basement while I comb through shoeboxes stuffed with poetry. Names both familiar and foreign rise to the surface as I remove handfuls of books at a time. Other hours, we sit in his living room, talking about gay authors. Occasionally, Ian reaches over to the shelves near his chair and pulls down items he knows I’ll be interested in, or walks from the room and reappears with a stack of books.

One stack is all sorts of thin pamphlets and books published by Tim Dlugos over a nearly twenty-year period. I’ve already found out that Tim went on to live in New York City, become an alcoholic, kick his addiction, continue to write stunning, witty poems, and eventually die from AIDS in 1990. But these books Ian shows me contain more surprises. While I knew Tim had lived in Arlington as a boy, I didn’t know that he also kept an apartment in Washington D.C. in the early 1970s. There it was, typed in one of the books and handwritten at the head of a letter to Ian. 1437 Rhode Island Avenue NW., #608.

I look online and find that 1437 Rhode Island Avenue, a Logan Circle address, is these days advertised as The Zenith, a luxury condominium. The wonders of gentrification: a writer like Tim could no longer, I suspect, afford to live there. But now I can make a pilgrimage there to thank a man I never met, who died before I even knew I was gay, for the poetry he wrote and I read and that helped me, somehow, become the man I am today.

All of us are making our way in this world on the shoulders of those women and men who came before, whether or not we are ever fully aware of it. For those of us who are gay and lesbian, the history of those who came before is often hidden. To call history “hidden” might imply activity: that someone has willfully covered up the past. Certainly, this is true for much of gay and lesbian history—people whose identity has historically been feared and hated are less likely to leave open records of their lives, and all too often, relatives and friends have made a habit of “cleaning up” the historical record by destroying evidence. But often as not, history is actually hidden passively: by benign neglect, by accidents of memory, by simply not looking.

I feel it is our obligation as gay men and lesbians to fight this passivity by actively seeking out and learning about our history. No one will do this for us, and I fear that the world will be all too eager to let gay and lesbian histories disappear. It’s the same impulse that causes many heterosexuals to say, "I don’t mind gays and lesbians, I just wish they weren’t so open about their sexuality." Instead, let’s be tremendously open, not only about our own lives and dreams, but about those of the people who helped us be able to proclaim them.

Postscript: I’m continuing research on H. Lynn Womack and the men who created and consumed the works of D.C.’s Guild Press. I’ve learned that David Trinidad, the literary executor for Tim Dlugos, is working on creating Tim’s Collected Poems. With its publication, hopefully one person’s life and work will be more accessible for future gays and lesbians to learn from.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: A gay guitarist?