In praise of books and magazines
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Some of us had nothing more electronic to use for wanking than books with hot stories and magazines with hot pictures. The stories may have been about straits because there pretty much was NO male-male filth that the average queer teen could find. And pictures may have been from publications devoted to sports like bodybuilding, swimming, gymnastics and the like– not that there was much beyond Sports Illustrated with its multisport coverage, as opposed to today's plethora of specialty pubs, from wrestling to surfing, shredding, and such soporifics as golf ("a pleasant walk spoiled") and bowling.
So we enjoyed what publications we could hold in our other hand. Now, "her eyes glittered at the sight of him" is hardly as specific as descriptions get, though once you had to get relief from Denmark and its civilized neighbors if you wanted, say, an entire single volume devoted to a lengthy, no nonsense, richly detailed account of two people fucking and sucking in a single sex scene where the wanking reader could cum multiple times at various stages of the exuberant single encounter.
And then there was the nonfiction, which has accumulated as "queer studies" have begun to suggest that sexual politics even among alleged "perverts" had an influence on world history as well as world art, literature, and music. Like sociological studies and narratives of coming out, intimidated teens and others not yet out of the closet, finding out about Mother Molly's Claphouse ("Good golly, Miss Molly!" was central to the invention of rock 'n' roll) centuries ago, to what Oscar was doing with those street boys (sucking them) fills in our history and opens our culture to a rich history that goes well beyond John Wilmot's filthy performances, part of his legacy even less popular in the past than his fulminations On Behalf Of those naughty colonists demanding unprecedented rights of self-governance.
So as part of another posting recently, your long-winded exemplar of barely (if at all) constrained verbosity wrote about: "...the unfortunate lack of nonfiction books and magazines."
And since what followed might possibly be better posted (and better received, or at least noticed) here, let me reveal what followed those quoted words:
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Peter Burg's "Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean" is a revelation, and only one of his historical studies of piracy, semen at sea, and "rum, sodomy, and the lash." Like many another volume, it can really only be obtained by outright purchase, and hence its valuable tales and insights are too largely unknown.
John Boswell's discovery that Homosexuality was Approved by the Roman Catholic church for centuries is more missing book availability.
I have remarked more than once about the usefulness of someone putting together or even offering one at a time, the earthshattering STH-- Straight to Hell-- aka The Manhattan Journal of Cocksucking. Not even the books that compiled the lurid true stories in that underground filth seem to be online.
Short of that, where are the old Fizeek magazines allegedly about bodybuilding, or early activist publications like One, from the Mattachine Society, or The Ladder put out by the Daughters of Bilitis?
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Partly I want to make the case that there is great, entertaining, enlightening, and educational stuff out there that would be a benefit to the entire community here if it could be found on this site.
Could give a whole new meaning to "Talk like a pirate day." Or lead one to respond in some way to learning that Walt Whitman was a member of the "Fred Gray Association" long before Dorothy had "friends."
And, let's face it, Boyd MacDonald's exuberant documentary filth celebrating real life sexual adventures is not only boner-making, but can be a true revelation simply by collecting and sharing stories of real world encounters in gritty, WYSIWYG detail.
Not that anyone would think of turning such written materials into a torrent for this site, but I do want to encourage people to think, at least think, about the value of such content and the good it can do, if only as a topic for debate and discussion. Which, correct me if I'm wrong again (and no one has ever resisted that impulse before!) is not the kind of discussion easily or often found anywhere in these forums.
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I have a complete set of Physique Pictorial and an almost complete set of Champion Studio mags.
Just thought I'd throw that into the pot
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And verily I say unto you, after posting (be sure to let me know privately because I miss stuff), thou shalt have a reward in bonus points and effusive gratitude. Maybe others will even come forward to share their hard-earned long-time accumulation. Like lots of publications, these were not always easy to find even when new, and access steadily declined after that.
Same problem exists for periodicals in other fields. Skateboarding, motorcycles, soap operas… all on newsstands somewhere, once upon a time, but after that, good luck! Not the kinda niche interest that an already cash-strapped library is going to subscribe to in the first place, much less pay to catalogue and preserve.
Look at what happened to hardcopy daily newspapers when microfilm came in. Everyone sent their shelf-filling issues, already deterioriating and hard to preserve, off for tidy little rolls of microfilm to come back so they could throw away the originals. Too bad if someone had clipped out a recipe on the back of a story you needed to research-- that is what survives now.
Also, too bad if a page is folded, there is a "gutter" between pages that cannot be read. And color? Ferggedaboutit. No color magazine supplements. No color comics. In fact, if the photos are halfway decent, consider yrself lucky.
And that's just for local newspapers with a mass circulation. It's not as though there is handy microfilm, of any quality, for teen idols you can "Win a date with" or much of anything else, including homemaking magazines, sewing, knitting, cooking.... So how is anyone ever going to see these titles without paying through the nose or visiting an LGBT archive that might, just possibly, have a set?
"Suddenly the past has fallen in behind us." --Jefferson Airplane, long, long ago, long ago.