Bail Out! (Black Knight Classics of the Homosexual Underground)

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 ----

Notable gay writers of the 1950s and 1960s who explored male homosexuality in their work included James Baldwin, John Rechy and Allen Ginsberg. Another 20th-century writer, Gore Vidal, had a lifelong male partner but preferred not to categorize himself as gay. 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. Designed to catch the eye, the paperback books featured vivid cover art and often dealt with taboo subjects. 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.