At Library Thing you’ll find a collection of covers from some of these vintage erotic novels. Most people are familiar with the sleazy, often campy pulp fiction novels that became a sensation among straight readers in the fifties (and even earlier.) At the same time, there was a smaller but equally vibrant market for homoerotic pulp fiction. It wasn’t until cheap DVD players became ubiquitous that porn started to become a downlow fixture in many American households, and it wasn’t until the Internet and mobile telephony matured that porn finally became an integral facet of daily life for both adults and for any curious adolescent with a mobile phone, laptop, or tablet.īefore affordable porn was widely available on DVD and the web, erotic novels continued to be popular. Even in the eighties and early nineties, porn on VHS tapes was mostly rented. In the sixties and seventies, you generally had to go to an adult theater or a video arcade if you wanted to see gay porn.
Porn still managed to make an impact on gay culture in those days, but it was much more subtle. Francis Sevin explores the largely forgotten genre of gay pulp fiction.ĭepending on your age, it might be hard to imagine – but before DVD’s and the Internet came along, there was a time when porn wasn’t always available on demand 24/7, and it definitely wasn’t free.