Was doing some searching on gay pulp books (it’s a bit of a hobby of mine), and ran across this listing for the book Light Out, Little Hustler. I featured it once before a while ago in a Gay Pulp post, but I learned some things about it that led to a interesting rabbit hole of connections!
This listing posted an interesting factiod that I didn’t know! I highlighted the info in a red box. PBO means “Paperback original”.
Who knew there was a Disney connection? I briefly tried to look into these “underground Disney porn comics”, but didn’t find much. If anyone does know more about it (especially if it’s gay/homoerotic), let me know! I didn’t initially know what the listing meant by “spoofing Richard Amory and Fruit of the Loon,” but I did find out later–keep reading.
George Davies/Lester Lance also wrote another gay pulp book seen below, so writing gay pulp wasn’t just a one off.
But what is up with this “Fruit of the Loon” business? Well, it turns out there was a fairly popular book in the mid 60s called Song of the Loon, which apparently was a very popular gay erotic book at the time. Here’s a listing of it from another site below. If the text in the pic is too small to read, I reposted it below the image.
Quote from the listing above:
“More completely than any author before him, Richard Amory explores the tormented world of love for man by man . . . a happy amalgam of James Fenimore Cooper, Jean Genet and Hudson’s Green Mansions.”—from the cover copy of the 1969 edition. Published well ahead of its time, in 1966 by Greenleaf Classics, Song of the Loon is a romantic novel that tells the story of Ephraim MacIver and his travels through the wilderness. Along his journey, he meets a number of characters who share with him stories, wisdom and homosexual encounters. The most popular erotic gay book of the 1960s and 1970s, Song of the Loon was the inspiration for two sequels, a 1970 film of the same name, at least one porn movie and a parody novel called Fruit of the Loon. Unique among pulp novels of the time, the gay characters in Song of the Loon are strong and romantically drawn, which has earned the book a place in the canon of gay American literature.With an introduction by Michael Bronski, editor of Pulp Friction and author of The Pleasure Principle.Little Sister’s Classics is a new series of books from Arsenal Pulp Press, reviving lost and out-of-print gay and lesbian classic books, both fiction and nonfiction. The books in the series are produced in conjunction with Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium, the heroic Vancouver bookstore well-known for its anti-censorship efforts.”
Well, it turns out George Davies/Lance Lester was the one who wrote the parody book of Song of Loon, using the pseudonym Ricardo Armory. It goes without saying that this would be pretty racist by today’s standards, but book description is pretty outrageous (give it a read below), an interesting part of gay fiction history, and with an odd Disney connection as well.
The fact the camp in this story is called the “Circle 69 Ranch” is likely another Disney reference… Disneyland has a horse ranch called the “Circle D Ranch”. It’s where they train and keep the horses that are used in Disneyland. They now also have an off-site location in Norco with the same name. It’s kind of fun to hear Disney had some gay, kinky people working for him!
