Figuring Out the Queers of New York

The Queers of New York

Leo Orenstein

Richmond Hill, ON: Pocket, 1972

The late Leo Orenstein was a producer, a director, an educator, an illustrator, a playwright and, with The Queers of New York, a novelist. That there aren't other novels in his bibliography comes as a bit of a surprise. As a young man, he played a part with the country's early paperback publishers. Orenstein's art for Fireside Publishing's Baron Munchausen is a personal favourite. "ILLUSTRATED BY GUSTAVE DORÉ"... except, of course, for the cover.

The Queers of New York is the product of a much different time. Its appearance owes a great deal to Pocket Books' belated effort to establish a line of Canadian mass market paperback originals. Orenstein's novel, one of the first, would soon be joined by titles like The Happy Hairdresser, Daddy's Darling Daughter and The Last Canadian, which I maintain is the stupidest novel yet produced in this country.

A much better book, The Queers of New York begins with a "panty-pink Cadillac convertible" being chased through Manhattan. At the wheel is our hero and narrator, charismatic go-getter Paul Norman. A Jewish gag writer for Punch Line – read: Laugh In – Paul is doing his darndest to reinvent himself. In the past, he's sunk money into mining and a suicidal daredevil – this time it's film production. Paul has gambled on an option for Fruitfly, "a play about homosexuals", which he's trying to mould into something that will sell in Hollywood. The thing is, he knows nothing about his subject, and the play's author, GT Baker, rightly rejects all his ideas. The gag writer thinks he's on to something when he learns that a blackmail ring has been secretly filming the city's wealthiest gays. Adding the blackmail element, along with actual blackmail footage, will make Fruitfly "something every producer in the business would be breaking their neck to get."

What seems too easy a solution becomes complicated when Paul's contact is run down by the crooks while walking away from the panty-pink Caddy. And so, the chase. Paul is also punched, kicked, drugged, kidnapped, shot at, and has a lead pipe thrown in his general direction. It's pretty exciting stuff, relayed with a good amount of humour – he is a comedy writer, after all – but the pacing is all off.

Blame lies with GT, who encourages Paul to learn a thing or two about homosexuality. His education begins with a visit to Dr Stanhauser, a professor of Anthropology at "the Forensic Clinic of Columbia University". Paul begins with a question:

"Are there any figures on what percentage of the population is homosexual?"

"I think Kinsey provides the most reliable figures so far, on that. At least judging from my work here at the clinic, I have no reason to doubt them. The picture that shapes up in these studies shows that 4% are exclusively homosexual, and another 33% have been involved in at least one enjoyable homosexual experience in their lives."

"Thirty-seven percent altogether? That's more than one out of three!"

"Yes, and that's to the point of orgasm. Mind you, I think Kinsey was a bit too wide on the 33% because he takes it from adolescents on; but altogether its generally assumed that 37% of the male population has at one time in their lives become involved with a male homosexual."

And on it goes, page after page. The whole thing reads a lot like an interview with a sexologist, circa 1970. Who knows, maybe it was. After the meeting, Paul feels it necessary to detail the life story of every second or third "queer" he encounters. Consider them case studies.

Ultimately, what might have been a fun and funny little novel suffers from want of a good editor. Pocket's Canadian branch plant was hardly known for its high standards; one need look no further than the first pages for evidence. No, not the novel itself, but the two-page "GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH WORDS AND PHRASES USED IN THIS BOOK". Not a bad idea, if Paul's own definitions didn't already pepper the narration. Here's our hero in the midst of an otherwise tense break-and-enter:

With all my "potzkehing" around, (potzkehing means fooling around and making a mess of things), I began to worry about Jinx. Could she hear me down here?

Nearly four decades have passed since publication, but I'm betting that in 1972 "Rosh Hashonah", "kosher", "schmuck" and "shmoose" were familiar to the "Goyim" (a word that also features). An equally useless "GAY GLOSSARY" follows the novel. Here, the reader is filled in on obscurities like "heterosexual", "homosexual", "bisexual", "straight", "gay", "queer", "faggot", "fruit", "pansy", "lesbian", "S&M", "narcissism", "buns" and "hooker".

I doubt Orenstein had anything to do with the glossary; there are differences in spelling between it and the novel proper. What's more, Paul's own definitions – and those of the OED, for that matter – do not match. "Pediaphilia" is "anal enjoyment in sex – homosexual or heterosexual" we're told on the last page of the book.

The Queers of New York received only one printing. There was no chance for a correction.

Object: A mass market paperback with a cover illustration provided by Orenstein himself. As bowdler of Fly-by-night noted last year, cover copy tells us nothing at all about the book, presenting instead "an absurdly detailed biography of the author." A loan from bowdler, The Queers of New York is the first book reviewed here that isn't part of my collection.

Access: Held by Library and Archives Canada and just thirteen universities – even the Toronto Public Library fails. Scarce and highly collectable; any decent copy offered for under $40 is a bargain. Of the three copies are currently listed online I recommend purchasing the most expensive. Yes, it's US$75, but the thing is signed.

My thanks to bowdler for the loan, and for the images used in this post.

Related posts:

The Curious and Unknown Leo Orenstein

The Naked, the Queer and the Starlost

The Squire Hardman Hoax: Naughtiness Abounds

Squire Hardman

George Colman [pseud. John Glassco]

[Foster, QC]: Pastime Press, 1966

Squire Hardman ranks as John Glassco's most accomplished, audacious and outrageous hoax. It's also by far the least common of his books – fifty copies – which pretty much explains why it has received so little attention. Infamous, yet unknown, like the very best literary hoaxes the work's history is as complex as it is entertaining.

At 1320-lines, Squire Hardman is one of the very few poems that Glassco wrote with any ease – but then, he rarely struggled when writing pornography. His inspiration was The Rodiad, a flagellantine fantasy in verse that is ascribed erroneously to the nearly-forgotten English playwright George Coleman the Younger. Glassco's Squire Hardman is similar in style and theme, though it does depart in one important manner; where in The Rodiad the flagellator is a man, the hand wielding the whip in Squire Hardman belongs to a woman. Here Glassco's own fantasies and desires hold sway.

Squire Hardman would be Glassco's only self-published book. In 1966, fourteen years after composition, he hired a printer in Waterloo, Quebec to produce the fifty, along with a handbill offering the book at ten dollars, postage-paid. This advertisement, describing Squire Hardman as “unquestionably the most brilliant flagellantine poem ever written", was subsequently mailed to academic institutions in Canada and the United States.

As he had in composing the poem, Glassco went to great lengths to mimic the early nineteenth-century style that had been employed in The Rodiad, right down to the title page. He was justifiably proud, writing poet Daryl Hine: “The introduction is in my best dated and documented style of Hoaxery; the nice title-page, decorations, layout are all mine too; I even stuck the labels on the covers."

Central to the hoax was a five-page Introduction, written by Glassco, in which he discusses Colman while comparing and contrasting The Rodiad and Squire Hardman:

The truth is that the two poems can be ascribed to Colman on the basis of internal evidence alone; and strong as this is, it is not really conclusive. All that can be affirmed with certainty is that both poems are by the same hand, and that their brilliance cannot lower the reputation of a writer who usually compounded coarseness with the graver faults of hypocrisy and dullness – from both of which these two poems are at any rate free.

In this mischievous bit of prose, Glassco feigns wonder that The Rodiad has been "reprinted many times”, while its "companion piece", Squire Hardman has been all but ignored. The hoaxter himself considered reprinting, even going so far as to commission illustrations from Philip Core (then a 15-year-old schoolboy). However, the idea was abandoned and the artwork was relegated to a brown paper envelope. A Gentleman of Pleasure, my biography of Glassco, features one of Core's previously unpublished illustrations.

Object: A well-constructed 68-page book with grey card stock cover. Issued in an edition of fifty copies, each is numbered in Glassco's hand.

Access: Fifteen copies are held by libraries in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. The remaining 35 are, presumably, in private hands. My copy was purchased twenty-two years ago for US$100 from a New York bookseller – I've not seen a single copy for sale since.

Though Squire Hardman has never been reprinted on its own, the poem is currently available alongside The Rodiad, "Punishment Day", "I Never Saw Her Coming" and "The Nursery Tea" in an anthology titled Punitive Poetry. The publisher, AKS Books of Bexhill-on-Sea, Essex, also sells Glassco's other flagellantine classic The English Governess. Both are published without the permission of the author's estate. Very naughty.

Cross-posted – with minor variations – at A Gentleman of Pleasure.

A Lionel Shapiro Cover Cavalcade

Either you hit the jackpot or get nowhere. There are much better writers than myself who can't even get to first base for coffee money.

– Lionel Shapiro, 1956

Having endured all 351 pages of The Sixth of June, I doubt I'll ever find the strength to open another Lionel Shapiro book – but if I do, A Star Danced, Gertrude Lawrence's 1945 "autobiography" will be the one. The English chanteuse maintained that the words were her own, but credit really belongs to Lionel Shapiro, ghostwriter.

A Star Danced was not the war correspondent's first book. The previous year saw They Left the Back Door Open, a rushed, but worthwhile piece of reportage on the Allies in Italy.

Shapiro turned next to fiction with The Sealed Verdict (Doubleday, 1947), "the tale of Major Lashley, whose reward for his brilliant and successful prosecution of a German war criminal was an official commendation... and an unexplainable feeling of guilt." One 1948 wire service story puts the first printing at 250,000, while another reports that Paramount had paid as much as US$200,000 for the rights. Though Walter Winchell thought The Sealed Verdict had the makings of an important film, no one was particularly taken by the results. The Bantam movie tie-in, which was never reprinted, marks the last time the novel saw print.

For Winchell, Torch for a Dark Journey (Doubleday, 1950) was "better than his first click The Sealed Verdict," but this time Hollywood didn't come calling. However, the novel did make it to the small screen in a 1950 Philco Television Playhouse broadcast. A California bookseller currently lists a souvenir of the effort, an inscribed copy of the first edition:

Signed for Delbert Mann - to whom I am greatly indebted for an incisive job of direction in the first dramatization of this book - and for whom I confidently predict an immense future in the world of dramatic arts. Lionel Shapiro, Nov. 24, 1950.

Mann was director of the television adaptation. His future in the world of dramatic arts wasn't exactly immense, but he did win the 1955 Best Director Oscar for Marty. And the further dramatizations? Still we wait.

Published in 1951, the Bantam edition enjoyed no second printing, though the uncredited cover image was recycled for by Corgi three years later.

Seen here through the fog of war in 1958, what Doubleday peddled as "a truly tender love story", Fontana pitches as a blood and guts war novel. In fact, The Sixth of June has just one battle scene, and it barely covers ten pages. Did I mention there are 351 pages in all? I read them all.

The Gazette, 6 August 1955

Six Sixth of Junes (Two Astonishingly Bad)

Reporting Lionel Shapiro's death, an anonymous journalist for The Canadian Jewish Review wrote that the late author's books had sold more than two million copies. I don't doubt the figure for a second. The Sixth of June continued to hit bookstore shelves for two decades, the last edition being a cheap 1975 paperback from New York's Pinnacle Books.

The Americans seemed particularly taken by the novel – it's very much an American story – but the Finns showed even greater dedication. As Kahdet jäähyväiset, the 1956 first Finnish edition (above) was followed by a string of unattractive books that continued into the 1990s.

With Brad Parker cast as a doughboy and John Wynter as a voyeur, one might assume this 1985 cover is the worst.

Nope.

Blame Gummerus, the original publisher of the translation, which issued this five years later.

The 1956 Dutch edition is much more accomplished, gracing the work with a multipurpose illustration suitable for a use on thrillers, political tracts and almost anything featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Au sixième Jour, the Presses de la Cité translation, was the one that appeared in Montreal's French bookstores. Published in 1956, it features the illustration Len Oehman provided Doubleday.

The Spanish edition, also published in 1956, presents a curious reworking of the Oehman painting in which it appears that Wynter gets the girl. Actually, the Lt Col is killed when he steps on a mine.

There, I've spoiled it for you.

A Fabulous Bachelor's Final Novel

The Sixth of June

Lionel Shapiro

New York: Doubleday, 1955

351 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Global Warming as Nationalist Dream

Erres boréales

Florent Laurin [pseud. Armand Grenier]

[Montreal]: [Ducharme], 1944

221 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Six Pyxides for Sunday

Six editions of The Pyx, beginning with the very first paperback edition from Fawcett's Crest Books imprint. Published in 1960, its cover – the best of the lot – cautions:

A mystery this – the first edition has no such section.

The first English edition, published in 1960 by Secker & Warburg, with Elizabeth Lucy falling to her death.

Published in 1973, the first Popular Library edition draws on the movie poster. Karen Black makes a phone call, yes, but it's hardly crucial to the plot.

"The 'eerie' novel of a beautiful call girl and her deadly secret", says Best Sellers? Well, not really. Look closely and you'll see that what's quoted is nothing more than the word "eerie".

This later Popular Library edition holds keeps the one-word Best Sellers quote, while discarding Karen Black. What do we have instead? A semi-reptilian eye and a wholly-naked body, neither of which feature in the novel. By the way, Elizabeth Lucy is a redhead.

Quartet's 1974 edition introduces a cat – again, not in the novel – and replaces the pyx with a tiny locket containing a girl's photo and what appears to be an aspirin.

The only Canadian edition, published in 1991 by HarperCollins Canada. The novel has been out of print ever since.

Related post: A Penthouse Killing in Montreal