Reading Material
"[Lady Chatterley's Lover] is, to say the least, a powerful aphrodisiac and I have it on the personal testimony of one who lisps that its descriptions of the normal sex act could do more than the arts of psychoanalysis to make an erring homo renounce his red tie and begin annoying women."--Merle Macbain to Leo Adams, October 12, 1929.[1]
In the early-to-mid twentieth century, before the existence of an active gay press and bookstores, gay men and lesbians necessarily relied on word of mouth and the sharing of books and periodicals among circles of friends for gay-themed reading material. Leo Adams's letters are a rich source of material about what he and his friends were reading in the period between the wars and immediately following World War II. Adams's most remarkable correspondent in this regard is Merle Macbain, editor of The Greater Chicago Magazine in the late 1929s, and later a Commander in the United States Navy who served as a technical adviser in the 1955 film Mister Roberts. Perhaps most remarkable about their literary relationship is that Macbain, a straight, married man who boasts of having slept "with at least 300 women,"[2] takes such an active interest in Leo Adams's gay reading list. In many ways, Macbain is more progressive--more queer, even--in his reading than Adams, whose taste in imaginative literature runs toward The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. Adams did read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and recommended it to Macbain. That letter is not among Adams's papers, but Macbain's, with his critical commentary, is:
- My dear Leo:
- Yes – I have read “Well of Loneliness” and I am willing to testify that if Miss Radcliffe [sic] Hall can love like she can write she is certainly not sex starved. From beginning to end the book is a rhythmic pleasure, and approaching it as I did from a wholesomely normal and purely impersonal viewpoint I probably appreciated it even more than you did.
Yours as ever / Merely Merle
Notes
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