Fresno: Soft-Core Queer Porn Capital?

by Susan Stryker, Director, GLBT Historical Society

"Soft-Core Queer Porn Capital of the Southern Central Valley" isn't the first slogan that leaps to mind when you think about Fresno, California -- a small inland city a couple hundred miles from Los Angeles, famous for its raisin grapes, underground gardens, proximity to Yosemite National Park, and little else. But that's what it was when frustrated novelist Sanford Aday published risque paperback books there between 1955 and 1963.

The tortured prose from the inside front cover flap of Aday's first novel, "Amber Dust" (1952), helps explain why Aday had more success as a publisher than a writer: "Tigre Niort, a novelist, inspired by a girl who knew all the answers but the one she wanted him to get, comes face to face with the most powerful man of the state and has to challenge him for his life." A second novel, "Satan's Harvest" (1953), treated "life and love along the Mexican border." Aday produced eight other unpublished manuscripts and turned to peddling others' work in 1955. He published under three different imprints -- Fabian Books, Saber Books, and Vega Books -- all from the same Belmont Avenue location in Fresno.

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Paperback books from the '40s, '50s, and '60s fetch high prices from today's collectors, especially if they have lurid or outlandish covers or offer sensationalistic treatments of topics that nowadays wouldn't merit a halfhearted "harrumph" from a church lady. Aday's books certainly fit the bill. Milder titles like Floyd Hynes' "Beach Mavericks" (1958) or Pat Bunyan's "I Peddle Jazz" (1960) were interspersed with racier offerings like "Our Flesh Was Cheap" by Eve Linkletter (1960) and "Camera Bait" by Lora Sela (1959). A few, like Kip Madigan's "Incest for Rene" (1960), treated themes that remain taboo even today.

Most of Aday's titles lacked substantial literary merit and were packaged to appeal to the broadest possible tastes, but they were nevertheless sincere attempts at storytelling -- a far cry from pornographic publications today. The books Aday published had characters, plots, and locations undoubtedly drawn from the obscure, small-town lives of the writers themselves, and as such they have considerable historical value -- not to mention some interesting, lighthearted reading opportunities.

All of the books dealt with sexual subject matter, and a handful were overtly queer. Aday himself was involved with the Mattachine Society, a pioneering homosexual rights group founded in 1950. One queer-themed book by Willi Peters, "Lesbian Twins" (1960), offers a tour-de-force example of exquisitely bad writing: "Obedient to Mom's insistence, Hilda started upstairs to join Jane for a nap. Jealousy stabbed at Bill's heart as ugly visions multiplied in his brain." Another, "Gay Detective" (1961), written under the pseudonym Lou Rand by Gourmet Magazine columnist Lou Hogan, is actually quite good, and offers a tightly plotted murder mystery set in San Francisco just as that city was consolidating its reputation as the gay Mecca.

Aday's books were deemed obscene in the 1950s. He was often attacked as a purveyor of smut and vigorously defended himself against censorship. His efforts on behalf of freedom of expression made him a cause celebre for a short while in the 1960s, especially when he and his partner Wallace de Ortega Maxey faced federal charges for shipping allegedly obscene materials through the mail. Their story was championed in early sexual liberation movement publications like Sex and Censorship, and drew support from the American Civil Liberties Union. Aday and Maxey were eventually tried and convicted in 1963 for shipping Oscar Peck's "Sex Life of a Cop" (1959) to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Aday was sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined $25,000 -- a sobering reminder of how repressive our society was only a few decades ago.