Boyd McDonald (1925 - September 1993)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Born in 1925 in South Dakota, Boyd McDonald entered Harvard as a high-school dropout after serving in the army in World War II: "I was a pioneer high school dropout," he writes, "leaving school to play badly in a bad traveling dance band. I was drafted into the Army, graduated from Harward and came to New York, where my principal activity was taking advantage of the city's public sexual recreation facilities. As a sideline I worked as a back writer at Time, Forbes, IBM and even more sordid companies. In 1970 I started the magazine, S.T.H. (Straight to Hell), the Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, later re-named the New York Review of Cocksucking".

Jobs with Time, IBM, and several Wall Street firms preceded Boyd's career as a chronicler of gay sex. He was the founder and editor of Straight to Hell (alternatively the Manhattan Review of Cocksucking), and later published a number of anthologies of true sex histories, the final three of which were Raunch, Lewd, and Scum. Boyd died in September 1993, two months after completing his final book.


Boyd McDonald, 1987, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1121533)

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)

McDonald compiled first person descriptions of sexual encounters submitted by readers, gave them mock-journalistic, slyly ironic titles ("Priest Dies- Story Won't", "Sports Special: Football Pro Takes Dick"), and intercut them with his acerbic political commentary and cultural criticism, producing an archive of subterranean and illict encounters which fuse functional pornographic narrative with social history. His magazines have been anthologized by Gay Sunshine Press.

Source: http://helmyishere.blogspot.com/2008/01/straight-to-hell_14.html

Further Readings:

Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall by Felice Picano
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Basic Books (June 28, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0786718137
ISBN-13: 978-0786718139
Amazon: Art and Sex in Greenwich Village: A Memoir of Gay Literary Life After Stonewall

A decade after the Stonewall rebellions, a small, all-gay press named Seahorse began along with Calamus Books and JH Press, which all came together to form Gay Presses of New York. Gay Presses of New York was not only the most successful gay press of its day, but the founders had made their move at the right time and place. Gay Presses of New York also played apart in the growth of what is now gay culture, consisting of bookstores, magazines, newspapers, theater companies, and art galleries. Many aspects of the arts, as they swirled around New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco during the 1970s through 1991 were connected to Gay Presses of New York.

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices