True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell

by William E. Jones

Overview

Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) had the makings of a successful life in the 1950s–an education at Harvard, a job at Time/Life–but things didn't turn out as planned. After 20 years of resentful conformity and desperate alcoholism, McDonald dried out, pawned all of his suits, and went on welfare; it was then that his life truly began.
From a room in a New York SRO hotel, McDonald published Straight to Hell, a series of chapbooks collecting readers' "true homosexual experiences." Following the example of Alfred Kinsey, McDonald obsessively pursued the truth about sex between men just as gay liberation began to tame America's sexual outlaws for the sake of legal recognition. Admired by such figures as Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs, Straight to Hell combined a vigorous contempt for authority with a keen literary style, and was the precursor of the first queer 'zines decades later.
Containing in-depth interviews with friends and family members and a wealth of previously unpublished material, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell is the first book devoted to this key figure of the American underground.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780996421812
Publisher:	We Heard You Like Books
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

William E. Jones is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who was born in Ohio and now lives in Los Angeles. He has made two feature length films, Massillon (1991) and Finished (1997) which won a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, the documentary Is It Really So Strange? (2004). His work has been the subject of retrospectives at Tate Modern and Anthology Film Archives, and has been included in the 1993 and 2008 Whitney Biennials. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Bidoun, Frieze and Little Joe. His book Imitation of Christ was named one of the best photo books of 2013 by Time magazine.

Editorial Reviews

02/29/2016
Jones’s raunchy and roving book centers on Boyd McDonald, the publisher of Straight to Hell, a transgressive, pornographic chapbook focused on the raunchy extremes and true tales of gay men’s lives. The magazine was dedicated as much to shock value as to prurient interests, and its tagline was “Love and Hate for the American Straight.” Originally a niche, underground publication, Straight to Hell became something of a cultural touchstone for generations of gay men starting in the mid-1970s. Its pictorials, interviews, and reader-submitted stories painted a unashamed picture of a vibrant if oft-hidden subculture, and it was one of the first and certainly one of the more distinctive queer zines. Jones (Flesh and the Cosmos) includes numerous excerpts from Straight to Hell, sharing the writing and photography that made the publication an underground hit. “Boyd McDonald’s work would have harassed the pleasant slumbers of respectable readers had he ever reached them. He did not, and as a result, comfort, complacency, and mainstream recognition eluded him,” Jones says in the introduction. This biographical retrospective is sometimes narratively aimless, but it sheds light on the era in which the zine was created. “Self-published and crude, Straight to Hell’s sense of urgency was as strong as its contempt for authority,” traits that it clearly took from its troubled, obsessive creator. The subject matter makes this an outrageous offering in its own right, and valuable for its insight and boldness. B&w photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Move over Maxwell Perkins, here's another editor who deserves to be more famous than you. Boyd McDonald may have been an alcoholic lunatic who masturbated chronically while encouraging readers to send in endless descriptions of their sex lives, but he remained pure in spirit." — John Waters

From the Publisher