Boyd McDonald (pornographer)

Boyd McDonald (1925–1993) was an American pornographer, known for creating the long-running zine S.T.H. or Straight to Hell.

Background

McDonald, who sometimes prefixed his name with the (self-awarded) title of "Reverend." He was born in South Dakota, and entered Harvard as a high-school dropout after serving in the army in World War II. Jobs with Time, IBM, and several Wall Street firms preceded his career as a chronicler of gay sex. After having lost his "straight" jobs, and living on welfare,[1] he founded in 1973 and edited until 1992 his long-running zine S.T.H. or Straight to Hell, primarily made up of readers' submissions of their sexual experiences, and also published a number of anthologies of true sex histories. Boyd died in September 1993, two months after completing his final book, Scum.

McDonald baptized Straight to Hell with an ever-changing variety of subtitles:

McDonald edited S.T.H. from a series of transient furnished rooms in Manhattan,[3] in one of which he died. At its peak, it had a circulation of ten thousand.[4] The editorship was taken over by Victor Weaver after McDonald retired in 1992, then by Billy Miller in 1999.[5][6][7]

Boyd himself always called STH a work of research and spoke, quite unironically, of its importance to future historians. STH, he claimed, told the story of what people were actually doing in "The Golden Age of Cocksucking (1940–1980)".[8] McDonald typically engaged in acerbic political commentary and cultural criticism, especially directed at the hypocrisy of those who are not fully accepting of their own desires, however perverted or taboo. He typically titled his contributors' stories to parody news items, so trenchantly that the editor's statement is made even before the author begins to speak: "Baptist Boys Do It, As It Were, In Church"; "Typical 'Straight' Admits Weakness for Friend's Tongue"; "Youth Leaves Damp Underpants for Host to Sniff", "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Armpit-Sniffing."[9] Bad spelling and writing were deliberately not corrected.

"The truth is the biggest turn-on", he wrote, and "the proper study of homosexuality is homosexuals" [ sic ].[10] McDonald said that his mission was to replace pornography with smut, by which he meant to talk about sex that is truthful, idiosyncratic, and honest even about its own reason for being.[9] Or as he put it elsewhere, "We articulate cocksucker values." [11]

McDonald was a pornographer with a politics:

We do not advocate the overthrow of the American Government. Johnson and Nixon and Reagan, and their millions of followers, have always seen to that. They have South Americanized America.... We support the minority of American men who are decent, like Ramsey Clark, Ralph Nader and Daniel Ellsberg.

This led him to publish, among many reader-contributed photos, one of President Reagan in his underwear.[12] McDonald also had a philosophy:

"Straights" have a surface charm that comes from their membership in the overpowering sexual majority. This gives them a certain fearlessness that passes for masculinity. But at heart they are too timid and terrified of homosexuality to be of any real interest. Only men with balls dare to be different.

or as he puts it elsewhere: "Straight to Hell is not for the upward striving middle class but for guys who like to go down."[13]

Legacy

Although primarily marketed and sold as pornography, McDonald saw his work as a kind of history of the homosexual experience. A Harvard graduate, McDonald compared his work favorably to the work of the great sex researchers, saying 'Compared to Meat, Kinsey is just spam'.
—Daniel Hendrickson[14]
McDonald insisted that what he printed was not pornography, which for him meant the trite, self-conscious fantasies generated by guilt and timidity that were increasingly available in the 1970s and '80s through an increasingly commercial salacious press. He published The Truth, in a manner of a crusading journalist – a photographer without a camera – with the serious intention of assembling documentation of homosexual sex in its "classical" age, 1940–1980. The result is a kind of oral (as well as anal and genital) history, taking the reader into terrain at once strange and familiar: the unacknowledged corners of life where repression is not lifted, but exploded to bits. In contrast to pornographic fantasy, the meaning of every scene, scent and sensation in McDonald placed before his eager public is simply that, however American life has been represented in the official organs backed by business, state, and religion, such things actually do happen.... Through the sheer abundance of true stories, McDonald presents a picture of homosexual sex as a nearly universal male experience, in pointed contrast to the contemporary ideology of homosexuality as special identity. In the world of the S.T.H. book, every barracks shower is an orgy room; every Boy Scout jamboree is a festival of sexual initiation; every conservative politician and clergyman pays male hustlers for sex. Everything men do to bond or compete in sports, war and politics is a sublimation of, if not a substitute for, homosexual desire.
—Bernard Welt[15]

Boyd McDonald was mentioned as a prominent figure in the golden age of gay literature by Felice Picano.[16] John Waters has also expressed his enthusiasm.[17] He is discussed at length by Reed Woodhouse in Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995.[18] McDonald is the only non-fiction author Woodhouse deals with.

Gore Vidal once described S.T.H. as "one of the best radical papers in the country."[19] William Burroughs read his revolutionary sex magazine Straight to Hell with eagerness and admiration.[20]

An exhibition of Straight to Hell material, curated by Billy Miller, was held at the Berlin gallery Exile, October 19 – November 16, 2008,[21][9] where Jan Wandrag created the "installation" "Straight To Hell: In Cock We Trust".[22] "An installation" by Jan Wandrag was held July 25, 2010, at the White Cubicle Toilet Gallery in London.[23]

The San Francisco gay bookstore A Different Light held "Straight to Hell: A Night of Readings from the Cum-Drenched Pages of S.T.H." The poster announcing the reading, on Saturday, November 26, has been preserved.[24]

From 2001 to 2005, over 200 fan messages were posed on a group, described as "A place for fans of Boyd McDonald's seminal work, Straight To Hell, The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts", which existed on Yahoo Groups Canada (https://ca.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Straight_To_Hell/info, retrieved 2014-09-04). After 2005 the group was taken over by unrelated spam.

Works

S.T.H. compilations

Most of the material from S.T.H. has been reprinted in the volumes. Both volumes have been reprinted several times.

As editor

Additional volumes, edited by McDonald, containing similar material though not from S.T.H., are:

Other works

A variety of McDonald stories were reprinted in the "Sex Histories" section of Guidemag Magazine.[26]

McDonald is also the author of "Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to 'Oldies' on TV", Gay Presses of New York, 1985, ISBN 091401708X.

Archival material

The Cornell University Library has a collection of "Boyd McDonald papers, 1925–1993". They occupy 15 boxes, and include 3.5", Zip, and Jazz disks of 1990–1996 material.

References

  1. ↑ Reed Woodhouse, Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, ISBN 1558491325, p. 63
  2. ↑ These subtitles taken from http://www.straight-to-hell.com, retrieved 2010-09-03, and Charley Shively's Introduction to Meat. How Men Look, Act, Walk, Talk, Dress, Undress, Taste & Smell, True Homosexual Experiences from Straight To Hell, Volume 1, unpaged Gay Sunshine Press, 1981. ISBN 091734278X, https://archive.org/details/Meat.HowMenLookActwalktalkdressundresstasteSmellTrueHomosexual, and http://www.straight-to-hell.com, retrieved 2010-09-03
  3. ↑ Charley Shively, Introduction to Meat
  4. ↑ Woodhouse, p. 64.
  5. ↑ "Straight to Hell – 'The Cumrag of the Stars'", http://straight-to-hell.com, retrieved 2014-09-03
  6. ↑ Billy Miller, "The Wonderful, Sexual World of Bob Mizer", HuffPost Gay Voices, November 20, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/billy-miller/bob-mizer_b_4215464.html, retrieved 2014-09-07
  7. ↑ David Bateman, "Cum-dripping fun", Daily Xtra [Canada], January 17, 2007, http://dailyxtra.com/toronto/news/cum-dripping-fun, retrieved 2014-09-07
  8. ↑ Woodhouse, p. 70.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Welt, Bernard. "One Man's Meat". Retrieved 2014-09-10.
  10. ↑ "The Dangerous Country, in Meat.
  11. ↑ "'We Articulate Cocksucker Values': Remembering the Sexual Revolution" pp. 161–174 of Chapter 4, "Queer Theory is Burning", pp. 145–174, of Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, ISBN 9780816676101. An earlier version of this chapter was published by Christopher Castiglia "Past Burning: the (Post)Traumatic Criss of (Post-)Queer Theory", in States of Emergency, ed. Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, University of North Carolina Press, 2009, ISBN 0807859850, pp. 69–87.
  12. ↑ http://archive.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=9C47C01B-83FD-4A0D-831BD7F31715EB1D, retrieved 2014-09-02
  13. ↑ All of these quotes from his introduction, "Love and Hate for the American Straight", to Flesh. True Homosexual Experiences from S.T.H., Volume 2. Gay Sunshine Press, 1982. ISBN 0917342917, p. 9.
  14. ↑ Hendrickson, Daniel. "Boyd McDonald". In Gerstner, David A. Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture. Routledge. p. 386. Retrieved 2014-09-10.
  15. ↑ Bernard Welt, "One Man's Desire", text accompanying the exhibition at Exile (see below) November 7, 2008, retrieved 2014-09-10
  16. ↑ Catherine Texier, "Gay Lit's Golden Age", New York Times Book Review, December 2, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/books/review/Texier-t.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&_r=0, retrieved 2010-09-02
  17. ↑ Trey Speegle, "Picture This: Andy Warhol Shot My Dirty T-Shirt", http://worldofwonder.net/graphic-t-shirts-art/, retrieved 2014-09-10, and elsewhere.
  18. ↑ University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, ISBN 1558491325. McDonald is discussed on pp. 62–73, in the chapter "Sexual Dandyism and The Legacy of Oscar Wilde".
  19. ↑ David Bateman, "Cum-dripping fun", Daily Xtra [Canada], January 17, 2007, http://dailyxtra.com/toronto/news/cum-dripping-fun, retrieved 2014-09-07
  20. ↑ Reference needed
  21. ↑ "Straight to Hell", http://thisisexile.com/project_STH.html, retrieved 2014-09-03
  22. ↑ Pablo León de la Barra, "Straight to Hell": the Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts at White Cubicle", http://centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com/search/label/Straight%20to%20Hell, retrieved 2010-09-03
  23. ↑ Pablo León de la Barra. "Straight to Hell": the Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts at White Cubicle". Retrieved 2010-09-03. The White Cubicle Toilet Gallery measures 1.40 by 1.40 metres, is located within the Ladies Toilet of the George and Dragon, and works with no budget, staff or boundaries
  24. ↑ Welt, Bernard. "One Man's Meat". Retrieved 2014-09-10. November 26 was a Saturday in 1988, 1994, and 2005; from the names of the authors participating, it seems most likely that it was in 2005.
  25. ↑ Both of these volumes were reviewed by Dennis Altman, "'"Please describe some of your best blow jobs...'", Body Politic, 86, September 1982, p. 38
  26. ↑ http://archive.guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontentarchive.cfm?GetMagArray=SexHistories&StartFrom=1&EndAt=30&ShowSummaries=Show, retrieved 2014-09-03