Visions will linger, of course. At a suspiciously trendy yoga center in downtown Manhattan recently I was introduced to Ingrid Casares, the current pop-culture-friendly dyke of choice, late of Madonna’s bed. Also there I bumped into a woman I’d known in Northampton, a formidable entity who’d broken Cambria’s heart. She strode up to me and shook my hand firmly and I thought of the things Cambria told me she’d done with that hand and I felt the old tug of irrelevant lust, just a tinge.
Called upon to sign legislation banning lesbian sex, Queen Victoria is said to have refused on the grounds that she could not imagine what on earth women could possibly do with one another. After an immersion in the culture I have to say that I echo the Queen’s sentiment. There is something mysterious and wonderful that I never could put my finger on. The space between all of us is vast enough, but between them, and for a short time between us, that space seemed much closer, less unforgiving, more welcoming.
In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway wrote that to live in Paris in the 1920s was to be the luckiest of men. Noting that Hemingway’s talent did not begin to fly until the intervention of Gertrude Stein, I would add that Northampton in the 1990s was quite the most magical of places. I’ve done things backward—gazed at my cake through my twenties and only started devouring it now. I might add, in a not entirely male fashion, that it tastes better this way.
Lust and Lechery in Eight Pages: The Story of the Tijuana Bibles
Chris Hall
There is something innately pornographic about comic books. Something about the form itself, the uninhibited passion of everything from the bright, gaudy colors on dirty newsprint to the characters’ exuberant declarations of heroism, villainy, love, and despair, inspires the pornographic imagination. Nothing is ever done halfway in comics, either physically or emotionally, and even the blandest books keep sexuality simmering right under the surface. Comics fans may almost universally revile his name today, but when psychiatrist Frederick Wertham asserted in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent that Batman’s relationship with Robin was a homosexual fantasy and that Wonder Woman was a handbook for lesbian bondage, he was pretty much spot-on. You don’t even need to know about the details of William Moulton Marston’s very unorthodox sex life to cock an eyebrow at all the ropes and spanking that cropped up while Wonder Woman was battling the Nazis.
But sex had been an intimate part of comic books for a good ten years before Superman made his 1938 debut in Action Comics #1. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the first form of mass-produced pornography for thousands of Americans came in the form of crudely printed comic books called “Tijuana bibles,” “eight-pagers,” or simply “fuck books.” The Tijuana bibles were porn in its purest form, without the slightest pretension toward art or nuance. They were not about sensuality or eroticism. They were about fucking, in a time when fucking was portrayed in no other mass medium. Tijuana bibles were created in a time before the Internet, before DVDs, before pay-per-view, before VHS or Betamax, before adult movie palaces on public streets, before a stack of Playboy magazines could be found in every home in America. Between the wars, the country was making the transition from nineteenth-century morals and technology to the modern age, and it did it in uneven heaves and starts. People were just getting used to the novelty of having radios, and large parts of the country wouldn’t have electricity or running water until after World War II. For thousands of Americans, their first explicit images of sex, the only ones that were regularly available to them, were the thin, cheap pages of the Tijuana bibles.
The typical Tijuana bible was eight pages long in a four by three format in black-and-white, or sometimes red or blue and white ink. Some bibles were sixteen pages long, and a few very extravagant ones even reached the mammoth size of thirty-two pages. One of the ironies of time is that virtually the only comics distributed today that are similar in size and shape to the Tijuana bibles are the Christian tracts that Jack Chick has drawn and sold for the last thirty-nine years. The content and philosophy of Chick’s work is 180 degrees away from that of the fuck books, if no less extreme in its passion and fantasy. In Chick’s world, teenagers get sucked into black magic and human sacrifice by the temptations of Dungeons and Dragons or Christian rock bands, and the Catholic Church lurks behind endless conspiracies ranging from the Holocaust to the rise of Islam.
While Chick has used the format to plead with his readers to turn from earthly sin and embrace Jesus, the world of the Tijuana bibles vigorously indulged carnal pleasures in every combination that could possibly be squeezed into eight narrow pages. The characters in those pages were invariably familiar, even if their behavior wasn’t. Every icon of popular culture—from comic strip characters to movie stars and even politicians—ultimately found themselves starring in at least one of the bibles. Within the pages of the Tijuana bibles, Mickey and Minnie’s relationship was finally consummated; Josef Stalin serviced the proletariat in ways Marx never imagined; and Jimmy Cagney fellated Pat O’Brien. As well as being the predecessors of today’s slash fiction, the Tijuana bibles provide a secret history of popular culture at the time. Every well-loved comic character, every movie star who made hearts throb and laps moist, at some time found their corporate-enforced chastity peeled away to expose inelegant and insatiable lusts.
The sexuality the Tijuana bibles depicted was not beautiful. It wasn’t nuanced enough to be considered “erotic.” It was frequently not only crude but also hateful and ugly. Reading the bibles today, one can’t help but be impressed by how they are so obviously a product of a sexually repressive society, where discussion of sexuality—and especially sexuality’s pleasures—was all but excluded from the public square. The erotic charge of the bibles seems to depend on the sexual naïveté of the reader; underlying all of them is a sense of amazement that such a thing as sex even exists. To captivate their audience, they had to do little more that simply acknowledge cocks, tits, cunts and asses.
But, of course, there was more to the bibles. After all, it wasn’t just anyone’s genitalia on display in those pages. By the 1930s, newspaper comics were already big business. William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought near-epic struggles over the strips and creators, and the decades-long war between the two helped elevate the art form to its creative and commercial zenith. The most popular characters were merchandised as toys and on clothing and found new life in other media. E. C. Segar’s salty, spinach-eating sailor Popeye virtually became a cottage industry after he debuted in 1929; starting in the 1930s, Popeye gave his stamp of approval to almost everything that could be sold, and starred in many classic animated shorts by the Fleischer Brothers studio. Chic Young’s Blondie and Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy were not only iconic in their print forms but also thrived in their adaptations to radio and film. The characters from all three strips—and others—quickly became shorthand for very specific traits and personalities. Americans knew them. When the country was first being crushed by economic depression followed by the destruction of war, they were America, in the best sense we could imagine.
And then they were stripped naked in the pages of the Tijuana bibles. Looking through the bibles has the same forbidden kick as if you happened to wander past the window of a beloved neighbor just in time to see her hungrily sucking off Pastor Ted and getting rimmed by your Aunt Sally. It’s not just anyone in these comic books. If it were, it’s hard to imagine that they’d get anything more than cursory attention by a few comics historians known for being die-hard completists.
Look, for example, at the mix of class and sexual anxieties in the Blondie and Dagwood eight-pager “Fired!” In terms of art quality and storytelling skill, this one represents the bibles at their very lowest. Dagwood’s cantankerous boss, Mr. Dithers (here called Smithers), is barely recognizable, and the spelling and layout are elementary at best. The sex scenes look like they were drawn by a boy still wondering what girls look like under their dresses. It’s exactly the sort of thing that you probably drew in the back of your fifth-gr
ade English class.
But despite the distorted art and the crudely pornographic story, “Fired!” doesn’t seem that far removed from Chic Young’s daily strip. Right in the first panel, Dagwood once again gets his lazy ass canned by Smithers, a gag that even the most casual reader of the original knows. He goes home and rants to Blondie about “that prick Smithers,” but instead of being merely passive and comforting, by page three Blondie is in Smithers’ office demanding Dagwood’s job back. Almost immediately, Smithers starts groping Blondie’s twat despite her protests. By page five, sexual assault is transformed into impassioned demands for Smithers to fuck her harder and deeper. At last, Dagwood appears on the scene; looking more put out than outraged, he jerks his cock while watching his boss screw his wife, petulantly complaining, “At least you could let me get in.” Smithers keeps pumping away, responding nastily, “Shut up Bumstead you got your job back what more do you want.” The narration observes without pity, “Looks like Dag-woods the on who got fucked.” [sic]
Alongside its crude sexual fantasy, “Fired!” injects the tired gags of Blondie with realities that the strip studiously avoided. The lecherous boss held real power in the 1930s, enabled by a lack of sexual harassment laws and economic desperation. And anyone watching Dagwood’s constant firings has to wonder why Blondie tolerates it in such precarious times. Blondie’s aggressive response to Dithers/Smithers here is much more plausible. Even the Bumsteads’ lascivious appetites seem much more in character when you consider the origins of the strip, which chronicled the adventures of a flapper named Blondie Boopadoop, who loved the dance halls and parties of the 1920s but eventually fell for Dagwood, the dissolute scion of the upper-crust Bumsteads. When the two married, Dagwood’s parents cut him off without a cent for disgracing the family by marrying a working-class trollop.
Dagwood’s humiliation is another common feature of the bibles. They catered to the sexual fears of their readers as much as they did their fantasies, and a common theme is the sexual humiliation or defeat of the protagonist. In “Bigger Yet,” starring “Claudette Coal-Bin,” a delivery boy who’s been lucky enough to get laid by the great movie star gets kicked out on his ass on page eight, his cock still rock hard, when he makes the slip of telling her that his boss is even bigger than he is. In “Chris Crusty VII,” the protagonist winds up getting beaten and robbed when the woman’s husband comes home; the last page shows him telling a flirtatious young woman to “go pound sand up yer ass!!!” In a nasty display of misogyny and anti-Semitism, “Gimme Beck” portrays Geezil, a caricatured Jew from the early Popeye strips, unsatisfied by what he gets for his five dollars from a hooker. In retaliation, he slips his fingers inside her and declares, “Ah dot’s it!! Now listen you bedroom boiglar!! I’m the boss—one finger I got up your ass and my thumb in your cunt—now, give it beck my five bucks or I rip out the partition!”
The history of the Tijuana bibles is largely speculation, the creators unknown. You can say the same about much of comics history, but the bibles were actually illegal, whereas Superman and Millie the Model were merely disreputable and juvenile. Even the origins of the name are uncertain. The bibles didn’t come from Mexico, but because many people picked them up in border towns, it could have been the specific reputation of Tijuana for forbidden pleasures, or it could have been outright racism. For whatever reason, the name stuck.
Even though the bibles violated virtually every obscenity law in the United States, that inhibited their production and distribution no more than Prohibition kept Americans from getting ahold of gin. Between seven hundred and one thousand titles were published from the ’30s to the ’50s. In The Tijuana Bibles: America’s Forgotten Comic Strips, comic historian R. C. Harvey cites a 1992 paper by Robert Gluckson that estimated that in 1939 alone, three hundred titles were produced with a total of three million copies. “Other sources,” Harvey writes, “say twenty million copies were produced yearly by the end of the decade.” Whatever the numbers say, though, they’re just broad guesses. The artists, printers, and distributors took great pains not to leave records of how much and what they produced.
The term underground has pretty much been diminished to a marketing gimmick to make middle-class consumers feel transgressive. In the days of the Tijuana bibles, though, underground networks were the only way to buy or sell them without legal consequences. Harvey describes the course taken by the bibles as “drawn in attics, printed in garages on cantankerous machinery, and distributed surreptitiously from the back pockets of shady vendors in alleyways and in dimly lit rooms.” Occasionally, organized crime was involved in the manufacture and distribution, but even at their height, no mobster was going to become a major player by selling twenty-five-cent fuck books. Despite the mass quantity that Gluckson and others estimate, selling bibles was a small-time racket.
The names of the creators have been almost entirely lost to history. One of the few exceptions to this rule was dubbed “Mr. Prolific” by Donald H. Gilmore in his work Sex in Comics. The prophetically named sexologist Gershon Legman eventually identified Mr. Prolific as “Doc” Rankin, a World War I veteran who worked for Larch Publications, a publisher of girlie cartoons and dirty joke books, in the 1930s. Art Spiegelman unabashedly praised Rankin’s work as he would a respected colleague in the introduction to Bob Adelman’s anthology Tijuana Bibles: “He was not only the seminal influence on the genre, he was by far its most competent draftsman, drawing credible likenesses in complex entangled poses with graceful steel-pen strokes. This guy was good enough to earn an honest living had he so desired. Visibly enjoying his work, he offered good value, often adding extra gags and caricatures in frames inside the frames.”
Spiegelman assigns a moniker of his own to one of the post-War artists: Mr. Dyslexic. Spiegelman’s judgment of Mr. Dyslexic is as harsh and merciless as his praise of Rankin is effusive: “He has no sense of left-to-right narrative progression and is constantly placing his figures or his balloons (and sometimes both) out of sequence. By hidden example he teaches the hidden difficulties of the cartoonist’s craft. He can’t draw even rudimen-tarily well, certainly can’t spell, and holds for me as a working cartoonist the same fascination a really nasty car accident might hold for a bus driver.” Mr. Dyslexic’s failings as an artist are visible even to an untrained eye, and while he certainly deserves every iota of wrath that Spiegelman calls down upon him, it has to be said that his work never reached the depths of incompetence shown in “Fired!” One of his works, “Chambers and Hiss in Betrayed,” is fascinating for the way it blends obscenity with Cold War paranoia. The 1948 Chambers-Hiss case remains one of the most contentious and emblematic of post-War political divisions. Whittaker Chambers, a Communist Party member, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that State Department official Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union (and to an extent, even today), whether you believed Hiss or Chambers was seen as representing where you stood on broader issues. Mr. Dyslexic explains Chambers and Hiss by imagining a sexual affair between the two. Hiss unforgivably betrays his lover with a woman, leading Chambers to turn Hiss over to the Feds. “I’ll not have him,” Chambers says as Hiss is led away in cuffs, “but neither will any woman.”
The Trouble with Safe Sex
Seth Michael Donsky
It’s Friday night, and I’m headed to the East Side Club, one of the last two remaining gay bathhouses in New York City.
Ostensibly a relaxation and social club for gay and bisexual men, it’s located on two floors of a nondescript office building on East 58th Street. I take an elevator to the sixth floor and wait behind a thick, Plexiglas window in a dark cell of a foyer, reminiscent of a vintage, blue movie theater box office. Posters for events such as the International Mr. Leather Contest, prominently featuring half-naked men, line the walls.
After a few moments, the manager buzzes me in through a small door. I am immediately overcome by a smell of chlorine, industrial-strength disinfectant, locke
r-room funk and poppers.
A labyrinth of interconnecting dark hallways is lined on either side with innumerable clapboard rooms. Each room contains a twin-sized cot, a hook for hanging your clothes and a table with a couple of condoms and a packet of lube. But whether anyone will be using the provided protection is anyone’s guess.
The lights in each room are on a dimmer but, as none of the rooms have ceilings, ambient light and noise easily spill over from the hallway. It’s here in the hallway that I meet Rubin.
A slim, youthful-looking Filipino, Rubin’s soft, delicate features belie the fact that he’s actually thirty-seven years old. He blushes when he admits that, in sexual trysts, he often lets men his own age believe that he’s many years their junior.
When I question him, he explains to me that he had been getting tested regularly for HIV every six months since coming out at age twenty and moving to New York City. Those tests stopped two years ago, however, after a night of heavy drinking when he had “bareback” sex with his best friend of fourteen years, an HIV-positive man.
Bareback sex is a popular and, in its implied rebellion, erotic term within the gay community for sex without a condom. Rubin has been vaguely unsettled by that high-risk incident and does not talk about HIV status with the men he hooks up with. He knows he could have sought HIV testing and counseling if he had really wanted to, but part of what has stood in the way is his shame.
“I’m afraid that people will tell me I should have known better,” he explains, casting his soft, brown eyes toward the ground. “That I did this to myself. I just don’t want to hear that.”
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