WILLIAM MALTESE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HELL #17 “PORNooooooooooooooooo!”

Pornography — hard and soft. Porn! Porno! Porno! Porno! Porn!

I mention the preceding because I recently read that any blog that even mentions “pornography” usually ends up getting more hits and traffic than do blogs that don’t mention it.

Of course, it’s not as if I don’t have something to say on the subject, having been accused, more than once, in my time, of being “a pornographer”, usually by people who haven’t a clue as to the difference, in the law, between hard-pornography, soft-pornography, child-pornography, erotica, and the more and more graphic sex scenes that, these days, invariably seem to end up in just about each and every novel that hits the bookstands.

There’s always been the argument, of course, that, by way of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we’re all guaranteed the right to write or say whatever we damned well please, including anything pornographic, as defined as “representations of scenes displaying sexual behavior that are erotic or lewd and designated to arouse sexual interest.”

I do have to confess, though, that in my early days of writing at least one hetero and/or gay erotic novel a month, the lines were more blurred than they are today as regards what constitutes pornography; the U.S. Supreme Court having only  decided, in 1966 (a case involving John Cleland’s English novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more commonly known as Fanny Hill), that “redeeming social value” DOES have something to do with the legal definition of what, by way of pornography, is obscene, or not obscene, and, thus, prosecutable, or not, under the letter of the law.

I’ve always successfully argued, though, that, from the get-go, I, personally, tried to make sure that I didn’t write pornography merely for the sake of arousing any reader’s purely prurient interests … always out to include, as was determined necessary in the case of FANNY HILL, at least a shred of social value in my novels’ depictions of sexual behavior and social relations … and, as was determined necessary in the later 1973 case of MILLER VS. CALIFORNIA, to be sure that each and every one of my books contained at least something of serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific merit. I usually accomplished this by providing a plot.

Granted, there were people who might have believed that the things my hero did to that goat, on that cliff top, then, later, did to that fruit and those vegetables in that garden, in my first gay novel, FIVE ROADS TO TLEN … or the necrophiliacal implications of my MASTER BLACK … or the rapes in my THE GANG RAVAGED TEACHER … might have overstepped the bounds into obscenity…

…just as they might have pointed out, by way of prosecution, as to how my publishers, in their submissions specs, insisted that “the more sex an author put in his book, the better”, “at least one major sex scene per chapter” … or how I personally registered the trademark “one-hand read®” to tie up its double-entendre implications … were blatant indications that our books were intended to provide readers with sexual arousal …

…just as they might have pointed out how many of the books at the time were filled with young men and young women, below the age of consent, involved in sexual activities (NOTE: I always tried to keep my characters above the age of 18, merely referring to how they “looked years younger than they were”) …

…but, hey, my books ALWAYS had a redeeming quality story line.

Not that a story line meant that some of my co-writers in the early days, even those with adequate redeeming qualities to their work— (my old chum, Victor Banis, comes to mind) … not to mention more than one of my publishers (Earl Kemp, Greenleaf Classics, comes to mind)  —were saved from being singled out and prosecuted for what some uptight people, decisions based on a sphinctal way of thinking, thought were overstepping the bounds of common decency.

I attribute my having escaped the witch hunts of those days to a couple of reasons. (1) I wasn’t exactly first on the scene but followed along on the immediate tails of writers like Victor who ended up arrested and put on trial with Earl Kemp from Greenleaf Classics. (2) I did most of my writing out of the country, mailing in my manuscripts, and picking up my royalty checks abroad, while literally circling the globe, always without a clue as to what monumental goings-on were happening in my absence (those days, these days, referred to as “The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction”), in which I was vicariously a key player.

Even when I was in the States, though, I seemed surrounded by broad-minded people who were obviously far more liberal than those carrying kindling, firewood, and torches in Victor and Earl’s neck of the woods. In Seattle (where I mainly lived at the time), its art community was genuinely accepting of me. Seattle’s primary “Big Kahuna”, by way of gallery owners, took great pleasure in introducing me at parties as “his friend, the pornographer” (my book, THE FAG IS NOT FOR BURNING, by the way, IS NOT my roman à clef of that time period). I suspect it helped that I was a college graduate, had served three years in the Army with an honorable discharge, didn’t look like “a dirty old man” at the time (ah, how the times have changed!), knew a finger bowl from a toilet bowl, and wrote hetero porn as well as gay porn; more than once I was once invited to read a selection from one of my hetero porn books (my STARSHIP INTERCOURSE, I remember as being a frequently poplar request) after dinner with one group or another of artsy-fartsy straights.

How marvelous it is, all of these years later, to find the kind of torrid passages in regular mainstream fiction that, in those earlier years, brought out all of those people carrying tar and feathers on the prowl for porn and the writers of it. How marvelous, too, to see how the female of our species has taken up not only the writing of porn (gay and straight), where before it was mainly a male-dominated profession and genre (those of us who wrote it in those early pulps merely attaching female nom de plumes to our hetero work to make it seem written by loose and promiscuous women).

Books that once would have had, and did have, authors and publishers yanked into the court, with threats of long and heavy-duty jail time, are now readily available, not in sleazy back rooms, but in respectable middle-America brick-and-mortar book stores and literally everywhere on line.

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that times haven’t, at least in some ways, exceedingly toward the better!

Of course, there are still a couple of areas of pornography that I avoid, and I would suggest any and all writers of porn, or potential writers of porn, do the very same:

1. Don’t even give a thought to writing anything sexual that includes anyone below the age of consent. If anything, the rules regarding what does and doesn’t constitute exploitation of children have increased over the years, and if you want to write a book that’s sure to cause controversy, get you hate mail, bring out of hiding those really angry mobs that used to exist in more profusion … with their hate, torches and firewood … show them something even hinting of kiddie-porn and that will do the trick and, likely, see you in court to boot. While I’ve had authors bemoan that they merely would like to write such books not by way of turning on predators but as condemnation of the trafficking in children as the evil it is, I only shake my head and tell them to gird their loins and prepare for the worst. After all, Earl Kemp got 1 year in jail, and Greenleaf Classics pretty much got drummed out of business, for merely publishing an official Washington, D.C. document — an illustrated edition of the PRESIDENTIAL REPORT OF THE COMMISSION ON OBSCENITY AND PORNOGRAPHY.

2. You might want to steer clear of hard-core Sadism & Masochism. I’m not talking Bondage and Disciple books, which seem to pass relatively unscathed, wherein consenting adults team up and use a bit of dungeon game-playing with accompanying whips, chains, ropes, handcuffs, leather, rubber, “safe” words, and the like. I’m talking books that offer up genuinely horrible torture wherein pain is often so confused with pleasure that it becomes difficult for the readers, let alone the characters, to differentiate the one from the other. My only real dark-journey into this particular genre, SS&M, an appalling m/f look into Nazi death camps and Jewish genocide, had me thinking, during its writing, that I might actually be channeling the Marquis de Sade. When the book was completed, I was so disturbed by what I’d written that I stuffed it into the bottom of a deep dark trunk and left it there for twenty years, figuring it would never see publication.  That said … one, day I did have a publisher ask me if I had anything available and that did publish the work. While it has since been rejected for a Kindle version, because of its subject matter and violence, it has been available in ebook format for quite some time, both from the publisher, and from Nook. So, an author merely takes his chance, by way of finding a publisher, and maximizing profits, if and when deciding to head in this particular direction.