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| Ed Wood wrote two very similar novels late in his career. |
If you've been following this blog, you know that I recently reviewed two of Ed Wood's rather obscure gay porn novels from the 1970s: Diary of a Transvestite Hooker (1973) and TV Lust (1977), both credited to his "Dick Trent" pseudonym. Technically, Diary is one of Ed's "nonfiction" books, since it supposedly contains the true-life reminiscences of an actual gay prostitute in Hollywood. However, since the prostitute in question ("Randy") is totally imaginary and his memories utterly bogus, I consider the book just another of Ed's novels. Either way, Diary is mainly an opportunity for Ed to indulge in his love of women's clothing and describe various outfits in fetishistic detail. TV Lust contains much of the same.
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| A Wood twofer. |
Side note: When I first bought a copy of Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (1992) about 30 years ago, I was so unschooled in the ways of porn that I didn't even know "TV" was slang for "transvestite." I figured that TV Lust was about the proliferation of sex on television or something similar. Ed Wood was known to watch hours and hours of television, so it's not an entirely far-fetched notion.
Anyhow, in my review of Diary of a Transvestite Hooker, I noted that my bootleg edition contained the full text of the book as well as the photo captions but was missing the actual photographs from the original 1973 paperback Well, as usual, the ever-reliable James Pontolillo swooped in to rescue me. Not only did he have the pictures, he had some trivia to go along with them. Here are two pics from Diary, supposedly depicting the book's subject on the job.
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| Randy conducts a typical transaction. Note the john's plaid pants. |
Due to the obvious signage, you can easily see that these photographs were taken on the 7000 block of Hollywood Boulevard, near the Hollywood Walk of Fame. More specifically, in the background, you'll spot a business called The London Shop. According to James, this was "housed in the ground level of the Roosevelt-Hollywood Hotel." The Roosevelt is still very much in business, but The London Shop has since gone the way of all flesh.
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| The world's ugliest? |
As it happens, I do have the photos from TV Lust in my collection. I didn't comment on them in my review because I wanted to focus solely on the text of the book, which may well be the last Ed Wood novel published in the author's lifetime. In Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. (2001), David C. Hayes described the pictures thusly:
The novel is illustrated with photos of the world's ugliest transvestite in some really awful poses.
Ouch. I feel that Hayes may have been experiencing some burnout by the time he got to TV Lust, having worked his way through many Wood books in a row, and this may have clouded his judgment somewhat when it came time to write his review. Once again, James Pontolillo had some insights to offer on the book's mysterious cover model:
The model featured in TV Lust (1977) went variously by the names Dean Noel and Dena Noel and appeared in only one photoset, apparently originating in 1975. Contrary to the TV Lust cover banner proclaiming “Exclusive Photos,” all of the book's photos came from this photoset, portions of which were first published in Female Mimics magazine some two years earlier. Various pictures of Dean/Dena were published from 1975-1985 in a variety of East and West Coast adult fetish magazines (Female Mimics, Guys in Drag, Ladies by Choice, More She-Males, Transsexuals) and novels (Transvestite Bride, Transvestite Housewife – both by Star Distributors).
Thanks again to James for providing some interesting background information on these striking photographs.