 |
| Two gentlemen frolic in the pages of Boyplay. |
Do you have a "good" pair of scissors in your home, one that cuts more cleanly and assuredly than the others? How about a "good" flashlight that you always reach for whenever there's a blackout? Perhaps in your closet is a "good" pair of jeans that fits you just right, even when you've cheated on your diet a little. Chances are, if you own multiples of any item, one always becomes your favorite, simply because it works so reliably.
Here's to the "good" things in life.
For publisher Bernie Bloom—who oversaw a multimedia porn empire in the 1960s and '70s—Ed Wood was definitely his "good" writer. Bernie published a wide variety of adult books and magazines in those days under such banners as Pendulum, Calga, and Gallery (all the same company), and Eddie was his man-of-all-work. If Bernie needed text of basically any description, Ed Wood could provide it, quickly and dependably. This could mean full-length novels or nonfiction books, but it could also mean short stories, editorials, or even photo captions. When Bernie's son Noel got into making adult features and loops, he also hired Eddie frequently, but that's a whole other story.
The point is, in the final decade of his life, Ed Wood wrote a massive amount of text for Bernie Bloom. Some of that was written under his own name, making it easy enough to spot. Some was written under well-known pseudonyms like Dick Trent and Ann Gora. That's fairly easy to identify, too. Eddie himself kept track of this kind of material on his own resumes. But, once you start delving into this subject, you start to realize that a great deal of the Wood text in the Bloom publications is not attributed in any way; sometimes it's not even titled.
One thing (among many) that the late Greg Javer taught me is that, if a Calga/Pendulum/Gallery magazine contains a known Ed Wood article, it probably also contains some other, uncredited Wood text, too. As I told you in a recent blog post, I purchased a copy of Gallery Press' Boyplay magazine, vol. 2, no.2 from May/June 1973. This is the first vintage adult magazine I have ever purchased, and having a physical copy of such a publication gives me a new perspective on the world Ed Wood inhabited in the 1970s.
This was not a cheap magazine by any means. The cover price is $3.50. That's over $25 in today's money—quite an investment for a gay porn mag. But Boyplay is a slick, well-produced magazine, printed on heavy paper and featuring lots of photographs, mostly black-and-white. I'm not schooled enough in the world of '70s gay porn to recognize the male models, but they look like they've had some rough experiences in Los Angeles. Or maybe that's just me reading into things. These guys may have been having a grand time in early '70s L.A., and posing for Boyplay was just a quick, easy way to earn some cash to finance their otherwise carefree lives. I swear, one of them resembles a young Anthony Hopkins mixed with Jon Voigt in Midnight Cowboy (1969).
By the way, I must point out that the photographs in Boyplay are almost quaint by today's standards. There is a great deal of male nudity here but no actual sex. I'm sure there were strict rules about what you could and could not show in 1973, and Bernie Bloom was trying to stay one step ahead of the law. So if you want photographs of men staring intensely at other men's genitals but not doing anything else with them, Boyplay is for you.
There are two verified Ed Wood pieces in this magazine: a short story called "Zeus and His Lovers" that he wrote under his own name and a nonfiction piece called "Never Too Late—Never Too Soon" credited to Dick Trent. These I have dutifully forwarded to Wood archivist Bob Blackburn, who confirmed that they were both on Eddie's 1970s writing resume. "Zeus" I have already reviewed, while "Never Too Late" will merit a separate review of its own in the future. Before we move on from these two "official" Ed Wood articles, I'd like to present a slightly censored version of the "Zeus" artwork so you have an idea of how this story was originally presented in Boyplay. The artwork is not credited, but I imagine it was by frequent Pendulum/Calga/Gallery contributor Charles Anderson. It's similar to the Anderson artwork I've seen in the past.
 |
| Sorry I had to neuter you, Zeus. But Blogspot has no chill about this kind of thing. |
We now arrive at the unsigned material in Boyplay, vol. 2, no. 2, and there is plenty of it. As with many of the Bloom-produced magazines of this era, the issue starts with an anonymous editorial. In this case, it's a few ellipses-filled paragraphs about how homosexuality has been shunned by society and even treated as a crime for many years but is now finally coming out into the open. Frankly, if Ed Wood didn't write this thing, I'll eat my hat. Who else would have mentioned "the Gay Parade on Hollywood Boulevard" so prominently in such an article? That's just the type of public event that would have captured Eddie's attention. The entire editorial is written in the same self-serious tone as the disclaimer at the beginning of Glen or Glenda (1953). I wouldn't have been surprised if it had ended with, "You are society … judge ye not."
The rest of the magazine, apart from "Zeus" and "Never Too Late," is given over to text and photos intermingled to suggest various homoerotic fantasies. The pictures themselves don't really align all that well with the text, however. I've made similar observations about the "Pendulum Pictorials" that Ed Wood wrote for Bernie Bloom in 1968. Those books supposedly use pictures and text to tell a movie-length story—they even falsely claim to be based on real movies—but they require a lot of imagination (and suspension of disbelief) on the part of the reader. So, too, do the illustrated stories of Boyplay.
The first such tale is called, appropriately enough, "First Time Homo." It's about an unnamed college football player, a big man on campus, who unexpectedly begins a physical relationship with a "sissy" named Larry. After his tryst with Larry, our narrator tells us that homosexuality is "no passing fad." This is an idea that recurs in numerous Wood stories, including "Zeus and His Lovers." But it's the description of Larry that marks this as quintessential Wood work:
Now he's not on any of the teams, in fact I always thought if he ever made a team it would be the girl's socker [sic] team. Now he doesn't mind me saying that. We made no bones about it, all of us on the team. We always called him a sissy and said he should be with the girls … he should be wearing their frilly blouses and skirts … he'd look cute in bobby socks and loafer shoes.
You don't get much more Woodian than that.
 |
| That amorous rogue, Patty. |
The remainder of the stories in the issue—"The Rounder," "Patty is Tough," "Strip Poker, Male Style," "Tough but Passive," and "Boys Will Be Boys"—center around a single recurring character named Patty. This surprising attempt at continuity suggests to me that one author probably wrote all of them, back to back. And who would have done such a thing if not Eddie? At first, it was kind of difficult for me to tell when one story ended and the next began, but I will do my best to sort them out.
"The Rounder" basically introduces us to Patty, a handsome and promiscuous young man whose income derives solely from prostitution. "Patty knows he can't play the game forever," the story tells us, "that one day he will be the garbage instead of the fruit." I want you to savor that turn of phrase. This theme of people aging out of sex work is one that recurs throughout Ed Wood's writing. The narrator also makes a point of telling us that Patty is "insatiable," one of Eddie's favorite adjectives.
"Patty is Tough" gives us a little more information about our main character and his rough-and-tumble past. The author wants us to know that this young man is both a lover and a fighter. But the phrase in this story that will excite Woodologists is this one: "The guys in the small towns, even during this age of the sexual revolution, are still very secretive about their sex lives … they try to hide it behind locked doors." Eddie's fans should know by now that "behind locked doors" is one of the author's pet phrases. It was even one of many alternate titles for Glen or Glenda.
Patty's next adventure is entitled "Strip Poker, Male Style," and it's a doozy. What's especially interesting here is that we learn Patty used to work for a carnival. Carnies turn up frequently in Ed Wood's short stories and novels, though these characters are far less common in his film scripts outside of Shotgun Wedding (1963). "Strip Poker" introduces a second character to the mythology: Patty's old friend Terry, who is still a carnie "because he really digs the life." Patty and Terry spend some quality time together while the carnival is on winter break, leading to the titular game of strip poker and the inevitable lovemaking session. Seasoned Woodologists will spot another of Ed's pet phrases here: "It takes one to know one." He even wrote an entire novel with that name in 1967. I was also charmed by the repeated use of the phrase "up the homosexual trail," the kind of tortured metaphor Ed Wood loved.
"Tough but Passive" gives us another perspective on Patty and Terry from an unnamed mutual acquaintance of theirs. This young man, seemingly another street hustler, has been known to have threesomes with Patty and Terry during the winter. He tells us that, even though he's every bit as tough as they are, he takes the passive role during sex and even likes to be hit with a leather belt. A great Woodian touch in this story is that the three men sometimes pool their money together to buy booze.
Finally, we have "Boys Will Be Boys," which provides further commentary on the frisky trio from "Tough but Passive." This time around, we learn that the third gentleman, the "tough but passive" one, is named Gil and that his trysts with Patty and Terry are infrequent but lengthy. They've been known to "go at it for a full seventy-two hours without stopping." This kind of erotic marathon reminds me of Ed Wood's 1971 short story, "Then Came Thunder." Terry has been trying to convince Gil and Patty to join him on the road with the carnival, but they're not interested. As the article explains:
It probably will never happen … yet there are the rosy -colored eyeballs when they think of all the fun they might have in the tents when the rain is coming down heavily and the sound rhythms in with their own body movements.
Isn't that a great little bit of writing? This version of carnival life is very similar to that described in Ed Wood's gay-themed story "Circus" aka "Pekka at the Circus" (1977). The author also describes the threesomes as "happenings," which is yet another of Ed Wood's favorite terms. Think back to Rene Bond in Necromania (1971): "Strange happenings come from strange happenings!" Believe me, the term "happenings" creeps up in many of Ed's stories and books from the 1970s. That word must have gotten lodged in his brain somehow.
Altogether, in Boyplay's May/June 1973 issue, we have two verified Wood pieces and seven potential ones. (I'd happily vouch for all of them under oath.) The speculative seven include: an unsigned editorial; an unsigned short story; and five (!) stories about a character named Patty, a tough ex-carnie turned male prostitute. For the Patty stories, I can only assume that Bernie Bloom or someone at Pendulum gave Eddie a passel of homoerotic B&W photographs and told him to make up a narrative about them. Naturally, he turned to two of his favorite subjects: carnivals and prostitution.
God, I hope this doesn't lead to me buying more vintage Pendulum/Calga/Gallery magazines. I think they're a potential goldmine of undiscovered stories and articles by Ed Wood, but I doubt I'll get another good deal like the one I got on the issue of Boyplay.