Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 215: "Zeus and His Lovers" (1973)

Zeus was a horny bastard, as Ed Wood understood all too well.

I've covered dozens of Ed Wood's short stories and articles over the years, but I've never owned any of the vintage adult magazines in which they were originally published a half-century or more ago. Most of the short pieces that I've reviewed on this blog have come from the three marvelous Wood anthologies assembled by Bob Blackburn between 2014 and 2022. The magazines Ed Wood worked on during the 1960s and '70s have become very expensive on the secondary market—well out of my price range—and I'm grateful to Bob for buying dozens of them so that Ed's work can be reprinted and enjoyed by fans today.  A few more of Ed's articles have been sent my way by generous readers, typically as PDFs or JPGs. Those were much appreciated as well.

I now own this exact magazine.

Recently, though, reader and podcaster Rob Huffman let me know that a copy of the May/June 1973 issue of Gallery Press' Boy Play was available online for a stunningly low price, and I couldn't resist. The Nixon-era gay porn magazine contained one verified short story credited to Ed Wood, but based on past conversations with Greg Javer, I knew that Eddie probably wrote multiple pieces for that same issue. Sure enough, when the copy of Boy Play arrived in my mailbox a couple of weeks later, I found Ed's unmistakable writing style throughout the entire issue. My preliminary diagnosis is that Eddie wrote every last word in it, including the unsigned editorial at the beginning. Hell, he may have written the copy in the ads!

Would you believe it took me this long to realize that Boy Play is a mere reversal of Playboy, the most famous adult magazine ever published in America? Funny how swapping those two syllables makes all the difference in the world.

I'll probably end up writing multiple blog posts about this one magazine. For now, though, I'd like to concentrate on the one short story in this issue that Ed wrote under his own name. It's called "Zeus and His Lovers," and the title gives you a good indication of its contents.

The story: "Zeus and His Lovers" (aka "Zeus... and His Lovers"), originally published in Boy Play, vol. 2, no. 2, May/June 1973. Credited to Edward D. Wood, Jr.

Synopsis: Zeus, king of the Greek gods, is happily married to Hera. They have an extremely active and mutually satisfying sex life. In addition, Zeus has numerous mistresses, a fact he does not hide from Hera. However, there is still something bothering him. He feels tremendous pressure to compete sexually with the other male gods, and it seems that all of them have taken young boys as lovers. Zeus is the only one who hasn't.

Zeus and Hera have a marathon lovemaking session. In the afterglow, the god and goddess discuss Zeus' sexual dilemma. The other gods have definitely noticed that he doesn't have a boy lover, and they're starting to talk. There's even a popular "epigram" about Zeus that's going around. Hera tells her husband that she supports him totally in whatever he does and would not be hurt if he took a young male lover. Zeus tells her he already has a boy picked out: a beautiful mortal named Ganymede, who will be the new cupbearer to the gods.

Wood trademarks: mythology (cf. "Thor and His Magic Hammer"); the word "lovely" (cf. Glen or Glenda, many others); heavy use of ellipses and italics; sheer material; supposedly "new" things that are not really new (cf. Glenda); references to characters' body temperatures; pink clouds; kaleidoscope; androgyny; ancient Greece (cf. "The Greeks Had a Word For It," "Sappho Revisited").

Excerpt:

"It is not for me to say what you should do, Zeus. It is only that I must serve you. You must do as you see fit. And if that is the fad, then you should most certainly investigate the cause for the fad and find out what enjoyment might be captured in the tender young bodies of boys."

Reflections: Back in 2022, the late, great Greg Javer and I reviewed an Ed Wood story from 1973 called "Thor and His Magic Hammer." As its title suggests, this strange little fable explores the sex life of the Norse god of thunder, specifically how a mortal woman named Andralia gives Thor a few pointers in the bedroom and makes him a better lover. "Magic Hammer" originally appeared in the May/June 1973 issue of Gallery Press' Goddess. That makes it an obvious counterpart to "Zeus and His Lovers": same publisher, same release date, similar subject matter. Eddie must've been going through a mythology phase in 1973. Or maybe the subject was always on his mind. Remember that Glen or Glenda (1953) makes an incongruous reference to Morpheus, god of sleep.

In hindsight, it's not difficult to see what attracted Ed to this strange, often disturbing material. Greek mythology is rife with loathsome and depraved behavior, much of it sexual in nature, including instances of adultery, rape, incest, and pedophilia. This is the stuff of trashy, exploitative fiction, exactly the kind that Ed Wood wrote. The fact that the Greek gods are capable of supernatural acts, such as turning into animals, only aids them in their debauchery. Their perversion truly knows no bounds.

While the story of Zeus and Ganymede inspired artists for centuries, it seems today like a textbook case of predatory sexual behavior.  According to the myth, Zeus was so taken with this beautiful adolescent boy that he took the form of an eagle, swooped down to earth, grabbed Ganymede, and carried him back to Mount Olympus. There, Ganymede indeed became the cupbearer to the gods, just as it says in this story, as well as Zeus' lover. It's never clear that Ganymede consented to any of this. Nevertheless, Zeus was so grateful for the boy's service that he granted Ganymede eternal youth and beauty. Is anyone else reminded of the real-life story of Liberace and Scott Thorson? While the famed pianist could not make his young lover immortal, he did pay for Thorson to have numerous plastic surgeries.

It's interesting to note that, in "Zeus and His Lovers," Ed Wood portrays Zeus' wife, Hera, as simpering and submissive. Greek mythology portrays her as anything but. In fact, Zeus' love affair with Ganymede angered Hera greatly. She was intensely jealous of her husband's new boy toy and made no secret of this. So why does Ed write her like the ultimate supportive wife, a woman who encourages her husband to have numerous lovers, even young boys? Perhaps this was Ed's commentary on marriage and how a wife "should" behave.

I'd also like to point out that the rest of Boy Play magazine is not about "playing" with actual boys. The magazine includes many explicit pornographic photos of men, and they're all very much of age. Some even look rather weather-beaten. Again, as with his story for Goddess magazine, Eddie may have taken the title of the publication too literally. Maybe even he didn't get the wordplay. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Ed Wood Summit Podcast #27 by Greg Dziawer

Did you know that Ed Wood wrote a short story about Thor, the God of Thunder?

This week, I am once again joined on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast by blogger Joe Blevins. He's here to discuss two extraordinary Ed Wood pieces from the May/June 1973 issue of Goddess from Gallery Press: a short story called "Thor and His Magic Hammer" and a nonfiction article called "Girls Who Have to Watch Their Periods as Well as Their Commas." Ed proudly penned the first under his own name and the second under his commonly-used "Dick Trent" pseudonym. Under any name, these are real finds! 

Thanks to Rob Huffman for supplying these great articles. He has an Indiegogo campaign for a video podcast you can check out right here.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part Six by Greg Dziawer

Gallery Press drops a Deuce on the reading public.

In last week's installment of Ed Wood Wednesdays, we continued indexing Pendulum/Calga/Gallery Press titles with a listing of all titles filed for copyright in 1973. It was a time of transition, with the pillars of Pendulum and Calga disintegrating early in the year. Gallery Press (previously a Calga d.b.a) incorporated in the late winter/early spring of 1973, and though the d.b.a. Edusex survived into the latter part of that year, there was solely Gallery by 1974, with all magazines under the Gallery Press imprint, published and filed for copyright by Gallery Press, Inc. This amounted to fewer than 60 issues across 37 titles, some carrying over from previous imprints, some new with wonderfully fanciful titles, including the resurrection of the incredible Heads Up. A pair – pun intended – of issues of Sam, solely featuring the otherwordly Roberta Pedon, also appeared in 1974. In all, Gallery's output in 1974 was less half of what was published by Pendulum/Calga/Gallery the previous year.

Ed Wood Wednesdays: The Wood Magazine Odyssey, Part Five by Greg Dziawer

A lot of Eddie's creative output went straight to adult bookshops like this one.

In the last two installments of Ed Wood Wednesdays, we indexed the magazine titles and issues filed for copyright (in 1970-71 and 1973 Library of Congress catalogs, respectively) by Pendulum/Calga, both incorporated publishers running out of Bernie Bloom's W Pico Blvd office, where Ed Wood and a small cadre of large talents and free spirits worked. Dramatic changes ensued in 1973, as both Pendulum and Calga disintegrated by the Spring. Common speculation relates to the burgeoning legal troubles of Michael Thevis, finally resulting in two murder convictions.

By the spring of 1973, solely Gallery Press, Inc. existed. It was still run by Bloom on W Pico under the imprints Gallery Press and (d.b.a.) Edusex, the Pendulum sensibility maintaining: free-love hippiedom, pleas-for-tolerance, utterly objective – well, excepting legacy terms like "perversion" and "deviation" – pseudo-science, lots of b&w and color graphic sexual photos (the proverbial raison d'etre), and, with regularity, Ed Wood's short stories and articles.

Ed listed 27 short stories and 49 articles on his resume for 1973, most of which are spread across the approx. 130 individual issues indexed here.