Boyd McDonald

Boyd McDonald (1925 – September 1993) was an American writer, editor, and pornographer. In 1973, while living on welfare in an Upper West Side SRO in Manhattan, he founded and became publisher of the long-running gay pornography and erotic literature zine S.T.H. or Straight to Hell, consisting primarily of readers' submissions of their sexual experiences, together with Boyd's commentary and single male pictures.

A sex radical and "hater of respectability", the reader's sex stories / histories published in Straight to Hell often involved childhood experiences, age-gap sexual experience, or other non-normative activities and orientations such as incest, zoophilia, and coprophilia. Boyd McDonald published such accounts regularly in The Guide, a historically MAP allied gay magazine which had NAMBLA writer Bill Andriette as one of its editorial staff.

Notable readers who have made sympathetic / supportive statements about age-gap sexual contact which violates age of consent laws include: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Mitzel, and Gore Vidal.

Gay / LGBT MAP ally Charles Shively said:

Boyd had a voice unique and inimitable. He neither overstated nor understated the joys of gay sex. ... Sham and fraud of any kind appalled him. He ridiculed the hypocrisy of police, clerics, politicians, therapists, teachers, and others of the so-called "helping professions". He likewise disdained gay/lesbian spokespersons and leaders dedicated to cleaning up the filthy in us all.

In 1992, he wrote in Lewd that "as the years have gone by and it has become more difficult than it was in childhood to find men to molest me and perpetrate crimes against nature, I have come to love abusing myself more and more." In a 1981 interview with The Advocate, he boasted that "recently I jacked off almost continuously for five days—except for when I went out for food." McDonald died in September 1993 as a result of a pneumococcal infection complicated by emphysema, two months after completing his final book, Scum.

Legacy and impact

McDonald described S.T.H. as both an artistic endeavor and a work of research, and spoke of its importance in documenting the lives of gay men in a period from the 1940s to the 1980s that he described as the "Golden Age of American Cocksucking". Bernard Welt wrote:

Through the sheer abundance of true stories, McDonald presents a picture of homosexual sex as a nearly universal male experience, in pointed contrast to the contemporary ideology of homosexuality as special identity. In the world of the S.T.H. book, every barracks shower is an orgy room; every Boy Scout jamboree is a festival of sexual initiation; every conservative politician and clergyman pays male hustlers for sex. Everything men do to bond or compete in sports, war and politics is a sublimation of, if not a substitute for, homosexual desire.

Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed of Pennsylvania State University identify S.T.H., along with the journals Fag Rag and Heresies, as pioneering "a 'zine culture produced by and for queers."

First-wave Australian MAP Activist and former leader of the Australian Paedophile Support Group, Colin "Emu" Nugent, reported that Australian Customs seized copies of two of Boyd McDonald's books, along with other titles, and held them pending prosecution of two men in Western Australia for the importation of child pornography. Nugent praises Boyd's frankness and quotes a sample of his writing:

Was it only last century that the very reverend gay icon, Boyd McDonald, published a series of magazines and books about the true life experiences of gay men? With such wonderfully inflammatory titles as The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, Straight To Hell, Meat, Flesh, Cum... They raged against the Festival of Light and other right wing, anti-sex bogies horrifying the timid, even amongst his gay readership, with their bold honest stories of sex between males.

"The biggest score of the month never got near the sports pages. Male cheerleaders who write sports stories can't be sniffing a guy's jock one day and exposing him as a 'fag' the next. The score: 52 counts of 'sexual abuse, sodomy, and various sexual acts' between seven boys aged 11 to 18, and coach B.F., aged 28. B.F.., a football coach of the junior varsity at a N.Y. state high school, was arrested.

Evidently some of the little motherfuckers are 'fuck and tell' types, and after enjoying their unorthodox post-practice pleasures with the coach, ratted on him, playing 'victim' roles. Having sex with boys on the team is definitely breaking training rules, and though the kids had strictly Little League pricks, B.F. was unable to resist their hot little ass­es - nor they him.

The reason boys go through the masochistic tortures of athleticism is to avoid being 'queer.' But often their desire to have fun outweighs their desire to have respect.

Some coaches, like some scoutmasters, are similarly torn by conflict. They get caught in a vicious circle. To show they're 'straight' they enter a career that is the straightest, but also, at the same time, the most in­sanely erotic, with boys constantly pulling off their jock straps and shorts.

External Links

Some of Boyd's contributions to The Guide.