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",[1] the reader's sex stories / histories published in Straight to Hell often involved childhood experiences, age-gap sexual experience,[2] or other non-normative activities and orientations such as incest,[3] 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 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.[4]
Straight to Hell
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".[5] 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."[7]
External Links
Some of Boyd's contributions to The Guide.
References
- ↑ Reed Woodhouse, Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, p. 69.
- ↑ Boyd McDonald, Boy, 16, Asks, 'If I Blow You Will You Let Me Take Your Piss After?' (January, 2000).
- ↑ Boyd McDonald, The Joy of Incest (February, 2000).
- ↑ William E. Jones, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell, Los Angeles: We Heard You Like Books, 2016.
- ↑ Woodhouse, Reed (1998). Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995. University of Massachusetts Press. Pages 70 and 72.
- ↑ Welt, Bernard (1996). Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Culture. Art Issues Press. pp. 58–62.
- ↑ Castiglia, Christopher; Reed, Christopher (2011). "Queer Theory is Burning: Sexual Revolution and Traumatic Unremembering". If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past. University of Minnesota Press. p. 172.