Gay Traders — 1968 Vintage Gay Pulp Novel Poster

Published in 1968 by Companion Books—part of the gloriously sleazy Greenleaf / Phenix paperback universe—Gay Traders by Aaron Thomas belongs to that wonderfully disreputable corner of queer print culture where the covers were loud, the plots were ridiculous, and subtlety had quietly left the building.

This was the late 1960s, right on the edge of gay liberation, when homosexual life in America was still largely forced underground. Mainstream bookstores weren't exactly overflowing with positive representations of gay men, so cheap pulp paperbacks filled the gap. They were sensational, tawdry, often absurd, and frequently more interested in sex than literary greatness.

Books like Gay Traders were sold as exploitation, but they also became part of the visual and cultural record of pre-Stonewall and early liberation-era gay life. For all their camp, sleaze, and overheated copywriting, they offered readers a coded little thrill: proof that other homosexuals existed, had desires, and were apparently getting into all sorts of entertaining trouble.