The Gay Trap — Don Holliday Vintage Gay Pulp Poster

The Gay Trap belongs to that glorious world of mid-century gay pulp fiction, where the titles were blunt, the covers were deliciously suggestive, and subtlety was nowhere to be found.

Long before pride flags were hanging in every bank window once a year, gay men were finding traces of themselves in cheap paperbacks sold in bus stations, drugstores, and dim little bookstores where respectable society preferred not to linger.

These books were often sensational, scandalous, and just a little ridiculous.

Which is part of what makes them so great now.

Written by Don Holliday, the pseudonym used by gay paperback legend Victor J. Banis, The Gay Trap came out of a period when queer life was still largely pushed underground, yet publishers had begun to realize there was an eager audience for stories full of homosexual adventure, trouble, lust, and camp.