The Wild Young Fags — Jack Smith Vintage Gay Pulp Poster

Published in 1969 by Cameo Library in North Hollywood, The Wild Young Fags by Jack Smith belongs to that wonderful trash heap of late-1960s gay pulp fiction, where the covers were lurid, the titles were shameless, and nobody involved seemed terribly interested in good taste.

This was the tail end of the pre-Stonewall era, when homosexuality was still criminalized, heavily policed, and treated by respectable society as somewhere between a scandal and a contagious disease. Mainstream culture wasn't exactly offering gay men much in the way of representation, unless you enjoyed tragedy, pathology, or a cautionary ending.

So the pulps stepped in.

Cheap, sensational, and usually a little ridiculous, books like The Wild Young Fags circulated through adult bookstores, mail-order catalogs, and those dim little corners of America where queer life managed to survive anyway. They were often marketed as sleaze, and frequently they were sleaze, but they also gave gay readers a glimpse of themselves in print.

The Wild Young Fags sounds less like a literary novel and more like a dare. Loud, provocative, and impossible to ignore, it captures exactly the sort of shameless paperback energy that makes these old books so collectible now. The original cover promised trouble, sex, and young men behaving badly, which is really all anyone could ask from a vintage gay pulp.