A Heritage of Infamy: Pulp Art and Movie Posters

It’s been a hectic week here, with my wife wrapping up a grant as I’ve prepared for company. When your homophobic in-laws are coming to inspect your new-ish digs for the first time, you want to pull out all the stops, which in my case meant framing some old gay pulp fiction paperback art for their viewing displeasure. Guest bedroom window nooks are now home to Daughters of Sappho (“A Heritage of Infamy!”) and Lesbian Queen (“Crowned campus queen, she chose to rule a small, hot female realm of off-beat lust”).

There are male-centric prints (like Gay Cruise) in the room currently serving as our gym, and of course men were the centerpieces of the pulp art in my previous home, where Hot Pants Homo was framed on the refrigerator alongside a dramatic photo of Jane Bowles. The Hot Pants Homo tagline is a doozy: “Women lusted after this handsome, virile jazzman… It took him years of agony to realize he wanted a man.” Wherever we live, the guest bathroom’s the same, featuring a large Gay Traders, a soapy visual feast where the naked women seem like more of a group-shower afterthought. “The trouble with swap is where to stop!” it warns. Who knows what the plumber thinks we’re up to.

Gay pulp fiction, old erotica (like that of Phil Andros) and comics have long intrigued me. As a youngster I had the requisite Ann Bannon library and books like Women’s Barracks, none of which were generally worth rereading, but to this day I use a Satan Was a Lesbian mousepad. Vintage movie posters were an even greater visual passion. In my teens and early twenties, as a cash-strapped collector of such items, I worked overtime and pieced together side work to amass funds for carefully plotted purchases that were far more attractively priced back then than they are today.

The fruits of that labor included all kinds of posters, ranging from those in decent condition (House of Strangers) to the tattered (originals for The Long Goodbye and California Split) or just plain weird (a massive Italian poster for Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers; an obscure, unattractive poster for a ’60s European rerelease of Johnny Guitar). My prized movie poster is an original insert for Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow, followed by an original Spanish release poster for Almodóvar’s Law of Desire, a ’60s American rerelease of The Thin Man, and an original linen-backed Manhattan poster purchased for $200-something, the most I ever spent on one item.

There are small Belgian posters, lower-priced than their French counterparts, for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Army of Shadows; French originals for newer films like The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Under the Sand and Friday Night; an original Japanese poster for Shōhei Imamura’s Black Rain; a handsome and unusual trade paper ad for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion; vintage magazine advertisements for Rope, Notorious, Citizen Kane, The Lady Eve, The Furies, Double Indemnity, and Garbo’s Queen Christina.

I’ve never quite known what to do with any of these. Once, out of nowhere, an ex and I had to flee an uninhabitable apartment after our neighbor (accidentally) started a fire. Our unit didn’t burn but more than half of it was destroyed by water damage. You hesitate to acquire or display any valuable paper items after something like that. Now I have a basement I can eventually turn into a home theater and modest gallery, and enough discretionary income to purchase and frame my most coveted poster: an original French Le Samouraï. But I hesitate, for different, more masochistic reasons than before. Collecting means less to me when acquisitions aren’t financially painful. There’s probably an old pulp fiction cover about that.

Cranky Lesbian

Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.

crankylesbian.com