Steamy Saturday
"Could a woman cure this man's warped desires?" Apparently not. Ray, handsome and muscular, always thought of himself as a typical heterosexual fellow until he becomes wracked by guilt after being seduced by the randy New York sophisticate Bruce Carton. It was easy and Bruce paid well, but was Ray truly gay? He tries to find redemption as the paid consort for the wealthy Amelia, but to little avail. Desperately, he reverts to sexually assaulting Emily, an aspiring actress. The despicable act only deepens his self-loathing. What to do? Well, if you can't beat 'em. . . . In the end "Ray recognized himself as a no-good bastard. But he didn't care, and he knew now that he never would."
There's much steam, not all of it good, in Ben Travis's 1959 pulp novel The Stange Ones, published in New York as a Beacon Book, an imprint of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp. Beacon Books included Universal's line of queer pulp fiction. Although The Strange One's is often mentioned in the history of early gay pulps, we could not turn up any information on its author, Ben Travis (a pseudonym, no doubt). However, the provocative cover art of a tortured man turning away in despair from a sultry, raven-haired seductress is by the prolific and highly successful pulp-cover artist Ernest "Darcy" Chiriacka (1913-2010).
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View other pulp fiction posts.
