Tribute to the anonymous authors of books on homosexual themes
EDITORIAL.- The books that we want to recover here today may not even have a place in the library of forgotten books which Carlos Ruiz Zafón imagined in "The wind's shadow".
But where they surely did find clandestine shelter was in the pockets of thousands of people who eagerly read them secretly. Some lined them with newspaper to hide the titles so they could read them on the subway on the way to work or back to the sacrosanct family home. Ran the 30 years and the phenomenon of the "Pulp fiction". Its name comes from the material that was used to make the covers, which was none other than the pulp of the cheaper woods.
It was about cheap books, with striking covers and that they circumvented the limits of censorship to try Taboo subjects such as interracial sex, prostitution or homosexuality. In principle the latter were aimed at gays and lesbians, but its sale, especially of lesbian, had a huge success thanks to the consumption of male heterosexual readers. The morbid has always sold well.
Generally it was about anonymous authors or signed with a pseudonym, although we also find large firms such as Gore Vidal, with reissues of works that made veiled references to homosexuality and in which sex was barely intuited. It was a way to show the experience of gays and lesbians in an environment that was hostile to them.
At first the production of these copies was scarce because, in the environment of repression that was lived, not everyone dared to ask for such a title on a counter. But the 60 already entered, the censorship begins to lower the guard and we find stories with explicit sex when not openly pornographic.
Today, International Book Day, we wanted to pay homage to the men and women who anonymously created those stories and those who read them. And we invite you to become aware of immense privilege that implies enjoying the freedom to write, publish and read without any kind of censorship that limits us.
Happy Book Day!
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Do not imagine how those years of darkness and fears were in all eyes always looking for complicity without words but so intense!