Barry Reay

An intimate history of the pornographic publisher behind some of the greatest works of the twentieth-century avant-garde. From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The authors of the books were young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists. Most of them wrote to survive, but some relished the...

Trans seems to be everywhere in American culture. Yet there is little understanding of how this came about. Are people aware that there were earlier periods of gender flexibility and contestability in American history? How well known is it that a previous period of trans visibility in the 1960s and early 1970s faced a vehement backlash right at the time...

The archive has assumed a new significance in the history of sex, and this book visits a series of such archives, including the Kinsey Institute's erotic art; gay masturbatory journals in the New York Public Library; the private archive of an amateur pornographer; and one man's lifetime photographic dossier on Baltimore hustlers. Shedding new light on American sexual history, the...

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided — men writing as women, and women writing...