Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Welcome to the latest installment of “I Call Bullshit!” I understand that Mayfair men’s magazines with Burroughs appearances are a desirable collectible and that they are not as plentiful as they once were. I also understand that the condition of them can be funky. But the presence of officially graded Mayfairs being offered on eBay for $200 a pop is just too much. It does not appear that they are being marketed as Burroughs collectibles as el hombre invisible is not prominently featured in the item description or the available images. You look a little deeper into the seller’s items and it becomes clear that there is some serious bullshit going on. One hundred bucks for a beat-up version of the 1965 Grove paperback of Story of O. Come on man, that is a bargain bin book.  

This is all clearly bullshit and not clearly thought out but it got me wondering if this is a premature ejaculation as much as it is bullshit. Is this seller on to something but just jumping the gun? Is this the future of men’s magazines? Is your Dad’s old porn going to be treated like Superman comics and Honus Wagner baseball cards in the near future? Will official grading become a thing? And three figure prices for mass market porn mags become the norm?  

Fetish is a key component to collecting and porn naturally plugs into the same obsessive urges and desires. Porn has always been a niche collectible and as academic books like Porn Archives edited by Tim Dean demonstrate “the production and proliferation of pornography has been intertwined with the emergence of the archive as a conceptual and physical site for preserving, cataloguing, and transmitting documents and artifacts.” 

Porn of the 1960s and 1970s is hitting that fifty year threshold whereby it is becoming high time to look back and reflect. To mythologize as well. David Simon’s The Deuce is an example of this process. Peter Doggett’s X-Rated: Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s shows how the Golden Age of Porn is being appreciated on the level of graphic design. The documentary on Hustler magazine, Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story, made clear how cutting edge and edgy Hustler was in terms of design and layout in the late 1970s.  

When you start talking about layout, design, and typography, you start getting into art appreciation and then the game is on in terms of increased collectability and increased prices. I would not be surprised to see an enterprising bookseller issue a catalog on the Golden Age of Porn presenting vintage magazines, films, and posters in terms of the art and rare book/periodical market, the fetish for dead technologies, and as relics from a print culture that no longer exists in the digital age. Couple this with the long-standing collectability of cult stars in porn (think Marilyn Monroe and Bettie Page), porn’s longstanding tradition of publishing work by outlaw and hip writers, and, as I mentioned in my introduction to the Evergreen Club News, porn’s insight into larger cultural and sociological issues, the stage could be set for a serious catalog that would reset, redefine, and legitimize the porn-as-collectible market much as Between the Covers’ The Great Mimeograph Revolution Catalog did in 2010. The next thing you know Burroughs Mayfairs are $250-$300 dollars like Floating Bears went up from $40 to $400 in an instant.  

So maybe just maybe this eBay seller is not full of bullshit, maybe just maybe he is just ahead of his time.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Betsy: You got to be kidding. This is a dirty movie.  
Travis: No, no this is a movie that a lot of couples come to. All types of couples.  
Betsy: You sure about that?  
Travis: Yeah, I see them all the time.

Taxi Driver is full of memorable and iconic scenes but I really get a kick out of the clip where Travis takes Betsy to a Times Square porno theater on their first date. Not because it shows how out of touch and socially inept Travis was but because it shows how in the know he was — even if unknowingly. Hear me out.

Believe it or not there was a time when your Mom and Dad went to a porno movie on a date. Take Deep Throat. Barbara Walters saw it. Spiro Agnew saw it. Hell, 2020 Democratic nominee John Hickenlooper took his mother to see it. In the era of porn chic or the Golden Age of Porn from 1969 to 1984, adult movies received positive reviews from movie critics and large in-theater viewership from the general public. Not the trenchcoat and newspaper over the lap crowd, but instead the more forward-thinking contingent of upper-middle class America. Porn movies were viewed as a crucial and vanguard element of the counterculture, part and parcel of the war on censorship and the freeing of artistic and personal expression. Pornos and their directors and actors were champions of sexual liberation, not Exhibit A for exploitation and discrimination. Travis Bickle was actually a very hip guy. Poor Betsy was the square.

At the forefront of the mainstreaming of pornography was Barney Rosset of Grove Press. And our friend William Burroughs. Nowhere is this phenomenon presented more clearly and repeatedly than in the newsletters of the Evergreen Club News. You have all heard of Evergreen Review, the primary periodical outlet of Grove Press, which brought the literature and art of the margins into Middle America, but you may not know that in conjunction with Grove’s extremely popular literary magazine, they also had a successful book and film club. A club that reached hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A club that distributed Victorian erotica, transgressive novels, portfolios of erotic drawing, sexual treatises, legal tomes on censorship and obscenity, foreign art films, New American cinema, silent movie classics, stag films, and gay porns.  

The Evergreen Club began in 1966 and as an introductory offer potential subscribers could receive a free copy of three titles: Eros Denied by Wayland Young, Games People Play by Eric Berne, and Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ novel was big news at the time as it had just beaten an obscenity rap in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The book was also a big seller reaching number one on the New York Post bestseller list in November of that year with the hardcover selling more than 50,000 copies. Selections from Burroughs novels, like The Ticket That Exploded, appeared in the early Evergreen Club News brochures but the book club increasingly became a film club especially once Rosset hit pay dirt with the distribution of I Am Curious (Yellow), the Swedish art-porn film that had obscenity issues of its own, which Grove covered in the pages of Evergreen Review. That movie would eventually make Grove $14 million dollars, which encouraged Rosset to dive head-first into the porn pool. Rosset eventually got all wet, losing money hand over fist, in an attempt to replicate the success of I Am Curious (Yellow). No other film distributed by Grove made a profit. By embracing hardcore pornos, Rosset also alienated some of his supporters, particularly female employees and supporters of women’s rights, who revolted against profiting on the exploitation and degradation of women as well as the pervasive sexism and misogyny at Grove. Female radicals, led by Grove employee Robin Morgan, occupied Rosset’s office and attempted to take over the press. As Loren Glass argues in Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant Garde, porn films ultimately played a decisive role in the downfall of Grove and Rosset.

But for a brief moment, Rosset was the Porn King, if not on top of the media mountain, at least at the vanguard of the future of technology. Albert Goldman’s Life feature, “The Old Smut Peddler,” on Rosset from August 1969 (which featured Norman Mailer on the cover and coverage of Woodstock and the murder of Sharon Tate), opens with Rosset’s vision of video cassettes and porn on demand in the bedrooms of America. By the 1980s this world came to be, which happened to destroy the Golden Age of Porn that Rosset helped usher into existence. For in the heady days of the late 1960s, Rosset aggressively acquired libraries, film archives, bookstores, and movie theaters and partnered with Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, noted collectors of erotica, all in the quest for porn content to feed his empire. Goldman’s article is provided here in full to provide a portrait of Rosset on top just before the collapse in a mere two years. Sidenote: The Old Smut Peddler was only 46 years old at the time of the article. I am older than that now. I guess that makes me an Old Smut Collector.

The Evergreen Club News documents the early days of the Golden Age before Deep Throat changed the game in 1972, by taking porn films into the spotlight and the mainstream. The success of Deep Throat made Rosset’s porn empire of vintage stag films, art-house erotica, New America Cinema, and other 8mm odds and ends obsolete and even worse quaint by comparison. Evergreen Club News is not well-documented. There is no checklist or bibliography and the brochures have no publication dates on them, which results in confusion. For example one prominent seller of Evergreen Club News dates them at 1960, which is clearly wrong. From what I can tell there were seven volumes of the News as well as several out-of-series pamphlets centered around a particular movie or topic, like The Aviator, a stag film from the 1920s, or The New Venus Library of Erotica, a collection of porn exploitation novels. Volume One of the News was published in 1966, when the Evergreen Book Club was initiated. That would place the rest of the volumes as follows:

• Volume Two – 1967
• Volume Three – 1968
• Volume Four – 1969
• Volume Five – 1970
• Volume Six – 1971
• Volume Seven – 1972

By 1972 Rosset’s reckless investment in film as well as internal struggles stemming from the decision to take Grove public basically bankrupted the company and stopped the flood of Grove titles to a mere trickle. As mentioned above, it is also telling that 1972 was the year porn broke, leaving Rosset behind like a starlet’s no longer needed boyfriend.

In the Counter-Culture Colophon, Glass makes good use of the News, particularly in his chapters on obscenity and feminism. Ephemera relating to old porn is crucial to documenting the history of media, advertising, and sexuality as well as gender studies and I suspect will be increasingly collected by institutions and private collectors as such. They are also of course interesting on a visual and design level. I have acquired about 50 Evergreen Club News brochures and I hope this archive will be of interest to academic and general readers alike. As promotional materials they are somewhat repetitive so I have scanned all the cover pages and just a small sample of complete pamphlets to provide a sense of the contents. That said, if anyone has an interest in seeing the complete contents of a particular number I will be happy to scan it and get it posted in the archive. Also if anyone has any News that I am missing please send in scans and we will add them as well. Enjoy!

“The Old Smut Peddler”
Life Magazine
29 August, 1969

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Evergreen Club News
Vol 3, No 4

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Vol 4, No 4

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Vol 4, No 7

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Vol 4, No 13

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Vol 5, No 1

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Vol 5, No 5

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Vol 5, No 6

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Vol 5, No 7

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Vol 5, No 8

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Vol 5, No 9

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 10

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Vol 5, No 11

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Vol 5, No 13

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Vol 6, No 1

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Vol 6, No 3

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Vol 6, No 4

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Vol 6, No 5

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Vol 6, No 6

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Vol 6, No 7

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Vol 6, No 9

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Vol 6, No 10

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Vol 6, No 12

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Vol 6, No 13

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Vol 7, No 1

Evergreen Club News
Anatomy of a Delivery Boy

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The Aviator

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Bare Sexpertise

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Getting His Goat

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Girl on a Swing

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Great Erotic Reading

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Her Daughter’s Boyfriend

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Evergreen Club News
Love and the Art of Sexual Fulfillment

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Lust Girls and Hot Desires

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New Venus Library

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Of Studs and Swapping

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Sex and Seduction Now and Then

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The Erotic Drawings of Mihaly Zichy

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The Friendly Couple

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The Picture Book of Sexual Love

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The Venus Quartet

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The Venus Treasury

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I got my mitts on a run of a magazine dedicated to the good shit that once again reminded me how full of it I truly am. Paging through Malcolm Mc Neill‘s Lost Art of Ah Pook, I came across a reference to Rush, a magazine of high entertainment, which featured in late 1976 the most comprehensive example of that graphic novel that ever saw print. Really should have seen this a lot sooner. Like years ago. But as is well documented, or as evidenced by the lack of documentation on RealityStudio, I have blinders on when it comes to appreciating the later work of William Burroughs. As a magazine like Rush proves yet again, this is my loss.

Rush was the Pepsi to High Times‘s Coke. Michael Horowitz, the foremost authority on all things drugs, noted that Rush was the most prominent competitor to High Times and he listed some other drug lifestyle mags I also never heard of like Hi-Life, Stone Age, and Marijuana Monthly. I have never come across these mags and I even wonder how prominent Rush really was. According to WorldCat, Rush ran for only four issues from late 1976 to early 1977. Now High Times is all over the Internet with extensive archives that document its long, illustrious run, but google Rush and you come up with almost nothing. Most of the references deal with the fact that the magazine printed Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill’s collaboration on Ah Pook Is Here in December 1976 in the third issue.  

Here is Malcolm Mc Neill on how Ah Pook found its way into the pages of Rush:

Rush was an offshoot of Swank Magazine and someone had suggested, not long after I arrived in New York, that I should see about getting illustration work there. The editor was a young guy named Ben Pesta and we got along well. He was friends with writer Doug Moench at Marvel where I was also working and we hung out together on occasions. I’d used the Ah Pook imagery as the portfolio for getting work at both magazines and they were both Burroughs fans and loved the work (back in the day when Burroughs fans actually read his books). I’m not sure if Bill had previously been published at Swank or not — that would be your bailiwick. When the idea of Rush came up, being able to publish a preview of “the unseen drug-fueled apocalyptic new Burroughs book” — was kind of handed to them on a plate. They were already familiar with it and I was right there. Characterizing a book about Death and the Control of Time in that way naturally didn’t exactly blow my skirt up, but it got worse as I pointed out in Observed While Falling. The result was so disappointing; I didn’t even bother picking up my favorite Ah Pook image that was to be used as the opening page. One of the very few pieces of art that was actually Lost. It’s the image I wanted for the cover of the Fantagraphics and German OWFs and finally got to use for the Kindle version exactly forty years later! 

Since they hadn’t been able to pay us much, Rush agreed to guarantee me four illustrations (I think) over the next year. I did one (Yage) and was working on another when the magazine folded. Everything about Ah Pook is weird, Rush was just one more crack to fall through.

In addition, the first issue printed Burroughs’ Cobble Stone Gardens. So it would seem that Rush was far from successful. As Malcolm notes, the magazine was published by the same guys who published Swank, which had a tradition of mixing counterculture writing with porn. For example, Burroughs appeared in an issue of Swank back in 1961. The inclusion of Burroughs in the pages of Rush suggests either that into the mid-1970s Burroughs was still a big draw for young heads or that the editors did not have any new ideas. Given Rush‘s short shelf life and the fact that Burroughs appeared in half of the mag’s issues, the latter appears to be the case although the editors of High Times dipped into the seemingly bottomless Burroughs well several times throughout the 1970s. If you were into drugs you bound to come into contact with Burroughs at some point.

I do not know about you but I am a Pepsi guy. I love the rip-off, the copycat, and the second tier. Give me a B-Movie and the D-List any day. Often this type of media can provide through its seeming lack of original ideas fascinating insights into the zeitgeist of the time. The copy becomes more interesting than the original even if its treatment of the spirit of the times is half-baked.  

Flipping through Rush I am reminded yet again of just how fucking crazy the 1970s really were and how short-sighted it is of me to focus exclusively on the 1960s. It is cliché that the sixties were the decade of sex, drugs and rock and roll but when you get down to it, the seventies were when that holy trinity went beyond the initiated and entered into secular experience. In the seventies the sixties went mainstream. Hell, even Time ran a cover story in the mid-1970s promoting cocaine as a wonder drug for the emerging class of yuppies who wanted to work hard and party harder. For a young ambitious stock broker, cocaine was viewed as the perfect recreational drug. By the dawn of the eighties, the hangover and paranoia would eventually set in and cocaine would be demonized and ghettoized in the crack epidemic. Similarly the Summer of Love would hit suburbia in the seventies with swinger clubs for the bridge and tunnel crowd, like Plato’s Retreat, key parties in Levittown, and gay culture seeping into mainstream sexual practices until AIDS came in and scared everybody straight. To give some idea of just how weird the seventies became, like Rush, there was a short-lived glossy mag along the lines of Sixteen and Tiger Beat, called Star that championed the groupie lifestyle and the tweens and teens who aspired to live it. Articles gushed over the girlfriends of The Rolling Stones or advised how a girl could catch an older man. Even in a decade of rock excess epitomized by the questionable dating practices of Jimmy Page and David Bowie, Star was just too much. It ran for only five issues. Finally as David Hepworth notes in his book, Never a Dull Moment, 1971 was the year the rock exploded, or more accurately, the year the rock industry consolidated into a big business increasingly run by corporations and accountants. 

The same could be said for William Burroughs. The seventies would be the decade when the Mimeo Revolution began its slow decline in importance as the main outlet for alternative writers until its eventual collapse in the early eighties with the rise of Reagan and the personal computer. Little mags became less and less important in Burroughs’ bibliography as mainstream publishers like Viking and Henry Holt marketed Burroughs’ latest releases. Burroughs would even appear in the pages of People. Rush is a forgotten mag that documents this shift. It captures a time when Burroughs as well as sex, drugs, and rock and roll emerged from the underground bookstores and headshops on to their eventual presence in the checkout line at the supermarket.  

Rush Magazine Archive

Rush
October 1976
Front cover

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Dope party

Rush
October 1976

Dope party

Rush
October 1976

State police

Rush
November 1976
Front cover

Rush
December 1976
Front cover

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976
Advertisement

Rush
December 1976
Crossword

Rush
February 1977
Front cover

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#15: Suck 5 & 6 (1971). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

“[C]omplete breakdown of censorship. There are shops all over town now where you can buy pictures of naked boys with hard ons step right up and take your prick displayed on the counter. And there is also a selection of home movies with the actors hard on the cover. What is different from movies like ‘The Men’ is that this is legal and therefore competitive. Instead of horrible looking Soho Jews there are beautiful kids jacking off etcetera. We could cut these movies in with the Cut Ups and show the result publically. We could cut the sex films in with newsreels and street shots and pop singers. How long this God sent opportunity will last I don’t know. No doubt our creeping opponents will try to crack down on ‘smut.’ If that happens we can put a protest riot in the streets.” William S. Burroughs, Letter to Antony Balch (Sept. 10, 1968)

“What news? The only sex-film quickie to make these days is a couple or two couples or four couples or sixteen couples fucking and I hear such are shown on the screens of NY every day, now. Also, gents entirely transparent clothing is available or, at least, has been shown by someone. How are you keeping up?” William S. Burroughs, Letter to Antony Balch (Dec. 9, 1968)

Hardcore pornography: What upstanding citizens saw as the work of the devil, Burroughs viewed as a gift from God. In my mind, one of the more WTF what-ifs of Burroughs’ entire career is what if Burroughs and Balch had made that “sex-film quickie” in 1968? As I will show below, in The Wild Boys and in a European sex paper, Burroughs wrote the script then he got stage fright faced with all the work involved. Apparently even Burroughs had his limits. Directing porno flicks was a horizon that he gazed upon longingly but which he did not tread beyond. But for just a moment think of it, a Burroughs gay porno/cut-up film that would have been shown in the sleaziest grindhouses of Time Square, or better yet, as an endless loop in a peep arcade. Burroughs as an experimental Toby Ross. What a mindfuck! If done right, if done at all, Burroughs would have taken his place with iconic underground porn auteurs like Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), Barbara Rubin (Christmas on Earth), and Andy Warhol (Blow Job and Blue Movie). Personally, I feel Burroughs deserves to be in their company already, based on the trilogy of PG cut-up flicks that he made with Antony Balch in the mid-1960s. These are important examples of underground filmmaking. Then again, I think Burroughs demands inclusion in any conversation of just about any creative form of the 1960s underground. Obviously literature, but also film, art (his scrapbook collages), sculpture (the Dream Machine), photography. As for dance, Burroughs sat that one out.  

Even if Burroughs did not make a porno, the Golden Age of porn of the late sixties through to 1980, when video began to take over the industry and the moral backlash initiated by the Reagan administration motivated a clean-up process in major cities like New York, received the gift that keeps on giving from the pornographic writing of Naked Lunch. The Naked Lunch trial was one of a long line of censorship precedents that culminated in the 1967 Supreme Court decision in Redrup v. New York, which legally protected written pornography in even its lowest and non-socially redeeming forms. After that ruling, the sewers overflowed and Time Square peep arcades sprouted like mushrooms in the shit pile, and the grindhouse theaters openly showed hardcore fucking of all persuasions in all types of innaresting arrangments, including live sex shows. So when you are watching David Simon of The Wire‘s latest show on the wildlife of the Deuce before The Lion King came in and Disneyfied Sodom, give some dap to Burroughs and AJ’s Annual Party for getting the party started.

I can think of no other major writer of the 20th Century with such a close relationship to pornography as Burroughs. Henry Miller comes to mind. Not surprisingly, porno mags are a crucial part of Burroughs’ bibliography. Sure, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski appeared in men’s magazines, but they just served as readily available outlets. For Burroughs, pornography is a major element of his theoretical and philosophical stance. Bukowski would scoff at the suggestion that his writing even had one. Bukowski’s obscenity was largely profit driven. He wrote dirty stories because the porno rags paid well and that is what readers wanted. Burroughs, on the other hand, wrote his own porno vision of the world, to which he felt audiences had cast a blind eye but nonetheless must be forced to acknowledge. For a sustained period, Burroughs used Mayfair, the British equivalent to Playboy, as a platform from which to disseminate his most radical and revolutionary ideas. Yes, Burroughs clearly took the Mayfair gig for the paycheck, but as his letters and interviews, such as The Job, suggest, Burroughs felt himself to be a pornographic prophet in this period. As Jaguar, another British mag of the period, asked concerning Burroughs: Pornographer or prophet? In true Burroughsian fashion, the answer is not one of either/or, but instead both/and.

Book collecting is also a perversion. A tolerated one to be sure. Collectors are looked upon with humor like the dirty old men of The Benny Hill Show. Good for a chuckle. Yet collecting is pure pornography. Just see how book collectors fondle and caress their books. How they gaze at them full of desire while undressing them of their dust jackets. Smelling deeply of their leather bindings. This is the world of fetish. There are elements of control and possession. Even rape. Many collectors kidnap their books from the world and lock them away forever. Book collecting can also be an expression of homosexual desire. (Burroughs collected guns, knives and canes.) In fact, it expresses the full range of sexuality. As such, the collecting of Burroughs men’s magazine appearances is the most meta of collections.

And I strongly recommend beginning collectors to walk on the wild side. First all, they are rather cheap when compared to Burroughs’ first editions and the rarer little magazine appearances. Digging around on the internet and at flea markets and yard sales (I remember rooting through trash cans during spring cleaning as a kid looking for old Playboys and Penthouses) can turn up these publications for under $30. Burroughs highspots include the large run of Mayfair titles from 1967 to 1970 (over 20 issues in all), which featured the monthly “Burroughs Academy Bulletin” column. Roy Pennington bootlegged several of these columns in his proto-punk zine, The Mayfair Acadamy More or Less, by his Urgency Press in 1973. A wonderful collectible in itself and another porn-related Burroughs highspot. Rest assured, we will see Roy again on this list. One of the more interesting Burroughs interviews appeared in a 1971 issue of Penthouse, which despite being reprinted in Burroughs Live, is worth getting in order to experience the interview in the context of its original release. Context is sometimes more important than content, which is why there will always be collectors searching out for first editions and first appearances rather than buying reprints and collected editions. Some items like Roy’s bootleg re-contextualize in interesting ways as they re-issue. The June 1961 issue of Swank contains one of the most significant Burroughs pieces in a porn mag or otherwise. I have written about “The Word” on RealityStudio before, setting out its importance in the publication and textual history of Naked Lunch. The same can be said for the three issues of National Screw from 1977, which provided the briefest of peeks at the hot action that would have been the complete illustrated Ah Puch Is Here by Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill.  

I would recommend getting these porn mags now, as they are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. Once again this is because this filth is being considered in terms of art and design. Vintage porno mags were all over the NY Book Art Fair at PS 1 this fall. As one dealer said to me as we were looking over a full spread of a woman taking a huge cock up her ass: “Screw hired some really great designers in the mid-1970s. The covers and layout were really good.” I am being serious here. Abrams, which has been publishing art books since 1949, put out in 2012 Sex Press: The Sexual Revolution in the Underground Press 1963-1979. Abrams has published similar books on the underground newspaper and the Punk press. In such circles as well as in academia, hardcore porn mags and films are being recognized as a crucial if problematic part of not just the sexual revolution but the larger cultural revolution of the 20th century.

Clearly in the early decades of the 21st, in the age of the internet and the digital revolution, society is going through a thorough pornification. Porn is big business and a force of technological innovation. (Brion Gysin stated that painting is fifty years ahead of writing. The same holds true for porn. For example, porn is at the cutting edge in exploring the possibilities of the digital revolution. The porn industry provides a case study into the trials and tribulations of monetizing the internet. It also provides a model for DIY archiving. Much of the history of pornographic film, particularly starting with the rise of video, is readily available on the internet, archived in free databases such as Pornhub or Tube8. Many of these videos were uploaded by amateur archivists and porn fans. Could such activities be a model for libraries and institutions on how to preserve and store not just new media artworks but also more traditional paper-based holdings? In any case, clearly it provides inspiration for developing archives and libraries outside of the institutional and, maybe even, corporate establishment.) The laws and mores of porn are seeping into the daily lives of the general population whether they are in contact with hardcore pornography or not. Elements of porn have taken over mainstream culture. Depictions of alternative lifestyles, like that of gays and transsexuals, which in the past could only be experienced through pornography, are now on magazine covers and TV programs everywhere. The Kardashians are the first family of porn and proof of pornography’s crossover.

Yet there was a time when pornography was tied not primarily to consumer culture but to revolution. Like with the counterculture, on the surface, the revolution in pornography seemed to have been all about hair. Making the pubic public. Feminist Germaine Greer proved herself to be a bushy haired streetfighter in the pages of Suck. But there was more to it than that. It was not about appearances but about taking action and about how you acted during the act of sex. In comparing Suck with Screw, Al Goldstein’s sex paper, Greer states:  

I would like to explain why I think SCREW . . . is counterrevolutionary. . . . SCREW is still into the whole tits and ass scene, you know? There’s no chance that SCREW could ever chance what I call the grammar of fucking because the sex with which SCREW deals is screwing and I’m not into screwing. The word means so many things. It means screwing up and screwing down and that’s not what you do with your cock and that’s not what you do with your cunt, you don’t really screw. People can’t believe that. They really think they are nailing something down. And I don’t think SCREW goes any way toward rescuing the people who take it – up the cunt or up the ass or in the ear – rescuing them from degradation or devaluation. . . . The trouble is that the women’s liberation movement doesn’t even see that SUCK IS doing something different because they can’t even see the difference between the semantics of sucking and screwing. People despise their sexuality so much. 

This was a time when pornography was as at home with the avant garde and the counterculture as with organized crime and skid row. This avant pornography seeped into the suburbs. I remember digging around in the closets of my home in the Drexelwood subdivision of Reading, Pennsylvania, as a teenager and finding a small stash of vintage smut. The Black Cat editions of Warhol’s Blue Movie and I Am Curious (Yellow) as well as Ralph Ginzburg’s hardcover mag, Eros, with its nude photos of Marilyn Monroe taken by Bert Stern just six weeks before her death. Today, these publications have become collectible, particularly the Warhol, which featured over 100 stills from the film. Visiting my parents in my twenties, I was discussing the Ginsberg obscenity trial with my stepfather, who remembered it distinctly as occurring in Philadelphia, not San Francisco, and it took me a while to realize that he was talking about the Ralph Ginzburg trial over Eros not Allen’s over “Howl”. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy indicted Ginzburg (maybe the Monroe photos put him over the edge) and Ginzburg was convicted in the District, Circuit and Supreme Courts. Ralph was sentenced to five years and actually served eight months. In Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese presents a scene where Travis Bickle takes Cybill Shepherd on a date to a porno movie at Times Square. The scene is supposed to demonstrate how disturbed Bickle is but I have always thought that the scene is not as crazy as it seems. In the early 1970s, porno movies, like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, were part of a date night for more curious (yellow) and adventurous suburban couples. Before AIDS, sexual exploration was not the exclusive domain of a promiscuous underground. Plato’s Retreat, a members-only sex club in New York City run by Larry Levenson, who happened to be a high school friend of Al Goldstein, catered to a well-to-do bridge and tunnel crowd of heterosexual couples and bisexual women. Its initial location was a former gay bathhouse where Bette Midler performed, but in its new incarnation gay men and sex amongst men were strictly prohibited. Only the hedonistic atmosphere of the former bathhouse remained.

This was also a time when a true skeptic like William Burroughs could watch a couple fucking on screen and think that the entire world was going to change. Sex was dirty and sick, just like the humor of Lenny Bruce. Suck: The First European Sex Paper was in on the joke. The paper was founded in Amsterdam in 1969 by Bill Levy, Heathcote Williams, Germaine Greer, Willem de Ridder, Susan Janssen, and Lynne Tillman. Suck co-hosted the Wet Dreams Festival, the first film festival devoted to pornographic films. Suck was as nasty a publication as there was at the time, but with a revolutionary spirit, creative layout and design. Suck also featured a sick, black humor that now has those in art and literature circles, like Abrams, placing the paper in the company of more artistically appreciated underground papers, such as IT and Oz, or punk zines, like Search and Destroy. Individual issues of Suck now approach $250 and a complete run is in the four figures.  

Burroughs appeared in Issues 5 and 6. While I recommend buying the entire run if possible, I have placed Suck 5 and 6 on my list. Suck 6: The Special Family Issue, like the Oz Kids Issue, crosses the boundaries of good taste into possibly the criminal. “Adults only, kids!” The issue is especially important considering the letters quoted above. Burroughs served as a judge at the Wet Dream Festival and in Suck 6 he provides “a new look at sex films” as well as a large selection from the then unpublished Wild Boys, presented as “Burroughs’ Blue Movie” along with explicit photos of twinks Mark and Johnny. Burroughs did not make his “sex-film quickie” but Burroughs’ Blue Movie in Suck 6 could be considered as a working script. As could “The Penny Arcade Peep Show/The Wild Boys Smile” selection from Suck 5.  

Clearly while writing The Wild Boys, Burroughs was more than causally interested in making a porno flick. The Burroughs collection at Arizona State contains much material relating to The Wild Boys, including items related to the proposed porno. The description of the material in the Arizona State archive is fascinating. What follows is courtesy of Alex Wermer-Colan and the archive.  

Box 8A Item 4

The Wild Boys Film Ideas and Correspondence [J:503]

This file contains a 2 page signed introduction and 16 page typed signed prospectus for the film of The Wild Boys and 7 page signed manuscript of various scenes for The Wild Boys film project, also signed by Burroughs.

The Wild Boys film project, as outlined by Burroughs in the introductions, was an attempt, with the help of Terry Southern, to make Burroughs’ novel into a film. The project was a failure: “In the spring of 1972 while I was in New York trying to sell The Naked Lunch film script I saw a number of hard core porn films including Fred Halsted’s LA Plays Itself and Sex Garage. This gave me the idea for shooting The Wild Boys as a hard core porn film. I met with Fred Halsted and discussed the idea with and gave him a copy of The Wild Boys . . . I then discussed the project with Terry Southern and we considered working together on the script . . . during the summer of 1972 Fred Halsted came to London and we discussed a number of alternative scripts. I finally decided the whole idea was impracticable both from a financial standpoint and from a standpoint of making a good film within our budget.”

Also included in this file are carbon copies of Burroughs’ letters to Terry Southern and Fred Halsted regarding the project. At the end of the file, the clippings for show times of Fred Halsted’s film in Time Square cut out of the New York Times, May 1972, are laid in.

All of the material contained in this file is unpublished and Burroughs’ plans for creating a film based on The Wild Boys are unknown outside this file. Preserved in the original maroon legal sized folder with title written in Burroughs’ hand in ink on the front cover and illustration pasted on the front cover by Burroughs. Also see Box 20.

Wild Boy Film Ideas folder – “As I have told you the first wild boy tribes were fugitive survivors from the Terror of Colonel Driss. The government denies that any terror occurred.”

Box 20

Drafts and Unpublished Film Manuscript of The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs [JACKSON 523, 526, 503], 1965

Item Descriptions: 55, 75, 78.

[523/525]: The Wild Boys (4 Files)

The first file contains the most important materials. This file contains the complete extant first drafts (1968-1972) of various passages from The Wild Boys. The MS consists of 92 pp. typed drafts, many of which bear extensive additions and alterations in the author’s hand in various colored inks, as well as several holograph pages. Because this entire MS is typed with an elite machine and is almost completely single-spaced, we estimate that it contains well over 175,000 words. Burroughs has signed various opening pages throughout the drafts and has also indicated which passages were ultimately used in the 1971 Grove Press edition of the novel. The subject matter in The Wild Boys may be seen as the final and successful extension of ideas originally essayed in The Revised Boy Scout Manual MS, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” MS, and Ah Pook is Here MS, all of which are contained in this archive.

This massive MS contains lengthy sections that were discarded by Burroughs in the final draft of The Wild Boys and which therefore remain unpublished. Preserved in the original maroon legal size folder with note in Burroughs’ hand in ink on front covers: “Wild Boy Overflow”.

Enclosed together with Wild Boy Film Ideas portfolio in cloth slipcase with Morocco label.

Second file. “Unpublished materials from Wild Boys also layouts and first drafts … old duplicates.” 14 pp of miscellaneous drafts of passages from The Wild Boys, mostly carbons. Notes in the author’s hand on orange file cover. Folio 22A.

Third file. “Wild Boys Hard Core Porn Movie and Chinese Bongsae Film Idea . . . Distinct file.” 26 pp. various sizes with a few holograph corrections, mostly carbon cut ups. Entirely unpublished material preserved in the original red folder with notes on front cover in the author’s hand. Folio 22.

Fourth file. “Wild Boys Film Notes Valuable.” This file contains numerous clippings and several pages of typed notes regarding The Wild Boys and used as source material for the film. Preserved in red folder with note in Burroughs’ hand on cover. Folio 35.

Reading The Wild Boys in Suck 5 and 6 pales in comparison to watching the fully realized film at Show World on the Deuce, but it was the closest Burroughs would ever get to being a porn director. A quick review of Burroughs in Suck: “It is Days of Rage meets Boogie Nights. Four spurting hard-ons.”  

Graham Masterton is the amazingly prolific author of over a hundred horror and thriller novels, as well as self-help / how-to guides about sex. He has been publishing steadily since the mid-1970s. Earlier in his career, however, he was the editor for Mayfair magazine and later the editor of Penthouse and Penthouse Letters in England.

During this period he was able to develop what would become the Mayfair Academy articles with William Burroughs. The articles appeared monthly over a period of two years from October 1967 to November 1969. Some of Burroughs’ most precisely stated essays and stories, they were distributed to a much different audience than the one that had experienced his writing in smaller press journals and underground newspapers. Even though Burroughs appeared regularly in magazines such as Evergreen Review, which did have a large distribution, Mayfair introduced him to a readership who was probably not buying the magazine for the chance to read his work.

The Mayfair articles were not just a great forum for Burroughs to expound on any subject he liked; they were a steady paycheck. Given the nature of his work, money was generally short, and as Masterton points out, the Mayfair articles were two years of guaranteed income. Much like Jack Kerouac’s column in Escapade in the late 1950s, Burroughs was now given the headmaster’s position of his own academy, simultaneously writing much of the work that would become The Wild Boys, The Job and Exterminator!

The following interview helps fill in some areas that are currently missing from the official story about Burroughs’ work and his life in London.

As an intro to the first Academy Series piece, “The Future of Sex and Drugs”, there is a short interview between Burroughs and Ginsberg and the editors of Mayfair, of which you were one. Was this interview more of a device to introduce the Academy Series or was this actually how it happened? Was the series Burroughs’ idea or Mayfair‘s?

I had been corresponding with William when he was living in Tangiers. At that time I was a newspaper reporter in Crawley, West Sussex. By the time he came to London I had landed the job of deputy editor of Mayfair, which wasn’t as grand as it sounds, because the entire magazine was put out by the editor and me and Brian Fisk’s dog. I went to meet William when he moved into his top-floor apartment in Duke Street, St James’s, and after a couple of meetings I asked him if he had any articles or excerpts from his forthcoming novels which we could publish. He had long had the concept of an academy at which he could expound and discuss his ideas on government repression and big business and the future of social control, so I suggested that he write a series of articles which we would call The Burroughs Academy. So I suppose you can accurately say that we thought of the idea between us. The interview was absolutely as it happened, although edited of course to make it rather more comprehensible than it actually was.

Including a literary figure like William Burroughs in Mayfair would be considered an odd choice for most pornographic or men’s-magazine equivalents of today. What was the philosophical approach behind the magazine?

Within its very limited budget, Mayfair was modelled closely on Playboy, which had always used prestigious authors and artists to give the magazine a veneer of respectability. We used to call it “excuse material”… in other words, readers would justify purchasing Mayfair by saying that they only bought it for the articles… and, good gracious, I hardly noticed that it’s full of pictures of naked girls. Brian Fisk, the founder of Mayfair, liked the idea of a magazine that had the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club. It sounds very dated now, but in the mid-1960s there was a big resurgence in interest in Edwardian-style men’s fashion, as well as wine and cigars and all the trappings of luxury living which of course had been missing in the 1950s. This veneer of respectability meant that we were accepted by WH Smith wholesalers while Penthouse was not.

The Academy Series is some of Burroughs’ most realized, precisely stated work of the 1960s. How did audiences react to the articles over the two years he contributed them?

In actual fact we received very little reaction from the readership and I suspect that few of our hardcore readers actually bothered to read his articles… or, indeed, any of the features and stories that we published. Most of the letters we received were about glimpses of girls’ panties as they went upstairs in double-decker buses. Or the lack thereof. The rest of the letters we invented. But there is no doubt that word got around about the series and eventually it became a kind of secret classic for Burroughs aficionados. Much of it ended up in his novel The Wild Boys. These days you can read it on the internet, and I have seen some snarky comments about the rather simplistic introductions that I wrote for each article. But you have to remember that William was never easy to read and his thinking was way ahead of his time, so I make no apologies for having tried to explain to Mayfair‘s readers what he was saying. If I could get them to read even half a page before they turned over to ogle Millie (of My Boy Lollipop fame) with not much on, or even Shakira Baksh (now Lady Michael Caine) wearing only a pair of pantyhose, then I counted that as a success for the counter-culture.

How did pornography and/or men’s magazines fit into the counter-culture in those days?

There had been one or two avant-garde stories and articles in Playboy but in those days girlie magazines were not really perceived to be part of the counter-culture, if by that you mean the Beats and the hippie and the satirists of the time (such as Screw and Oz magazines and TW3 on television.) So when we included William’s Academy Series in Mayfair, it was really the first time that a sex-oriented consumer magazine had featured articles that seriously questioned the Establishment.

While the Mayfair pieces were pivotal pieces in Burroughs career, especially in terms of stating his views on the world, for some reason they do not figure very largely in any of the biographies of Burroughs. Why do you think that is?

Mayfair‘s circulation was not enormous and it was not published in the United States, so the Burroughs Academy did not reach a very wide audience at the time. I don’t think that many of William’s followers would have been natural Mayfair buyers, either. I think there is a certain literary snobbishness about it, too, from what I have seen from several biographies. Those biographers fail to realize how important the Mayfair articles were to William as a writer and a thinker, and how they also helped him to pay the rent.

The Academy Series in Mayfair introduced William Burroughs to a much different audience than before. How was his homosexuality viewed by this new audience, since he was writing for a decidedly heterosexual publication?

William’s homosexuality was never an issue either with me or the readers of Mayfair. I suppose if we had published the articles today we might have included more arguments about the status and treatment of homosexuals in society, but most of the articles were concerned with thought control and political issues.

The tenor of the Mayfair pieces is very different from the work Burroughs began doing once he moved to NYC later in the 1970s. Do you think it was just a symptom of the times that he was so focused on political issues / control in the late 1960s? Why do you think he moved on to the more reflective work we see in The Cities of the Red Night and the novels that followed?

William did not like London and he was deeply suspicious of the politics of the 1960s. Not only that, I think that when he was writing for Mayfair he was feeling not only culturally displaced but politically and socially and even physically claustrophobic (his apartment was very small and confining, with sloping ceilings because it was on the top floor.) I lost touch with him when he moved back to NYC, partly because I was now newly married with a child and partly because of the geographical distance and partly because times had radically changed. His work always had a sentimental / nostalgic element to it… “last boat whistling in the last harbor” … “dim faded far away” and I think when he returned to the United States he felt able to wallow in his historical interests like the Johnson family and the myths and legends of the Old West.

What was the main demographic for Mayfair? I’m assuming it was 18 – 45 year old men from all backgrounds, but did you find that there was a much wider audience than that?

I think the audience ranged from 16 to 96, and included any man who liked looking at girls with no clothes on.

What do you feel Burroughs’ views on pornography and the world of avante-garde art were?

William hated censorship of any kind. As a homosexual he obviously preferred the stimulus of gay pornography (although I never saw him look at any, and there was never any overt gay activity in his apartment while I was there, apart from Ian Sommerville bursting into tears because his boyfriend had left him). But William never expressed any adverse opinions about the pictures or sexual articles in Mayfair. As far as avant-garde art was concerned, he was right at the leading edge. He and the artist Brion Gysin were working on a way of turning words into art.

As a noted writer of manuals and self-help guides on sex, what is your opinion of Burroughs’ view that Christian attitudes towards sex were the main thing holding back Science at that time, as he expressed in the interview you did with him in Penthouse in 1972?

I believe that narrow-mindedness of all kinds was holding back sexual and scientific progress, not necessarily Christian repressiveness. William wrote about sex openly, which is why The Naked Lunch was considered to be obscene when it was first published, and one of the main themes of my sex manuals was that sex should be discussed openly, especially between sex partners. I even wrote a Christian sex manual Love Thy Lover, Love Thy God which was commissioned by the American inspirational publishing house Pillar Books, but never published (although to be fair they paid me for it.) In those days, people did not have the vocabulary, either in words or emotions, to talk openly about sex, or to explain to their partners what they wanted and what they didn’t want. Teaching people to be articulate about their sexual needs and anxieties is one of the greatest gifts you can give them.

Do you feel that this is still true in the present day?

Less so, obviously, than in 1972. I like to think that the sex books I wrote were instrumental in helping society to be less repressed about sex. They certainly did so in Poland when they were first published there after the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989… I still get blushing Polish ladies coming up to me today to tell me that I taught them everything they know, but of course the great explosion in sexual communication came with the internet, when people could freely see images of sexual activities that excited them and aroused them, and could instantly and confidentially look up anything about which they were unsure.

You have said in interviews that Burroughs taught you to “pick up your typewriter and walk.” How did he influence you most as a writer?

He taught me most of all to live the story rather than write it… to be there as the action unfolds, and to forget about the sheet of paper in front of me (or the screen, these days.) William’s novels are full of smells and sounds and weather and all kinds of sensations that make the narrative feel real. I work very hard even now to make sure that I am El Hombre Invisible, the Invisible Man, and that once readers start one of my novels they forget that they are reading words on a page, and think that they are actually living the story. The other thing that always impressed me about William was his dialog, which is actually highly stylized but “sounds” when you read it as if it is how people really speak. He brings over an enormous amount of character in his dialog and I always try to do the same. In fact I work on my dialog relentlessly, rewriting it again and again until it hits exactly the right note.

In what ways is your early novel Rules of Duel influenced by Burroughs?

Rules of Duel is written in the style that William and Brion devised called “intersection writing”. This means that the writer follows factual coincidences and synonyms as if they are a kind of code. It is an entertainment more than a mystical way of expressing yourself. I also used William’s method of cutting up sentences so that they are more than a mystical kind of code. This means that William hits exactly the right note.

Could you summarize the method you used to write Rules of Duel and the overall story for those who have not been able to read it yet?

I wrote most of Rules of Duel in the evenings after work, but I would take pages around to William’s apartment for him to read and comment on. It is set in London in the late 1960s and the hero is a newspaper reporter who suspects that central government is trying to introduce some repressive plan to control everybody in the capital. When it was finished I showed it to Wolf Mankowitz the film director and he loved it, and (if you don’t mind me being big-headed) called it a “psychedelic masterpiece.” “Psychedelic” — how’s that for dating it? Unfortunately he thought that it was probably unfilmable. William used one or two sentences from Rules of Duel in Nova Express, and he also said that he had used some in The Ticket That Exploded but I have never been able to find any in that particular book of his.

How close would you say you and William became during his time in London? It sounds as if you saw him pretty regularly.

I suppose I went round to see him about two or three times a month. We would either have a meal in his apartment or else we would go out to a restaurant in Knightsbridge or Covent Garden, usually with other friends of his such as the film director Antony Balch and Allen Ginsberg and Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin. We talked about all kinds of stuff, some of it totally inconsequential, like how much he hated Jacques Tati movies because he couldn’t stand clumsiness and incompetence — some of it serious like the politics of mind control or Scientology (which was a great new interest of his at the time.) He had a dry, droning voice and the appearance of a bank manager from the mid-West, but he could be incredibly funny and irreverent and we had some really good evenings and days together.

I drove him and Antony Balch down to the Scientology Center at Saint Hill in East Grinstead so that he could have a snoop around. We adopted the names of William Lee and Graham Thomas, and Antony made an 8mm movie of our visit which he later intercut with old black-and-white movies. I don’t know who has a copy of this film now but I would love to see it again.

Somewhere I have a photograph taken by Antony that day but it was temporarily buried during my move to Ireland. William and I talked a lot about the whole Rules of Duel concept, which was to educate young people, help them to become literate — but, more than literate, to give them their own language which would not only give them more control of their own lives in an increasingly technological world, but free them from the baneful influence of politicians and old farts. In some ways, much of that has come to pass in the internet age.

I have a picture in my mind’s eye of the evening at Duke Street when Alex Trocchi came to visit and brought William a swordstick. Nobody who has seen movies and photographs of William looking less than animated can imagine what it was like to see him dancing around his apartment with this sword, swinging it dangerously from side to side and shouting, “Ho, there, you ruffians!”

You have said that you have been reading Gysin’s book The Process for the last 25 years. Burroughs also made a point of calling it one of his favorite books of all time. What is it about The Process that keeps you coming back to it?

The Process is magical. The writing is so visual and so tactile that sometimes I have to re-read a sentence twice to work out how it was done. It is far too druggy and plotless to read all the way through. The first two chapters are enough. To quote: “I joggle the miniature matchbox I hold in my hand and these masterpiece matches in here chuckle back what always has sounded to me like a word but a word which I cannot quite catch. It could be a rattling Arabic word but my grasp of Arabic is not all that good and no one, not even Hamid, will tell me what the matches say to the box.” Technically, “chuckle” is such a brilliant word to use for matches in a box. And there are dozens of passages like that.

What was it about Brion Gysin do you think so fascinated Burroughs? At one point he said that Gysin was the only man he ever really respected.

Brion was probably the laziest man in the world but he had abundant talent as a writer and an artist and he was prepared to consider anything to express how he felt. No conceptual boundaries.

How close were you with Brion Gysin?

Not very. I met him a few times and he signed his book for me, and we got on well. We had a hilarious evening at a restaurant full of Middle Eastern gentlemen when William got very drunk and started shouting that we should bomb the Ay-rabs. Brion and I had to remove him with apologies to our fellow diners and take him home.

Is there anything about Burroughs and his work that you think people, even fans, misunderstand?

Maybe this is apparent to other people, too, but William told me one evening that he felt as if he had never lived the life he was supposed to live, and that somehow he had ended up as an outsider on the edge of his own existence. This could well have been brought on by the displaced feeling he had when he was living in London, but throughout his work there is always an underlying sense of lives that never worked out… of opportunities missed or squandered. There is such strong nostalgia, too, even for places that he never visited. Overall, I think he felt that nobody else could see the world the way he saw it, or think the thoughts that he was capable of thinking, and sometimes I think that made him feel desperately detached. That is what Rules of Duel is all about, that feeling of alienation in London in the late 1960s, that feeling that officialdom is always watching you and out to get you. That’s why I thought it so appropriate to see it published today, when we are back to heavy-handed state control and surveillance.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

One of the great things about the Naked Lunch celebration in Paris was wondering whom you might bump into on any given day. At the Beat Hotel ceremony, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Roy Pennington and his brother Jim. Roy and I have been in and out of contact for quite a few years. I bought a small collection of My Own Mags from him on eBay. After I bought the mags, I found out that Roy was the publisher of Burroughs’ Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973 as listed in M&M) and the Urgency Press Rip-Off of Time (1972). This led to a correspondence that progressed in fits and starts.

Published in the early 1970s, these bootlegs strike me as precursors to what would become a burgeoning punk zine scene by 1974-1975. Of course, Burroughs was one of the Godfathers of Punk. Many people realize that Burroughs influenced the musicians, like Lou Reed, Blondie, and Television, but I think fewer people are aware that Burroughs was a major influence for the writers who covered punk and the editors who published punk fanzines. That said, these writers and editors were also inspired by the little magazines that featured Burroughs. Take a look at Punk or Search and Destroy. I see a lot of My Own Mag and Fuck You in them. Pennington’s publications, done in a true DIY spirit, provide a bridge from the mimeo scene of the 1960s to the punk zines of the mid-1970s.

Pennington’s two Burroughs publications very much invoke a particular time and place in Great Britain: the area of Brighton and Hove in the early 1970s. These two towns used to be “a haven for bookshops,” and an oasis of alternative culture in Britain. I have described elsewhere how a bookstore can serve as the center of a community and that was the case around Sussex University in Brighton. The two bookstores in question were Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop and John Kieffer and Richard Cupidi’s The Public House Bookshop. Pennington’s publications would not have been possible without both bookstores. I know bits and pieces about these two stores but a thread on Michael Nimmo’s blog A Haven for Bookshops really captures the spirit of the community that surrounded these two bookshops. Pennington’s books come out this heady atmosphere.

In talking to Roy in Paris, I asked him if I could publish a revised version of a letter to another book collector he sent me years ago that detailed the history surrounding the publication of The Mayfair Academy Series More or Less. He agreed and the edited letter is available on RealityStudio. Roy also allowed us to reprint his essay on Burroughs (“Some Disparate Mentionables“) that appeared in the Appendix to The Mayfair Academy Series. The essay captures the youthful enthusiasm that surrounded Burroughs’ work among university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Burroughs’ writing puzzled and astounded readers and thus inspired young admirers to become young publishers. This scenario occurred numerous times from the late 1950s to the present day.

Pennington’s publications are some of the more interesting and appealing A-items of Burroughs’ entire bibliography. The Mayfair Academy Series More or Less and The Urgency Press Rip-Off of Time highlight the fact that given the time and the inclination anybody can become a publisher. This is alternative publishing miles away from the mainstream press. It is rough, it is raw, and it is truly wonderful, inspiring stuff.

Letter from Roy Pennington on Mayfair Academy Series More or Less

Dear ____:

Here is the Mayfair Academy Series More or Less; because the original has coloured pages, the photocopy is not perfect. Also enclosed is a photo I took when I visited Burroughs in his flat in London [8 Duke St., St. James] in 1973 after I had done the “book.” This was the only time I had ever met him and we had a long talk. He interviewed me, really, asking “What do you young people want to read these days?” He was at the time doing The Job and not the later more “readable”, “narrative” stuff, e.g. The Dead Roads trilogy. Burroughs also asked, “Why do you say I am an arch-materialist?” I had rambled on about this in the little essay at the end of the Academy Series [republished here at RealityStudio]. But we did not get very far with this: I was petrified and bewildered to be there. I just wish, in retrospect, that I had gone through that rambling essay “Some Disparate Mentionables” with him, word by word. This was after all a by-product of an MA thesis I had just completed at Sussex University on self-referentiality. I think I offered Burroughs compensation for the bootleg, and the offer was declined. I cannot remember much more about the evening as he plied me with scotch.

Anyway, here is some background to the Academy Series:

I had just graduated from University and had some time on my hands (and some speed in my pocket). There was a local bookshop, which also did printing in Sussex called The Unicorn Bookshop, run by Bill Butler. Burroughs’ Ali’s Smile, published by Unicorn Bookshop, proved popular, and Butler encouraged me with my earlier Urgency Press Rip-off publications. My brother Jim of Aloes Press in London (who published The White Subway) also helped. I noticed the Mayfair magazine stuff, and I decided to collect them into one publication. Collecting the articles required going to the British Library and getting all the back copies of Mayfair and photocopying them. This proved a curious episode as I needed my philosophy tutor to provide a letter of introduction so I could access the magazines as they were kept in the restricted-access erotica archive. So I sat there, doing the “academic” research with this pile of skin-mags on the desk surrounded at the other tables by the slightly more erudite researchers.

I then typed the photocopied Burroughs Bulletins onto litho-plates. This explains the limited print run of 650 as the platen wore out. The press was located upstairs at 50 Gloucester Road, the address of Unicorn Bookshop. Mike Hughes, Butler’s partner, operated the machine, but I did the typing on an IBM Golf at a flat in Hove and took the stencils over to Bill in Brighton. After printing, I then collated the piles of pages in my flat with friends and got them stapled and trimmed back at Unicorn Bookshop. The coloured paper was a consequence of what stock Bill Butler had left lying around the store.

The illustrators were a couple of friends who etched (drew) directly onto the plates, plus my filling in spaces with the Mayan glyphs. I cannot remember where I copied the glyphs from other than a reference to Public House (on page 30), which was another bookshop run by Richard Cupidi who had previously worked with Butler and set up a rival bookshop specializing in Native American material. Glyphs were chosen because they are mentioned in some of the Bulletins.

On reflection, I think Richard Mahoney was too stoned to do any illustrations. I got another person to fill his space (p. 87). Personally I was worried about page 87 as it had little relevance to any of the Bulletins, and it represented a woman masturbating in a prison cell. These fears were not unfounded as Butler and Unicorn Press had obscenity issues with the authorities stemming from J.G. Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. Mahoney’s name remains in the Table of Contents since those off-set plates were completed (deletions are difficult) before he proved unable to complete his illustrations. Caroline did all the others (p. 9, 20, 96, 104). She was an artist / jeweller in the area who was living in the basement. She was annoyed with me when I added bits to her work.

The cover was just a collage of stuff cut out from Mayfair. For example, the photo of Burroughs on the cover was from Mayfair, and I think, was used for each Bulletin. The young man taking his knickers off must have come from another mag. There is not any publication date in the book, but the earliest version I have is from November 1972. Copies were 30p. Cheap, I tried to make up the difference by charging delivery to London, but was told off by Compendium Books.

Back copies of the original Mayfair magazines are actually still available on the used magazine / book market. I looked for them as I thought the Scientology bulletins were worth collecting together as I am not sure they have re-appeared subsequently in his books.

It’s been a pleasure to write this down, as it brings back fond memories of a time when I had the energy to get excited about language and literature and do something. I do not have that energy or excitement any more. It also caused me to re-read my own bit in the Mayfair Academy, which I found excruciatingly embarrassing and naïve in bits, but quite funny elsewhere. Incidentally, the last three lines on p. 103 come from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book La Prose du Monde. These lines are the opening sentence of that text, which I studied (and translated from French) for my Master’s degree in Phenomenology of Language. It is also embarrassing to see again how I misspelled Academy. Somewhere in my pile of rubbish, I have the delivery notes for all those who I sent copies to (mainly bookshops), but I cannot find it.

Roy Pennington

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

On the flipside of the men’s magazine is the fashion magazine. The porno industry represents the seedy underbelly of the seemingly glamorous fashion industry. Both worlds expressed an interest in the Beats in the 1950s and 1960s. In her landmark memoir, Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend when On the Road was published, describes how she first came into contact with the image of Kerouac through the pages of Mademoiselle. The magazine printed a picture of Kerouac that was then used in several print advertisements for On the Road. The ad is reprinted in Matt Theado’s The Beats: A Literary Reference. If you are going to get Johnson’s book, go get Theado’s as well. It is a treasure trove of source material on the Beats: reprints of manuscripts, letters, magazine articles and book reviews.

Mademoiselle separated itself from the competition by marketing itself to a collegiate audience. Until November 2001, scores of young women learned about what was new in fashion, art, and culture in the pages of Mademoiselle. On reading about Kerouac and the Beats in its pages, Johnson writes, “Thus several thousand young women between fourteen and twenty-five were given a map to a revolution.” This played into the deepest fears of Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. Surely some of those girls who flocked to North Beach and the Village clutching their Mademoiselles and On the Roads later found themselves in the pages of Swank. There are lots of casualties in a revolution, sexual or otherwise. Minor Characters makes this clear as does Hettie Jones’ How I Became Hettie Jones and Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life As A Woman.

Mademoiselle jumped on the Beat bandwagon early. In the mid-1950s, the magazine was publishing poems by Gregory Corso from The Vestal Lady of the Brattle, before City Lights published Gasoline. The Beats continued to be regular fodder for Mademoiselle once the Beats became mainstream news. Mademoiselle‘s early discovery of Corso is not as surprising as it seems. There is a long tradition of fashion magazines latching on to avant-garde / countercultural movements, particularly in the realm of art. This partnership became very public when the Surrealists hit American shores in the 1930s and 1940s. Dali and his art appeared in fashion magazines. Dali even designed a shop window for Bonwit Teller department store. A Dada-cum-Surrealist like Man Ray blurred the lines between high art and high fashion. Clearly this cross-pollination had been an aspect of modern art long before photographer Cecil Beaton famously posed models in front of Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm for Vogue in 1951. Pop Art made such distinctions a joke. In a fashion shoot for Life, a Warhol screen test of Ivy Nicholson was projected on her as she modeled the latest “Underground Clothes.”

The world of fashion (and later the world of art) is / was driven by the shock of the new. In the 1950s, the Beats were new. A literary avant-garde to be exploited. Yet the Beats gave as good as they got. A fashion mag, like Mademoiselle, was a source of income. Ginsberg, the publicist for the Beats, played all the angles to milk the squares for cash. Gregory Corso was a master of the practice. In letters from the mid-1950s, Corso expresses his amazement that he conned Mademoiselle for $25 for his poems. In a letter from late 1959, Burroughs writes Ginsberg about just how welcome the check for his contribution to Mademoiselle was. In the 1950s, twenty-five dollars was easily a month’s rent.

Ginsberg got Burroughs into the pages of the January 1960 issue of Mademoiselle. The theme of the article and the magazine as a whole was a compendium of the young stars of tomorrow commenting on the dawning of a new decade. The symposium in which Burroughs appears is entitled “Quo Vadis” and was billed as “7 Young Voices Speak Up to the 60s.” The presentation of Burroughs’ as a young voice representative of his generation is therefore an example of Ginsberg successfully putting one over on the mainstream media. Burroughs was far from young (he was 45 at the time), but he was new. I would guess that Ginsberg sold him to Mademoiselle on the basis of his appearance in the November 30, 1959 issue of Life. In “The Only Rebellion in Town,” Paul O’Neil lambasts the Beats, but Burroughs comes out of it rather well. His talent as an author is grudgingly acknowledged. It is a case of hedging your bets about that in which you have absolutely no understanding. You do not want to look the fool later on. It probably helped that Burroughs was in Paris and that Naked Lunch was published there. At the time, Paris was the center of fashion. One of the shifts of the Sixties would be the displacement of Paris from that pedestal.

Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lorraine Hainsberry, Christopher Logue, Norman Podhoretz, Francois Truffaut and John Wain comprised the panel of young voices. Logue, Podhoretz, and Wain all had ties to the Beats. Logue was a member of the Merlin Group who discovered Samuel Beckett and worked with Olympia Press to print Beckett, Genet, and others as well as original dirty books written by Merlin members. Podhoretz wrote one of the most famous attacks on the Beats, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” for Partisan Review in the Spring of 1958. Podhoretz was a classmate of Ginsberg at Columbia and, no doubt, his conclusions in that article stem from his intimate knowledge of the events surrounding Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs from 1944 to 1949 at the University. Wain was a key member of the Angry Young Men in England. Wain appeared in a joint anthology of the Beats and the Angries published by Citadel Press in 1958 in which Burroughs appeared under the name William Lee.

It is a remarkable collection of individuals, but Burroughs stands out. Given that in January 1960 few people in the United States could actually get a hold of anything by Burroughs in print, this piece in Mademoiselle might have been many readers’ first encounter with Burroughs’ writing. Mademoiselle printed a picture of Burroughs in the page providing biographies of the panel. He is the only one so pictured. This highlights what a man of mystery he was at the time. He was notorious as the picture makes clear. The word “danger” — printed on a fence — looms ominously behind him. Life provided the back story and the first photographs; Mademoiselle provided a text.

And what a text (posted here in its entirety). Burroughs’ contribution leads off the symposium. Although Gysin had discovered the cut-up by January 1960, Burroughs does not utilize it here. This is Burroughs in pure carny mode a la the Atrophied Preface and the Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness. Young female readers, like Joyce Johnson, must have been left scratching their heads. The piece is full of drug references, such as China Boy and yen pox. The trope of horse racing taps into drug slang for heroin. Ginsberg’s piece builds off all this hip drug jargon. When asked about the Sixties, he opens by writing, “Everybody should get high for the next ten years.” Burroughs predicted a decade of mass consumerism and drug use, which was not far off the mark. Add to this Ginsberg’s call to “let’s blow up America — a false America’s been getting in the way of realization of Beauty — let’s all get high on the Soul” and you have a pretty good idea of what to expect in the decade ahead.

So the future of the 1960s was clearly laid out in the dying embers of the 1950s. The Silent Decade was far from it, and the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit was wearing Day-Glo underwear. Peace and love. Sex and drugs. Youth and Revolution. And where was this all this going to take place. A reader of Mademoiselle knew that, too. The University of California at Berkeley. What became Ground Zero for student revolt was the featured University in the Colleges and Careers section. Things may have been a little sleepy there in January 1960, but change was in the air. How did Mademoiselle know? Joan Didion told them. She wrote the article on Berkeley. She oughta know. She went on to write the book on the Sixties twice: The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Not much better has been written on the subject. Pick up a copy if you can. 

Cable: “What do you want in the next decade for world, not self”

Reply:

Chere Mademoiselle:

I am placed by you in the otherworldly, selfless and detached position of a losing better [sic] before and/or after the race. I have nothing to lose. I won’t be there for the finish. Safe in Not-Self, I firmly extol the virtues of every horse until starting time: High Metal (carrying a lot of weight): Conversion and Peace. Houses of flexible, translucent but decently opaque — in the right places — plastic, all hues, inflatable and deflatable, for the Pause That Refreshes, Helicopters and every kind of motor vehicle. Gadgets, contrivances in dazzling number and variety, all mute and odorless. Soft sidewalks, floors, steps. Stratosphere Purple has become a household word.

China Boy (good mud runner): Too little and too lately known, has developed a formidable boardinghouse reach with an Old China Hand. Is it fragile? Will it break? The Colonial Dames are invited to drink the bitter tea of General Yen. (Yen means opium need, or perhaps just plain need. Yen pox is opium ash taken with hot tea, if any) Will they accept? He shrugged and reached for his yen pox, and China Boy kicked his brains out at the first hurdle and re-regulated him to his Club Seat in Not-Self.

Bet my last Non-Self coupon on North Sea Bubble (unknown stable): Came from nowhere in the Stretch and crossed the Finish Line with a burst of silent fireworks. I could not hear the cheers. My ears stopped with dust, sealing wax, losing stratosphere tickets in Parimutuel Purple and other Not-Self debris, which swept across the track in a black wave of protest…

Photo Finish. Foul Claimed. The Judges’ Box is empty. Outraged spectators forced the winning horse to eat his jockey, establishing an ominous precedent, inviting carnivorous disaster into Green Pastures.  

Please Accept My Most Distinguished Sentiments.

Official in Absentia

William Seward Burroughs

p.s. The Sacred Geese are equipped with outboard marine motors.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Q: What is with all the men’s magazines?

A: Oh, I read them for the articles.

Really? In part. Take exhibit A: the July 1961 issue of Swank. For anybody interested in the textual history of Naked Lunch, this issue proves to be very interesting. Burroughs contributes “The Word,” “a first draft of a section of [Naked Lunch] and contains material that has never been published before — given to Swank by poet Allen Ginsberg.” In the introduction to the piece, John Fles, a former editor at Chicago Review during the Naked Lunch scandal in 1958, writes “The Word is the striptease the author does for you with the snake of language. The Word — this is just a thin slice of a 60pp unpub’d ms. — is the précis of all of Naked Lunch…” In fact, this piece of The Word manuscript appears in cannibalized form in the Atrophied Preface section of the Olympia Press and Grove Press Naked Lunch. The prefaces of the Grove and Olympia printings differ from each other and differ from this selection in Swank. In fact, this piece from Swank does not directly correspond with the version of “Word” that was published in Interzone.

In July of 1961, Naked Lunch had yet to be published by Grove. The book was, in certain circles, highly anticipated and expected at any moment. A note attached to Fles’ Introduction states that publication was expected in April or May of 1961. The book was not officially released until November 20, 1962, over a year later. One reason for the delay was the expected (and rightly so) obscenity trial following the novel’s publication. Barney Rosset and Grove Press were waiting until the time was right to defend the novel in the courts and the court of public opinion. The trials surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer set the stage. The potential obscenity trial surrounding Floating Bear 9 which published “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in June 1961 further put matters on hold. Every magazine appearance and review relating to Naked Lunch was potential material for the trial, so even this issue of Swank can be viewed as an exhibit for the defense of the novel.

This section of “The Word” coupled with Fles’ introduction stands alongside the more obvious “Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness” and “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” as a document that provides a statement of purpose for the seemingly immoral and inexplicable Naked Lunch. “The Word” is described as a “striptease” and a “précis.” It is an unveiling, a revealing of the mysteries of the novel. In it, Burroughs lays the text bare in his own trademark style. He shows his hand. I have written elsewhere about how the prospect of an obscenity trial dictated critical and readerly approaches to the novel that continue to be in force to this day. The peek into the flesh of Naked Lunch that Burroughs allows in Word becomes something of a complete revelation in the Deposition. Or does it? Elsewhere, I have also discussed how these statements of purpose are a drain on the power of the novel, and can be considered a con of sorts. Such ideas are by no means original to me or to critics, like Jennie Skerl or Robin Lydenberg, who made similar statements in William Burroughs: At the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989. There were concerns about the literary cost entailed in defending Naked Lunch back in the 1960s.

Take “Sigma Project No. 13,” the minutes from the inaugural meeting of John Calder’s Writers Night at Better Books in November 1964 that included Peter Brook, John Arden, and Adrian Mitchell discussing The Theatre and Its Future. This single mimeographed sheet was a supplement to the Moving Times, a rather nebulous newspaper / little magazine project of Burroughs’ that appeared in My Own Mag as well as in a broadside poster issued by the Sigma Project as Project No. 1. The minutes state, 

How much longer must we wait before it dawns on us that the world of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is far more real and even at its most phantasmagoric, more to the point than this blind, self-perpetuating, hysterical delusion we call modern civilization.

The fact that we can allow ourselves again and again to be sidetracked into “seriously” discussing whether Burroughs’ book is “obscene” or “art” or anything else underscores how deeply we are immersed in our delusion and just how widely we have missed the point he is making.

Our tactics for defending its publication must surely be relative to the nature of the resistance it engenders and, if they are to be effective, must break entirely with the terms in which that resistance in (sic) expressed. They must be an OUTFLANKING.

The time is NOW. The climate is changing. Let us indulge no longer in the kind of mutual masturbation that will allow the Times Cultural Consensate to show your benevolent faces (incolour) lined up behind Mr. Wesker’s record player as is pumps Bach’s 42nd concerto for Wind, Culture and Community down the coal-mines of the Provinces.

Calder published Naked Lunch in the United Kingdom in 1964 so a similar process of defense to Grove’s was in progress at the time of this meeting. Champions of Naked Lunch were offended by all the various stripteases surrounding Naked Lunch. Some things should be left to the imagination.

Clearly, the July 1961 issue of Swank proves of interest to those immersed in Burroughs on several levels. This issue advertised itself as “the search for sex in hipdom’s high society.” Here are articles on jazz (Charles Parker), blues (Billie Holiday), the French, modern art, and beatniks. Jonas Mekas, the critical voice of underground cinema, contributes an article entitled “The Honest Art of Hollywood.” Tuli Kupferberg, who later gained fame as a member of the Fugs, writes an article. Check out Tuli’s staple bound treasures from around 1961/1962, Yeah and Birth, if you get a chance. They are a sign of the times around the corner. Similarly, the gumbo of obsessions that boiled over later in the decade is present in this issue of Swank.

I mentioned in an earlier post that a collection of men’s magazines is an inexpensive way to collect the writers of the Beat Generation. As you can see from this issue of Swank, such a collection is very informative as well. The multifaceted role of sex in the avant-garde and counterculture is a field that has been turned over by scholars for years, but there is much left to uncover. Publishers, like Taschen, have issued multiple volumes on the history of men’s magazines, but for the most part these books reproduce images rather than study them. Stephen Gertz’s book, Dope Menace, provides a similar look into elements of sleaze in drugstore paperbacks. Yet his essay introducing the book is worth a close look as well and opens the door to future scholarly attention. Gertz’s book has gotten quite a bit of notice in the media. At last count, two dozen University libraries have purchased the book, and Gertz has been asked to lecture on the subject at the University level.

And then there are the photos. The recent death of Betty Page brings to the forefront that many images from men’s magazines in the 1950s and 1960s have become iconic. Many people appreciate them as art. Many enjoy their comic elements, just as many others despise them. For better or worse, the men’s magazines of the post-WWII era are a major part of the story of not just the sexual revolution but the myriad other revolutions occurring after Hiroshima. As a brief scan of these magazine covers related to Kerouac and Burroughs reveals, much has changed in the presentation of sex since the 1950s and 1960s, but much has remained the same. The story of the sexual revolution is still in the act of being told. Whether you are telling a cautionary or celebratory tale, a close look at the photos and articles of men’s magazines are an essential part of the history.

William Burroughs in Swank

“The Word”
Swank
(Front cover)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

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“The Word”
Swank
(Introduction by John Fles)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

“The Word”
Swank
(Burroughs text, page 1)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

“The Word”
Swank
(Burroughs text, page 2)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

This list is by no means comprehensive, although I attempted to make it as complete as possible. I combed through Maynard & Miles and Eric Shoaf’s Checklist marking down all the men’s magazines with William Burroughs fiction, essays, or interviews. I took adult men’s magazines to be glossy magazines with a mixture of nude pictorials, fiction, and lifestyle articles. Basically, they are skin or porno mags; be it girlie or gay.

The key element to this list is the glossy Time / Life magazine format mixed with the nude photos. As a result, the Mayfair Academy Rip-off of 1973 did not make the list although this publication would be a nice addition to a Beat / men’s magazine collection and is a simple way to get a hold of the many Mayfair articles in one place. I did not include Olympia Magazine or the later issues of Evergreen Review (especially the issues of the late 1960s) which flirt with the men’s magazine format but remain literary magazines at heart. I also listed gay magazines (a men’s magazine from a different bent if you will), most notably Playgirl, to show the changing ways Burroughs’ image and works could be utilized. In some cases, I just was not sure if the magazine was in fact a glossy men’s magazine at all. I listed Suck, National Screw, and Blueboy, for example. National Screw started as a newspaper tabloid format like an underground sex paper, but morphed into a glossy after a couple of issues. I know little about Suck and Blueboy but they clearly are sex-oriented magazines and they tell an interesting story about Burroughs so I included them. Any additions to this list would be greatly appreciated as well as a brief write up describing its contents both Burroughs related and otherwise.

William Burroughs in Wildcat Adventures

Excerpt from Junkie
Man’s Wildcat Adventures
(Front Cover)
Volume 1, No. 1, pp 23-25, 47, 55-72. New York: June 1959 (35 cents)

Excerpt from Junkie
Man’s Wildcat Adventures
(First Page of Burroughs Text)
Volume 1, No. 1, pp 23-25, 47, 55-72. New York: June 1959 (35 cents)

William Burroughs in Swank

“The Word”
Swank
(Front cover)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

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“The Word”
Swank
(Introduction by John Fles)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

“The Word”
Swank
(Burroughs text, page 1)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

“The Word”
Swank
(Burroughs text, page 2)
Vol. 8, no. 3: 51-55. New York: July 1961 (50 cents).

William Burroughs in Mayfair

“Interview” and “The Future of Sex and Drugs”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 1)
Mayfair
Vol. 2, No. 10, pp 11-15. London: October 1967

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“The Engram Theory”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 2)
Mayfair
Vol. 2, No. 11, pp 28-31. London: November 1967

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“Where’s Our Killer Whistle?”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 3)
Mayfair
Vol. 2, No. 12, pp 54-56. London: December 1967

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“Scientology Revisited”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 4)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 1, pp 29-31. London: January 1968

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“The Last Broadcast”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 5)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 2, pp 28-29. London: February 1968

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“By Far The Most Efficient and Precise Language We Possess is the Common Cold”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 6)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 3, 54-56. London: March 1968

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“The Fire Breaks Out”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 7)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 4, pp 32-34. London: April 1968

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“In That Year of 1969, Astonished Motorists Were Hustled at Random into the Death Cells for Parking Offenses”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 8)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 5, pp 54-55. London: May 1968

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“Switch On and Be Your Own Hero”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 9)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 6, 52-54. London: June 1968

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“The Academy’s Ultimate Offer — Immunity to Death”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 10)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 7, 52-54. London: July 1968

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“Do You Remember Tomorrow?”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 11)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 8, pp. 28-29. London: August 1968

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“Oh God, Get Me Out of This!”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 12)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 32-34. London: September 1968

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“Wind Die You Die We Die”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 13)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 10, pp 52-53, 62. London: October 1968

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“Man, You Voted for a Goddam Ape”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 14)
Mayfair
Vol. 3, No. 12, pp 52-54. London: December 1968

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“Rally Around the Secrets, Boys”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 15)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 1, pp 52-54. London: January 1969

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“Infiltration”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 16)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 2, pp 52-53. London: February 1969

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“The Brain Grinders”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 17)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 4, pp 32-34. London: April 1969

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“I’m Scared, I’m Scared, I’m Not”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 18)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 5, pp 52-54. London: May 1969

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“The Final Crusade of the Veteran Warriors”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 19)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 6, pp 52-54, 56, 58. London: June 1969

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“The Voracious Aliens”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 20)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 8, 32-34. London: August 1969

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“Days of Great Luxury Are Coming Back”
(The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 21)
Mayfair
Vol. 4, No. 9, 54-56. London: September 1969

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“My Challenge to Scientology”
Mayfair
Vol. 5, No. 1. London: January 1970

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“The Transplant Apocalypse”
Mayfair
Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 32-33. London: February 1970

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“Without Your Name, Who Are You?”
Mayfair
Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 52-54. London: March 1970

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“And a Final Word From William Burroughs”
Mayfair
Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 36. London: June 1970

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“D.E. My Super Efficiency System”
Mayfair
Vol. 5, No. 7, pp. 52-54. London: July 1970

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“Twilights Last Gleamings”
Mayfair
Vol. 5, No. 12, pp 61-62. London: December 1970

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Mayfair Academy (More or Less)
Urgency Press Rip Off, 1973
Contains ten of the Burroughs “Academy Bulletins” from Mayfair

William Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill in National Screw

“Los Niños Locos”
National Screw
June 1977

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“Los Niños Locos”
National Screw
June 1977

“Day Is Done”
National Screw
August 1977

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“Day Is Done”
National Screw
August 1977

William Burroughs in Various Men’s Mags

“The Invisible Man” by Ann Morrissett
Rogue
September 1963

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“Prophet or Pornographer”
Jaguar
New York: January 1966. (Interview with Jaguar Staff)

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“Exterminator!”
King
pp 58-60. London: July 1966 (7s 6d)

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“Auf der Suche Nach Yage”
Privat Herrenmagazin
Zurich: November 1966

Not in M&M, Shoaf, or Schottlaender

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“O Say Can You See If Bently’s Who He Appears to Be?”
Cavalier
Vol 18, No. 12, pp 43, 57. New York: October 1968 (60 cents)

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“Discussion Playboy Panel: The Drug Revolution”
Playboy
17, No. 2, pp 53-74, 200-201. Chicago: February 1970 ($1.00)

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“William Burroughs: Mind Engineer”
Penthouse
6, No. 6, pp 37-40, 60. London: June 1971 (30p). (Interview with Graham Masterson and Andrew Rossabi)

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“The Penny Arcade Peep Show / The Wild Boys Smile”
Suck
5, pp 10, 15. Amsterdam: Summer 1971

“Blue Movie/Who Are These Boys?”
Suck
6, pp 15-16. Amsterdam: 1971

“William Burroughs Takes a Look at Sex Films”
Suck
6, p 15. Amsterdam: 1971

“William Burroughs ‘I’ve Noticed a Regrettable Vagueness in Accounts of Hallucinogenic Drugs. In Time I Think These Just Lead to a Sort of Dreamland State”
Penthouse
Vol. 3, No. 7, pp 44,46, 52. New York: March 1972. (reprint of June 1971 Interview)

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“Face to Face with the Goat God”
Oui
2, No. 8, pp 68, 92, 94. Chicago: August 1973

Download Burroughs Text

Download Burroughs Interview

“What’s Your Worst Nightmare?” (Response to a Questionnaire)
National Screw
December 1976.

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“California Men”
In Touch
Jan-Feb 1977.

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“First Meetings: One Dozen Memories from the Files of William Burroughs”
National Screw
April 1977. Taken from discussions with Victor Bockris

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“My Life in Orgone Boxes”
Oui
October 1977

“My Life in Orgone Boxes”
Oui
October 1977

“The Health Officer”
Club
October 1977

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“Women: A Biological Mistake?”
Playgirl Magazine
March 1978

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“Dear Allen…Love Bill”
Blueboy
April 1978

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“Dinner with Andy and Bill”
Blueboy
October 1980. Interview with Warhol and Burroughs

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Jack Kerouac in Escapade and Mayfair

Kerouac on our “bloody mad history”
Escapade
February 1960

Kerouac on the Berlin Question
Escapade
April 1960

Kerouac on Zen
Escapade
October 1960

Kerouac on Jazz
Escapade
December 1960

Kerouac on Cody and the Road
Escapade
April 1961

Kerouac “In the Ring”
Mayfair
November 1968

The Beats in Swank

Various Beats
Swank
March 1961

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William S. Burroughs in Men’s Magazines

• Burroughs and Beats in Men’s Magazines: Introduction
• Burroughs in Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs Appearances in Adult Men’s Magazines
• William Burroughs’ Word in Swank