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Posts tagged Sleaze
The Gang Bangers
Aug 1st
The Gang Bangers front cover
by Sean Greene
Published in 1968 by Ram Classics
I’m at a loss to describe this book – this may well be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. It isn’t without its merits I suppose, but frankly I would hope that no one would seek out this book.
While The Gang Bangers promises an expose of devotees of “multiple sex,” instead it delivers a sickening stream of rape, incest, and pedophilia. Like so many other books of this ilk, “The Gang Bangers” recounts the therapy sessions of our narrator as he counsels a family of “deviates.” Usually the label “deviate” seems more comical than anything else. That’s not the case here.
This tale begins with an introduction to Barbara, the daughter. One by one we meet the son, the mother, and the father. While the descriptions of their early sexual experiences are designed to titillate, the non-stop stream of what we now recognize as child molestation is anything but erotic. This lurid tale reaches its apex when Mary, one of the family’s counselors, lets go of her professionalism and succumbs to her own carnal desires.
One of the few interesting moments in this book is when we meet the father. We read about his earliest sexual experiences which consist of incest and rape. Just as we think we’ve reached the sickening depth of human perversion, we learn the father has an even more shocking sexual secret – brace yourself for it – the father has had homosexual relations.
This book is a vivid reminder of how much society’s attitudes about child sexual abuse and homosexuality have changed since the 60s. It is difficult to reconcile how Greene can describe child sexual abuse in a matter of fact tone while reacting to the revelation of the father’s homosexual experiences with scorn: “The faggot father – the deviated daddy…” It was enough to make me cringe with nervous laughter.
Tacked onto the end of the preceeding family’s story is a short tale that has nothing to do with the preceeding storyline and isn’t enough to redeem the book. Were we simply presented with the three meat market women and their encounter with the butcher, this scene might have had erotic possibility (Let me just add if you’re going to do that with a sausage, for the love of God, have enough sense to use a condom.). Unfortunately, rather than simply presenting the tale of the erotic shenanigans of the meat market, Greene found it necessary to give us case histories of the three women and we are “treated” to more descriptions of rape and abuse.
Perversion and Beyond
Jul 12th
Perversion and Beyond front cover
by Robert H. Sheldon
Published in 1968 by Viceroy Books
I approached this book with a bit of trepidation and uncertainty that I’d be able to finish it. Not because I don’t like perversion. Those who know me well would vouch for my deep affinity for perversion. My uncertainty arose because the back cover features the word “incest” in large type and that is one of the few perversions I cannot abide by. However, only the first chapter is devoted to that topic and it is thankfully short.
I had hoped the book would take me for a shocking journey into the recesses of the depraved sexual mind. Instead, I journeyed back in time, specifically San Francisco in the 60s at the height of hippie culture.
Having been born after the 60s, and having parents who were anything but counterculture, it’s sometimes hard to relate to the turmoil and confusion of the Vietnam era. While I often hear people who lived through 60s talk about sweeping social revolutions and the incumbent fears that they produced, it usually comes across as self-aggrandizement. Old hippies can claim that they ended the war in Vietnam all they want, but they’re full of shit. I’m certain the Vietcong weren’t sitting around in their tunnels hoping that the next “Love In” was going to be the one that put the peace movement over the top.
But I digress. Good exploitation takes the worst fears of the middle class and puts them on garish display. By that standard, this book is an example great exploitation. (The implied bestiality didn’t hurt matters either.) Most of the tales follow the sexual exploits of outsiders, be they bikers, hippies, the young, blacks, and so on. I can imagine the various exploits of sex and drugs would make the average middle class Midwestern hausfrau flip her wig.
Readers with modern sensitivities may find themselves shocked by some of the racist language in the book. While I learned a new slur “ofay” (a slang term for crackers like myself), it’s not one that I’m likely to ever use. Oh, there’s a lots of uses of the “nigger” thrown in the mix too, and their use is particularly humorous when it’s used immediately before touting someone’s virtues.
If you want an accurate historical document of sexual outsiders, I can’t really recommend Perversion and Beyond, but if you want perversion and/or insight into the fears of the middle class during the end of the 60’s, you can’t go wrong with this book.
The Bisexuals
Jul 9th
The Bisexuals front cover
by George Bishop
Published in 1964 by Century Books
As I read The Bisexuals my depraved thoughts returned obsessively to one thing: typesetting. Why typesetting? Because The Bisexuals is so riddled with typesetting errors that I sometimes wished for a “Rosetta Stone” to help decipher it.
I debated rearranging this review so that it would be as poorly presented as some passages in the book. But since I’m the only one who would get the joke and no one else would realize the errors were intentional, I decided to spare everyone the torment that I suffered through in trying to decipher this book – there are limits to my sadistic streak.
Were this book printed overseas, I could have excused the typesetter on the theory that English wasn’t his native language. Unfortunately, in what is likely the only valid claim in the whole book, the title page says that the book was printed in the USA – shooting in the foot the notion that Americans used to take pride in their work.
Claiming to be “actual sex case histories collected by … the Western Adult Institute in its nationwide study on Sexual Incompatibility,” The Bisexuals crudely attempts to trace bisexuality through time and apply a “scientific” psychoanalytic approach to bisexual “deviation.” But beware, this book is to scientific inquiry what alchemy is to chemistry.
Still, there are a few good things about this book that kept me reading. For one, the prose flows easily and provides the requisite amount of salacious detail.
The chapter devoted to the Succubus was particularly interesting. Whether the tale of Carmen d’Angelo is historically true, I don’t know (a fast internet search turned up nothing), but the image of a repressed young man taking refuge in a cave and tying a leather thong to his cock to keep his sexual urges at bay was quite an entertaining yarn either way. Also interesting is the crime spree of Marcel Bonaventure (again, searching the internet turned up nothing). This passage proved un-arousing, but interesting all the same.
My favorite passage in the book is this quote credited to E. Burns Clarke (another likely fictitious source):
“An extreme form of this perversion (bisexuality) Burns Clarke continues, “is found when the woman watches a man have sexual intercourse with another woman and then, immediately following the orgasm, rushes to orally embrace his partially erect member, thus, in effect, performing the lesbian and heterosexual functions simultaneously by vicariously making love to the woman as well…”
How this man anticipated my fantasies several years before I was born, I don’t know. That he characterizes them as “an extreme form of this perversion” only serves to warm my little twisted heart.
Other highlights (or lowlights depending on your perspective) include bestiality, finger fetishism, and others.
Even though this book suffered from its poor printing quality and is an obvious work of fiction, I still enjoyed it and you may too.