Boyd McDonald (pornographer)

Life

McDonald was born in South Dakota. He attended Lake Preston, South Dakota High School, but did not graduate. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, he was admitted to Harvard and given a small scholarship. He was soon drafted into the Army. After discharge from the Army he returned to Harvard (Eliot House) and earned a degree in American history and literature.

He said that "of all the benefits I got from Harvard, I am most grateful for the opportunity it gave me, albeit unwittingly, to come out fast and thoroughly." Contrary to the usual beliefs about pre-Stonewall gay sex, and despite sodomy being a felony in Massachusetts, late-night gay parties were frequent. In his words, "these parties quickly turned into orgies." Many "straight" boys attended, including one year most of the football team. His "first serious lover" was a straight football player, met at a party/orgy. "When I was at Harvard, I was glad to be homosexual... I thought it was extraordinary and heterosexuality was ordinary and I was lucky to be chosen for this minor elite."

Late in his life, McDonald stated "I feel homosexuality is a gift, an advantage." He explained that the main advantage of homosexuality was the opportunities it provided for sexual encounters with many men, which promiscuity he endorsed and celebrated. He believed all men wanted these sexual encounters, even if they would not admit it to themselves. He was as contemptuous of monogamous gay couples as of straight ones, and opposed gay clones who were "determined to take homosexuality out of the toilet" and "introduced their lovers to Mom and Dad." He had his greatest contempt for hypocrites, those engaging in gay sex while publicly defending heterosexual monogamy.

Homosexuality "was for McDonald an obsession, as he often said." He never spoke of sex as "fun" or "playful"; "he wanted to return to sex its raw, unpretty power.... As a lover of facts about sex, Boyd was necessarily a hater of respectability.... To him, in fact, 'there was no such thing as an open homosexual. There are people who are openly gay, which is something else again.'" Society would not tolerate open, unashamed sexual acts between men.welfare

After graduation, he worked for Time, IBM, and several Wall Street firms. As he put it:

I was a pioneer high school dropout, leaving school to play badly in a bad traveling dance band. I was drafted into the Army, graduated from Harvard and came to New York, where my principal activity was taking advantage of the city's public sexual recreation facilities. As a sideline I worked as a hack writer at Time, Forbes, IBM and even more sordid companies.

Put differently, he was "downwardly mobile — in the eyes of society — educated and a whore, reveling in filth." Abandoning his traditional career constituted "saving his life." It was unbearable to him because it was "irredeemably corrupt," and the stress caused him to begin drinking. Pawning his suits caused him "exhilaration." Thenceforth, he had a horror of the slightest luxury or comfort and kept his possessions to a minimum, living primarily on donuts and coffee. He read The New Yorker regularly.

In 1973, while living on welfare in an Upper West Side SRO (for years before his death he was living in "Riverside Studios" at 342 West 71st St.), he founded his long-running zine STH or Straight to Hell, which consisted primarily of readers' submissions of their sexual experiences, together with Boyd's sexual or political commentary and single male pictures, reader-sent or from studios such as Old Reliable or Athletic Model Guild (always credited). He also published a number of anthologies of reader-contributed true sex histories.

In later years, diagnosed with a severe anxiety disorder, agoraphobic and obsessive compulsive, his horizons narrowed considerably. He saw few people. His activities were limited to what he could do in his room, which resembled a monk's cell: mail, telephone, television, and editing his publications. In 1992, he wrote in Lewd that:

As the years have gone by and it has become more difficult than it was in childhood to find men to molest me and perpetrate crimes against nature, I have come to love abusing myself more and more.

In a 1981 interview with The Advocate, he boasted that "recently I jacked off almost continuously for five days--except for when I went out for food."

McDonald died in September 1993, two months after completing his final book, Scum. The cause was "pneumococcal distress complicated by emphysema." All of the voluminous correspondence and papers in his room—many unpublished sex confessions—was discarded by his relatives.

McDonald was friends with a number of other gay pornographers or pro-sexual figures, such as David Hurles and Kenneth Anger.

Straight to Hell

The date that McDonald's zine Straight to Hell (ISSN 2473-4608) began publication is unknown; the earliest number known is issue 3, from 1973. At its onset, it was focused briefly on foreskin fetishism. Publication was irregular, and issues were not not always dated nor copyrighted, although sometimes an approximate date can be inferred from advertisements or news items mentioned; for example, issue 53 contains an ad for Cum, so it was about 1983. It was published (under McDonald's editorship) "from the early seventies through the mid-eighties".

McDonald edited and published STH from a series of transient furnished rooms in Manhattan, in one of which he died. He typed the stories, editing while he typed, in the sizes needed by the layout of STH; he was thus its compositor. Pages were mimeographed (by McDonald), later copied at a neighborhood shop; they were hand-assembled, folded, and stapled. McDonald himself did everything during most of its run, and his work has been compared with samizdat publishng. At its peak, it had a circulation of ten thousand, and provided him with a small amount of income, to be spent on male prostitutes. He moved his attention and energy to his series of STH compilation books (with titles such as, "Filth", "Cum", "Sex", and "Raunch"), and turned over the editorship of the original chapbook series to first Victor Weaver in the mid-1980s, then finally to Billy Miller in 1989. The latest issue published, as of 2017, was 68, edited by Miller.

STH was published with an ever-changing variety of subtitles, imitating the titles of "serious" publications:

The material for STH came from reader submissions, which were abundant. McDonald was a "genius" in "goading, pushing, fishing, pulling, begging, getting faggots to speak for themselves." He sent questionnaires to contributors, asking for more details: "Do you smell your clothes when you undress?" "Do you smell your asshole on your fingers?" "Did you make full use of the sexual allure of your boyhood?" "When you cum, how many squirts does it take?" "Did you [a stripper] toss your underpants to the men watching?" "Did any of them become so inspired by your act that they had sex [in the bar]?" He published the questionnaires and answers that were returned to him.

The reader submissions were coupled with McDonald's acerbic commentary on the hypocrisies of society and of celebrities, and advertisements for explicit gay pornography which no other magazine would touch. For example, an advertisement from Times Square Studios contains the picture of a naked, masturbating man, with the credit line "Official Photographer to STH" (the name of this official photographer is not given, as there was no "official photographer"). The studio described its photos of beefcake as "Superbly detailed anatomical studies. Ideal for the advanced medical student as well as the lay practitioner."

McDonald himself always described STH as a work of research, indeed a work of art. He spoke of its importance to future historians. STH, he claimed, told the story of what people were actually doing in "The Golden Age of American Cocksucking (1940–1980)". McDonald typically engaged in acerbic political commentary and cultural criticism, especially directed at the hypocrisy of those who are not fully accepting of their own desires, however perverted or taboo. He typically titled his contributors' stories to parody news items, so trenchantly that the editor's statement is made even before the author begins to speak: "Baptist Boys Do It, As It Were, In Church"; "Typical 'Straight' Admits Weakness for Friend's Tongue"; "Youth Leaves Damp Underpants for Host to Sniff", "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Armpit-Sniffing." Bad spelling and writing were deliberately not corrected:

Any hack writer can be coherent, but these are amateur writers and they put a lot of incoherent things in.... The letters I like are the ones that are pretty ragged. A lot of fears and flaws, failures. The three Fs.... Some of the guys try to organize them and make them quirkier and have little punch lines at the end. Little neat, O. Henry type stories.... I don't like them organized.

"He encouraged STH readers to read Ernest Hemingway and William Burroughs as models of direct, unadorned style. His ideal was the graffiti found in public toilets. He asserted, 'I find men who don't use punctuation are more fun in bed than those who do.'"

"The truth is the biggest turn-on", he wrote, and "the proper study of homosexuality is homosexuals" [ sic ]. "In the long run, the only thing that has any real class, or real dignity, or respectability or responsibility is the shameless truth." McDonald said that his mission was to replace pornography with smut, by which he meant to talk about sex that is truthful, idiosyncratic, and honest even about its own reason for being. Or as he put it elsewhere, "We articulate cocksucker values." However, though many used STH as masturbation material, "I am apparently one of the few men who doesn't", even though "I do beat my meat relentlessly."

McDonald often expressed his political views:

We do not advocate the overthrow of the American Government. Johnson and Nixon and Reagan, and their millions of followers, have always seen to that. They have South Americanized America.... We support the minority of American men who are decent, like Ramsey Clark, Ralph Nader and Daniel Ellsberg.

Ronnie and Nancy Reagan..., beneath their misleading smiles, have hearts of pig iron, which finds expression these days in bullying the minorities, the poor, the sick, the hungry, the old, and, for all I know, the lame, the halt, and the blind.

McDonald also had a philosophy:

"Straights" have a surface charm that comes from their membership in the overpowering sexual majority. This gives them a certain fearlessness that passes for masculinity. But at heart they are too timid and terrified of homosexuality to be of any real interest. Only men with balls dare to be different.

or as he puts it elsewhere: "Straight to Hell is not for the upward striving middle class but for guys who like to go down." ("Go down" is slang for kneeling so that one participant's mouth is at the level of the other participant's penis.)

Straight to Hell alluded in its title to straight men: it is the "straights" that are going to hell, for their hypocrisy.

McDonald celebrated homosexual promiscuity:

There have been several pious articles in both the "straight" and gay press recently about compulsive promiscuity. I suspect the authors of these articles to be jealous. It is usually suggested that people who are obsessed with sex seek "help". But it is not such gifted and well-functioning people who need help, but rather the sexually cold ones. They make a virtue of their fear, their coldness, and their ordinary, conventional attitude. I regard extreme and frequent sexual heat, and the obsessive, compulsive prowling of people who are seeking to relieve it, as admirable--as a gift--and far more enviable than the writing of those who profess to scorn it.

Contrary to their reputations, the real hot homosexuals who have sex in toilets and so forth are simply nicer people and more concerned, more caring, more loving, more affectionate, and friendlier than the prudes. The prudes pretend that they are the ones who are decent, and the ones in the toilet are indecent, but it’s just the other way around.

He had suggestions for improving male strip shows:

I wonder if any impresario in this branch of the theater has ever thought of just putting his boys on stage, one after another, and having them strip and play with themselves in silence instead of copying the traditional female format of dancing to music. If the boys would simply undress and play with their dicks and assholes, as they do at home alone, it would reduce the artistic interference of the theater and enhance both the audience's and the performer's experience of, respectively, voyeurism and exhibitionism.... Another gimmick that might enhance the presentation would be to have the boys, once naked, piss into a bucket onstage.... Finally, the strippers might sniff and lick the armpits of their T-shirts and the pouches of their underpants or jock straps when they remove them, or even sniff and lick their finger after rubbing it on their piss-holes or assholes, in this way demonstrating their allure.

He said that compared to adult movies, "Shakespeare and so on are kid stuff".

Celebrities

Boyd's main intention was to expose hypocrisy and let people know what male sex in this country really was. As such, he was particularly interested in celebrities, because attention was already being given to celebrities and their sexuality, along with their lies, would more rapidly achieve his goal. Many famous people appear in the pages of STH, some voluntarily, others not at all. Others appeared in Cruising the Movies. (Look at the history for March 2017 to see what was deleted.)

Legacy

Although primarily marketed and sold as pornography, McDonald saw his work as a kind of history of the homosexual experience. A Harvard graduate, McDonald compared his work favorably to the work of the great sex researchers, saying 'Compared to Meat, Kinsey is just spam'.

McDonald insisted that what he printed was not pornography, which for him meant the trite, self-conscious fantasies generated by guilt and timidity that were increasingly available in the 1970s and '80s through an increasingly commercial salacious press. He published The Truth, in a manner of a crusading journalist – a photographer without a camera – with the serious intention of assembling documentation of homosexual sex in its "classical" age, 1940–1980. The result is a kind of oral (as well as anal and genital) history, taking the reader into terrain at once strange and familiar: the unacknowledged corners of life where repression is not lifted, but exploded to bits. In contrast to pornographic fantasy, the meaning of every scene, scent and sensation in McDonald placed before his eager public is simply that, however American life has been represented in the official organs backed by business, state, and religion, such things actually do happen.... Through the sheer abundance of true stories, McDonald presents a picture of homosexual sex as a nearly universal male experience, in pointed contrast to the contemporary ideology of homosexuality as special identity. In the world of the S.T.H. book, every barracks shower is an orgy room; every Boy Scout jamboree is a festival of sexual initiation; every conservative politician and clergyman pays male hustlers for sex. Everything men do to bond or compete in sports, war and politics is a sublimation of, if not a substitute for, homosexual desire.

Comments by other writers

Boyd McDonald was mentioned as a prominent figure in the golden age of gay literature by Felice Picano, whose name, and only his, appears in the copyright statement of the 2015 reedition of Cruising the Movies. John Waters has also expressed his enthusiasm, and his picture (with Billy Miller) appears in issue 53. He is discussed at length by Reed Woodhouse in Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995. McDonald is the only non-fiction author Woodhouse deals with.

Seeking models for "a good life as a gay man", Woodhouse lovingly evokes and contextualizes McDonald’s interest and enthusiasm for sex:

STH was a formative influence on me.... We demanded sexually explicit literature and got it, but we wanted that literature to be proud, not ashamed.

Boyd McDonald was for me one of the keys to a grown-up, unashamed gay life, one who not only disentangled me from my own hypocritical knots, but showed me the hypocrisies in the world’s mendacity about sex”.

Not only did he encourage a generation — my generation— of gay men to have all the sex it wanted and to tell the truth about it; but he posed sex as the ineradicably weird thing it is.... It will never be polite, never become a mere lifestyle or choice, according to McDonald. All we can do is tell the truth about it, and get as much as we possibly can. Why should we have lots of sex? Because (as he puts it in a rare sincere moment) sex simply makes us nicer people.

Gore Vidal once described STH as "one of the best radical papers in the country."

William Burroughs read Straight to Hell with eagerness and admiration. Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, and Christopher Isherwood were all fans. Pictured holding copies of STH were Cookie Mueller and Jackie Curtis; Fran Lebowitz appears with an STH shirt. In contrast, gay author John Preston, who openly admitted writing pornography, called STH and its writers "dirty", "filthy", "sick", "kinky", and "twisted".

Charles Shively said:

Boyd had a voice unique and inimitable. He neither overstated nor understated the joys of gay sex. ... Sham and fraud of any kind appalled him. He ridiculed the hypocrisy of police, clerics, politicians, therapists, teachers, and others of the so-called "helping professions". He likewise disdained gay/lesbian spokespersons and leaders dedicated to cleaning up the filthy in us all.

Encouraging promiscuty

McDonald celebrated and encouraged promiscuity, which he claimed was men's nature. "All too often — in reading and in life — we look for sex and only find love; all too often we want a nice piece of meat or a nice hot suck hole and only find a wonderful human being."

The peak of STH's popularity in the 1970s contributed to the great peak of gay sexual promiscuity between 1976 and 1980, as portrayed in Jack Fritscher's novel Some Dance to Remember (1990) and Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On (1987). Its epicenter was the South of Market, Folsom Street district of San Francisco. As his friend David Hurles said:

Perhaps you had to be there...the 70's, San Francisco, the blossoming and peak of the gay sexual culture, It was a rare time; everything, it seemed, was perfect. So perfect, in fact, that those of us there could not have possibly imagined it might ever be otherwise!

In New York, ít was centered on the Mineshaft, a world portrayed in Larry Kramer's Faggots (1978) and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (1978). It ended in the early 1980s with the AIDS epidemic. STH enthusiast John Waters has said we will not see another such celebration of casual gay sex in our lifetimes.

Exhibits, a reading, fans, and a song

An exhibition of Straight to Hell material, curated by Billy Miller, was held at the Berlin gallery Exile, October 19 – November 16, 2008, where Jan Wandrag created the "installation" "Straight To Hell: In Cock We Trust". "An installation" by Jan Wandrag was held July 25, 2010, at the White Cubicle Toilet Gallery in London.

The San Francisco gay bookstore A Different Light held "Straight to Hell: A Night of Readings from the Cum-Drenched Pages of S.T.H." The poster announcing the reading, on Saturday, November 26, has been preserved.

From 2001 to 2005, over 200 fan messages were posed on a group, described as "A place for fans of Boyd McDonald's seminal work, Straight To Hell, The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts", which existed on Yahoo Groups Canada (https://ca.groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Straight_To_Hell/info, retrieved 2014-09-04). After 2005 the group was taken over by unrelated spam.

A song about McDonald was included on the 2006 album Matmos, by the group of the same name, each of whose tracks is about an important but controversial character. McDonald thus found himself in the company of Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Burroughs, Valerie Solanas, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria. McDonald's track includes clandestine recordings of sex acts at the San Francisco oral sex club Blow Buddies.

S.T.H. compilations

Most of the material from S.T.H. has been reprinted.

As editor

Additional volumes, edited by McDonald, containing similar reader-submitted material are:

Additional titles unrealized at the time of his death were Bare, Heat, Hoses, Sex Hounds, Sperm, Stuff, Tools, and Used.

Cruising the Movies

McDonald is also the author of "Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to 'Oldies' on TV", Gay Presses of New York, 1985, ISBN 091401708X; with additional uncollected articles and a new introduction by William E. Jones, South Pasadena, CA, Semiotext(e), 2015, ISBN 9781584351719.

He reviewed movies broadcast on commercial television, which he watched "on a GE b/w [black and white] receiver. It cost $80". The reviews collected in Cruising the Movies first appeared in Christopher Street (magazine). "A few ran in New York Native, Connection, and Philadelphia Gay News." He used the now-closed Film Stills Archive of the Museum of Modern Art.

The title page of the first edition showed a man in a jock in front of a television, apparently looking for images to fuel his masturbation. (The image on the TV is the Statue of Liberty.) McDonald's interest was the actors, whose physique and clothing (or lack of same) he would discuss, not the directors. He was uninterested in the movies as such; his interest was in the actors as sexual objects, who sometimes achieved the status of "piece[s] of meat." He called the actors "eating stuff", and said that "their talent is not only irrelevant, but a distraction from the main point of movies, the exhibition of beautiful and exceptional people."

One movie reviewed, Fraternity Row, he saw in a theater. He complained that no fellatio took place in the theater: "I prefer theaters in which men strip completely bareass in the balcony and slouch down in their chairs with one foot on the chair (or shoulder) in front of them, whilst other men crawl up the balcony steps on all fours, meaningfully."

Like STH, Cruising "is not strictly about movies; it frequently uses them as an excuse for political, social, sexual, psychological, and autobiographical comments."

Material deleted from an unspecified book at the request of Winston Leyland, owner of Gay Sunshine Press ("Cole Porter a cocksucker, Brooke Shields's and Tyrone Powers's [ sic ] shit-holes"), was restored in Cruising the Movies.

Other works

A variety of McDonald stories were reprinted in the "Sex Histories" section of Guidemag Magazine.

Archival material

The Cornell University Library has a collection of "Boyd McDonald papers, 1925–1993". They occupy 15 boxes, and include 3.5", Zip, and Jazz disks of 1990–1996 material.