The Gayest Books: Edward Sagarin and the Cory Book Service
As Long As It Isn’t True: A Literary Scandals PodcastShow Notes
“Rapidly growing interest in the subject of homosexuality has made novels on this theme a big seller...”
Happy Pride Month! After one publishing house started finding success with publishing books focusing on themes of homosexuality in the late 1940s and early 1950s, they began keeping a mailing list of those interested in gay books. But the United States Postal Service started catching on, and the publishers were indicted on obscenity charges.
That didn't stop Donald Webster Cory, the pen name of American academic Edward Sagarin, from starting his own gay mail-order book business in 1952: the Cory Book Service. But Sagarin was plagued by internalized homophobia, and for decades maintained that homosexuality was a mental illness that can be cured. That is, until another queer academic had enough of Edward's drama.
Theme music is credited to Wendy Marcini, Elvin Vanguard, and Jules Gaia.
Instagram: @literaryscandals
Selected bibliography: • Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement by David K. Johnson • "The Book Club That Helped Launch the Gay-Rights Movement," The New Yorker • "Sagarin, Edward (Donald Webster Cory)," GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer Culture
More from As Long As It Isn’t True: A Literary Scandals Podcast
After a long hiatus, As Long As It Isn't True returns for season two. In 1958, Truman Capote published his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, which would go on to become one of the most beloved pieces of literature of all-time. It would inspire the equally beloved film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn in 1961, a film we're still talking about today. But Capote's inspiration for the character of Holly Golightly is a whole other story, as well as the flocks of women who started claiming they were the real Holly Golightly on which Capote based the character. Threats of libel lawsuits were made. But the true inspiration for Holly is something of a Freudian tale... Instagram: @literaryscandals Selected bibliography: • Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman by Sam Wasson • "Gay Pride Book: Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's - the Novel That Saved My Life" by Jamie Brickhouse, HuffPost • Capote by Gerald Clarke
"The people who believe in these lists are asleep. Anyone sitting up at three in the morning secretly has doubts."
After her writing career as a biographer was destroyed by a book that tanked, as well as her off-putting personality, Lee Israel fell into poverty and began forging letters and literary documents of prominent 20th-century authors. She was so good at slipping into the words and minds of others that some of her forgeries even made their way into an early edition of a 2007 biography on Noël Coward. But like all good career criminals, Lee's success would come to an untimely end. She would tell her story in her 2008 memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger, which was adapted into a feature film starring Melissa McCarthy as Lee — for which she would be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
“You can’t translate poetry into prose. That’s why it’s poetry.”
"It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"