Acquired Tastes XLIII: Gay Pulp Fiction, Part 63 - An Interview With Hannah Givens From Carl Corley - Gay Pulp In The Deep South

Acquired Tastes XLIII:

Gay Pulp Fiction, Part 63

An Interview With Hannah Givens

From Carl Corley - Gay Pulp In The Deep South

One of the on-going pleasures I have experienced while doing research for this series of posts dealing with vintage gay pulp fiction are those moments when I happen to stumble upon a website devoted to exactly what I was looking for. Such is the case with Hannah Givens' quite comprehensive and beautifully executed website devoted to one of my favorite vintage gay pulp fiction authors, Carl Corley. 

Givens' site, Carl Corley - Gay Pulp In The Deep South contains a treasure trove of information, photos, illustrations, along with ready-to-read copies of all of Corley's published works. 

Since I discovered her site, I have visited it repeatedly and have even begun to work my way through Corley's impressive output of fiction. I encourage you to click the link above and visit the site. The artwork, alone, is worthy of your time and attention. 

Recently I had the pleasure and honor of asking Givens about the genesis of the site and her apparent appreciation of Carl Corley.

1/ A little about you. (You don't have to reveal much.) Where are you from? Where did you go to college? What made you want to be a librarian?

Well, I’m queer and autistic, and about to turn 30. I’m originally from Alabama and have been living in Georgia for about six years. I’ve bumbled around doing a lot of things, and my stint in academia was fairly long, but currently I’m an artist, freelance animal caretaker, and aspiring homesteader. So, quite different from what I expected at the time I was in school and making the website. I attended the University of Montevallo in Alabama for my BA in history, and then the University of West Georgia for my MA in history and museum studies. I was also briefly in library school. I was homeschooled and grew up in my local library, so it seemed like a natural choice... I could say “I love books,” and it’s true, but more specifically I love a) knowing things, and b) being able to be someone else for a while.

2/ Who is the biggest literary influence in your life? Who is your favorite author? Do you write?

That’s hard to say… I’m hyperlexic and read 300+ books a year. I’m very interested in genres and how they work, more so than any specific author or category, and am heavily into comics and graphic novels now. (I was delighted when I found out Corley also did comics.)

I do write a bit, but my current focus is trying to get into comics myself, developing art portfolios and graphic novel pitches. I may have a webcomic soon.

If I had to name some current favorites, I’d say G. Willow Wilson, Matt Kindt, and Neil Gaiman -- I know them from comics, but they’re unpredictable genre-crossers and write genius work at their best.

3/ The Carl Corley site is quite impressive. How long did it take you to put it together? When did it make it's internet debut?

Thank you! I think it took about two semesters, and I think it went up early in summer of 2017. Most of the time was spent processing the scans, each page or art piece had to be cropped down individually, and everything had to be organized and saved. I wanted to do optical character recognition to turn the scans into searchable text, but because the pages were curved (I didn’t want to break the spines of the archival copies), the machine couldn’t read it. Each book would’ve had to be individually retyped, and that would’ve inflated the time by hours and hours for each book. Long story short, the site itself didn’t take long, but getting everything in some kind of shape to go into it took time.

4/ Where did the funding for something like this come from? Or was it a labor of love?

I paid (pay) for it myself -- it’s about $25 a year for hosting through Reclaim Hosting (an education-focused service) and the site is built with Wordpress. The biggest expense is $15 a month for the FlipHTML books, which I decided was worth it at the time to make the site really functional, and I made the commitment to keep it up. The need to plan for hosting and other costs was thoroughly drilled into me during public history classes, and the lack of grant longevity and so forth is one reason so few public history sites exist, but something on this relatively small scale was manageable for me to commit to on my own. I spent a week in North Carolina to get the scans and that trip was about $400, if I remember correctly, and I probably could have (should have) found a grant to pay for that. The initial time investment was just part of doing my senior project, and it doesn’t take any time to keep up now except the occasional check to make sure the site’s still working.

5/ Why Carl Corley? How did you learn of him? What about him intrigued you?

I knew I wanted to focus on queer history, and was particularly interested in it being Southern history, because we queer Southerners tend to be erased in the narrative. One of the early classes in my program had us reading six or eight books on our topic of choice and summarizing the existing research, so I chose that subject -- there were only six or eight books available specifically on that anyway. (Many more that are related, but only a handful with a specific focus.) One of them was Men Like That: A Southern Queer History by John Howard, who I would call the preeminent scholar of the subject. He did the initial research into Carl Corley, even interviewed him, and included a long section about him in the book.

It was like exactly what I wanted to find had fallen into my lap. Corley was Southern and queer, wrote books that were very deeply about both those things, and did it under his own name. He painted his own covers, which was also an oddity. It’s hard to describe what about him seems to grab those of us who have been grabbed, but you know it when you see it! He’s just different and fascinating, and after I finished that section, I Googled to see if I could find any of his books or anything more about him. I couldn’t. I really wanted to read some of his work, and the idea just struck me that doing research would be a marvelous excuse to go find some of the stuff, and wouldn’t it be a great final project to make a website where it was all available?

In deeper searching, I found that via Howard, Corley had donated his papers and a full set of his books to Duke University. From there it was a series of utterly astonishing yeses -- my advisors said yes, Duke University said yes, everyone said yes. I emailed John Howard and had the privilege of having him on my thesis committee. I wrote to Carl Corley, and got a note back which I treasure, although he passed before we could discuss anything in depth. I did a lot of work, for sure, but I expected to be told “no” at every single step. Nobody ever said it. So that part was easier than I ever thought it would be.

6/ When you proposed the creation of this website to your advisors, did you get any pushback due to the subject material?

I was expecting to, but I actually didn’t get any objections to any of the queer stuff I worked on in school, no matter how explicit. Sometimes I got the impression that people in the department were just super afraid of telling me no because they didn’t want to get in trouble for discriminating, rather than actually supporting the projects, but I don’t know that for certain. My actual advisor was very positive about it and pushed for other queer history projects on campus. I got a bit of judgment from other students, but by the time I was working on the site for my thesis project, they all knew what to expect from me and that they couldn’t make me feel the slightest bit bad about it, so they just didn’t bring it up anymore. Funnily enough, it was an amazing networking strategy. At conferences people always ask what you study, expecting to be bored, but they absolutely light up when you answer “gay porn!”

7/ How did you go about collecting everything on the site? The artwork? The biographical info? Did he have an estate or was his work part of the college's archives?

Almost everything is from his collection at Duke, which he put together to donate at John Howard’s behest. During the process, as I started working with Howard myself, Howard also sent me a package of extra Corley things he’d had laying around from his own work. He stipulated that I donate them to Duke to add to the collection when I was finished, which I did. Historians are really at the mercy of academic collections most of the time, and this collection was large and delightful. Corley had kept a lot of his original art, which was particularly exciting for me, plus some personal scrapbooks. Probably the biggest find was a tiny memoir, just a few pages, but enough to add some shape and a coda to the things he’d told Howard in the 90s -- I was able to update his information with some important details he hadn’t shared in that interview. It’s another lucky thing that a trained historian had already laid the groundwork, and probably told Corley what kinds of things would be useful.

8/ Does he have any living relatives? If so, did you speak with any of them?

I believe he was survived by a long-term partner, but I wasn’t able to contact him or track down any other relatives. Corley would have been about 92 when he died, and didn’t have children, so most of his relatives would probably also have passed by now and I couldn’t get any further. 

I believe he passed away not long after he wrote to me, but I haven’t even been able to confirm that because death records aren’t public in Louisiana.

9/ The FlipHTML books are an absolute treasure. Did you scan all those books yourself? How?

I did! The library at Duke University has an absolutely splendid overhead scanner, with supports you can raise. So, I could position each book with adequate support for the spine, then scan each page with the push of a button, turn the page and do it again. One hand on the book and one on the button. Very fast, and it delivered each set of scans as a single PDF at a very high resolution, which saved hours in organizing scans. I adored that scanner and could only have gotten a fraction of the work done without it. (It may entertain you to know that the machine also had a massive outward-facing preview screen, so everyone in the reading room and everyone in the hall on the other side of the windows could see aaaaaaaalllllll the penises in those comics!)

10/ Did you research any of the publishing companies or trace any of the rights to books? Did they revert to the author? Who owns them?

I worked with an academic librarian at West Georgia to try and trace the copyrights, but neither of us got anywhere. 

Since the publishers are gone and the author died without an estate, they’re being treated as orphan works. Basically, they’re not public domain, but they also don’t belong to anyone either, so it’s a gray area. 

I’m presenting them for educational purposes, but definitely couldn’t reprint them and/or make money from them.

11/ Did you read all his books? What do you think of his writing? Which are your favorites?

I haven’t read all of them, I’m embarrassed to say. When I was doing the project, I just didn’t have the time to get all the images processed for the site and also get the thesis done and also read everything in detail. I skimmed them all and read about half of them, focusing on the ones with the most autobiographical content. I keep meaning to get around to the rest, possibly for further publication on the subject. I’d love to do a mapping project to chart the locations he mentions.

I think his writing is rough around the edges, and nobody got much editorial help at the time, but there’s something very honest about his work, and once you get into the rhythm of his language you can appreciate how unique it is. A Chosen World, the first one, is the most autobiographical. The Scarlet Lantern and A Brazen Image are also fascinating. I just love how strange and intense his world seemed to be, and the unedited nature of the work only heightens that.

12/ What was the purpose of all his maps and historic drawings? Was he commissioned to create that work? The historic drawings look like something you might have found on a paper place mat at 1960's or 1970's diner. Did people hang this work on their walls?

Yes, these were actually the things that made money for him. For most of his life he was an illustrator for the Louisiana Department of Transportation, so some of them are promotional images. He had a friend who ran a newspaper, and commissioned the historical art to run basically as cartoon strips, and that supported him financially later in life. He also sold small paintings out of a studio at one point, I think those small square pieces illustrating Southern vignettes are from that time, so people were indeed purchasing them for their houses. I’d love it if someone with more art history and folk art expertise took an interest in that!

13/ Is there a piece of his artwork that is your favorite?

I love the cover of Jesse, Man of the Streets. I think it was one of the first I saw, and it’s just so much. The dripping background colors. The distinctive way he renders figures is fascinating to me, and here the figure is the absolute focal point of the piece, where some of his other covers are hard to parse. I really think it’s his best work. But I love all his cover art paintings, before they got titles and blurbs and borders all over them.

14/ Could you talk a bit about the religious writings and drawings? They are the one part of his history I don't understand. Was this a late life conversion?

That’s definitely an oddity, and one I couldn’t find much about -- Corley didn’t seem much for self-analysis, and didn’t put much religious content in his books. He seems to have been an atheist, based on a few references. 

Christian imagery fascinated him, though, and I can see it as being part of the languorous Southern aesthetic he loved. Not a theological or dogmatic Christianity, but an aesthetic one. (He seems to have thought Jesus was extremely sexy, among other things.) You’ll also note that his religious book was self-published right in the midst of his gay pulp releases in the 60s, so I don’t think it was a conversion as such, and not one in his later life, as he lived into the 2010s.

15/ If you could ask Carl Corley one question, what would it be?

I’d ask if he was happy. If he felt he’d said what he wanted to say in his work. His most personal and intense books feel like he’s trying desperately to be heard, or maybe to understand himself and his own life. I’d ask if it worked.

16/ Was there a piece of artwork or a book of his that you couldn't find? And what of all the unpublished works referenced? If I recall, there were a number of book covers designed for novels that never made it to publication. Will they ever see the light of day?

A lot, if not all, of the comics in his archive are incomplete. And randomly incomplete, with a bunch of pages missing, not just a missing second half or something. I don’t know how that happened, and I wish so badly I could’ve read them as stories and not just looked through them as art.

The Duke archive has a big ol’ box full of unpublished but bound manuscripts, it looks like he had them bound himself. Some of them are massive. I was getting close to the end of my week there, and had to make the executive decision to not scan those, because the published works were of more historical interest. It’s extremely unlikely that they’ll be published now, without an estate. I’d love to have them on the site, but it’s also fairly unlikely that I’ll be able to get them myself since I’m not in academia anymore and the time and money just isn’t there for another weeklong trip. But if anyone wants to volunteer to get them scanned, I’d definitely put them up!

17/ Would you ever do something like this again? Another author? What are you working on now?

I’d love to do it again, but I got incredibly lucky with this project. The sources and resources were there, and the copyright issues didn’t sink the project like I thought they might when I first had the idea. Now that I’m out of academia, I’d have to be even more lucky. Trying to be an independent scholar is honestly near-impossible, you don’t have the connections or the grants or the academic libraries or the time, and when you do get something finished and published, you don’t get paid for it. I’m glad I can be proud of the site and my contribution to the research in that field, and may try to do a few more things here and there on the subject, like the mapping project I mentioned, but it’s just really hard to access academic sources for a new project. Currently I’m shopping around an academic article about representation in the classic Whose Line is it Anyway? show that I researched when I still had access to the university library, but there hasn’t been much interest. I think it’s in my nature to want comprehensive projects like that, I re-watched and made extensive notes on the entire show, and it makes the barriers to independent scholarship even higher if you aren’t satisfied with working in small chunks.

For those who are interested in more books, I recommend checking out Victor J. Banis -- he was writing at the same time but has made a lot of his novels (old and new) available as ebooks.

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I want to thank Hannah Givens for being so generous with her time and for providing us with so much information. And I do hope you all stop on by her site,  Carl Corley - Gay Pulp In The Deep South. It is a feast for the eyes and a slice of gay history I truly treasure.

I wanted to point out that Givens does not profit in any manner from the Corley website. In fact, it costs her money on an on-going basis, as there are hosting fees she is responsible for She's currently considering doing some type of crowd-funding, but that's something she's just started to think about. In the meantime, if you would like to donate towards the upkeep of the site... contact me. I have the information to do so via PayPal or Venmo; supporting this type of scholarly work is good for the community and interests me. This is our history and it deserves preservation. 

That's all for now.

Next week, we'll return to our look at Gay Way books and another set of vintage book covers.

Until then...

Thanks for reading.

The Man I Love - Dorothy Dandridge

 

As Long As He Needs Me - Judy Garland