William E. Jones

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones's I'm Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book's narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I'm Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press's heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn't hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place. William E. Jones's previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell's iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer 'zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I'm Open to Anything, his debut novel.

I'm Open to Anything

I Should Have Known Better

Boyd McDonald (1925-1993) had the makings of a successful life in the 1950s--an education at Harvard, a job at Time/Life--but things didn't turn out as planned. After 20 years of resentful conformity and desperate alcoholism, McDonald dried out, pawned all of his suits, and went on welfare; it was then that his life truly began. From a room in a New York SRO hotel, McDonald published Straight to Hell, a series of chapbooks collecting readers' "true homosexual experiences." Following the example of Alfred Kinsey, McDonald obsessively pursued the truth about sex between men just as gay liberation began to tame America's sexual outlaws for the sake of legal recognition. Admired by such figures as Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs, Straight to Hell combined a vigorous contempt for authority with a keen literary style, and was the precursor of the first queer 'zines decades later. Containing in-depth interviews with friends and family members and a wealth of previously unpublished material, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell is the first book devoted to this key figure of the American underground.

Boyd Mcdonald and Straight to Hell

True Homosexual Experiences

Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burtontelescopes 350 years, the period from the 1620s to the 1970s. It is what artist William E. Jones imagined Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy would have looked like had it appeared in the pages of Drummer magazine. In preparing the book, Jones condensed Burton's vast 450,000-word masterpiece of 17th Century English literature to a small fraction of its length, and paired the excerpts with vintage images of leather men at work and play. Robert Burton was fascinated by the variations of human sexuality, albeit more as an observer than as a participant. He wrote about sex in covert Latin passages that are newly translated in Jones's book. Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton is a delightfully perverse condensation of Burton's speculations on the sexual proclivities that subsequent generations of gay men put into exuberant practice

Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

Tearoom

Fred Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was gay porn's first masterpiece: a sexually explicit, autobiographical, experimental film whose New York screening left even Salvador Dalí repeatedly muttering "new information for me." Halsted, a self-taught filmmaker, shot the film over a period of three years in a now-vanished Los Angeles, a city at once rural and sleazy. Although his cultural notoriety at one point equaled that of Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith, Halsted's star waned in the 1980s with the emergence of a more commercial gay-porn industry. After the death from AIDS of his long-time partner, lover, spouse (and tormentor) Joey Yale in 1986, Halsted committed suicide in 1989.In Halsted Plays Himself, acclaimed artist and filmmaker William E. Jones documents his quest to capture the elusive public and private personas of Halsted--to zero in on an identity riddled with contradictions. Jones assembles a narrative of a long-gone gay lifestyle and an extinct Hollywood underground, when independent films were still possible, and the boundary between experimental and pornographic was not yet established. The book also depicts what sexual liberation looked like at a volatile point in time--and what it looked like when it collapsed.

William E. Jones

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