Dirk Vanden: Pioneer of Gay Literature
According to Wayne Gunn, Lambda Literary Online, 'Dirk Vanden was one of the heroes, the pioneers of the gay pulp movement. Between 1969 and 1971, he published seven novels - works that were viewed seriously enough to cause them to be listed by Ian Young in his great bibliography and by two different contributors to Claude J. Summers's Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage. Of course, Vanden, like all the other pulp writers, has been mostly ignored by literary critics.'
"Once upon a time, many long years ago, I was the best little Mormon boy in the whole wide world! Born and raised in Utah, as Richard Fullmer, I had been baptized and confirmed a Latter Day Saint, at age 10, then ordained a Deacon at 12, a Teacher at 14 and a Priest at 16. I was planning on becoming an Elder at age 21, after I had graduated from BYU and gone on my Mission to help save the world for Jesus. I fully intended to come home from converting the heathens, and marry a Good Mormon girl in the LDS Temple, and beget a large family of Good Mormon Children, and they would all go to Church together and praise God and Jesus and Joseph Smith, marching proudly arm in arm into the Millennium! Then, after a few hundred years in Paradise, when I finally died, I would go to my reward: my very own planet, in a galaxy far, far away, to become a God of my own making, to start my own version of the human race - to see if I could do better than Jehovah had done! Seventy years later, I am called ‘a Master of Homosexual Erotica’ and a ‘Pioneer of Gay Literature.' What happened?
“My Boy Tom,” my naked handyman & “adopted son”
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