"How Dare You Even Think These Things?" by John Preston (High Risk)

John's Life as a Pornographer

In many ways, John Preston's literary career began when his grandmother found an early story that wasn't pornographic, but definitely horny and confronted him. Before tearing it up. She screamed “How dare you even think these things?” By the 1970s, John Preston was writing gay BDSM classics like Mr. Benson and The Love of the Master.

This essay is not just about one author of erotic fiction, but also a history of gay men in the Boomer generation, from the closeted 50s to the liberation of the 1970s to the AIDS years when they saw many of their friends die as the U.S. government remained indifferent to their plight.

With John Cheever, you can see the impact of a homophobic society on the WWII generation. When John Cheever wrote about gay men, they were either side characters or coded. Various stories including “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Country Husband” can be read as gay stories based on context clues. Only in Cheever's last novel Falconer does he explicitly depict homosexual characters. Even then they are closeted men who only get to indulge because of their status as prisoners.

By contrast, John Preston proudly writes about how he went to a bus stop because he heard about perverts lurking for young boys. He was 15 and a traveling businessman took him to a hotel and taught him everything he needed to know. For a gay teenager in 1960, this was the best sex education available. They certainly weren't teaching sex education in the schools. Even if they were teaching sex education, they weren't teaching it for gay kids.

Obviously, this is deeply problematic. Preston doesn't even bother to consider that he could have been killed. Presumably he went back. One can imagine John Cheever as one of the men who trolled bus stations. Most likely, Preston imagined that he'd one day grow up to be one of the businessmen, because that was the life of gay men in the era. Certainly Preston's fiction reflects that power dynamic.

Preston never calls his books erotica or smut or adult. He calls them pornography. He wrote pornography. Pornography inspired him. He spent his youth reading the writer Samuel Steward, writing as Phil Andros, even as his books were published by the most exploitative publishers and sold in the sleaziest sex shops. By the 1970s, both Preston and Steward became heroes to gay men seeking community, validation and masturbation material.

When AIDS was ravaging the gay community, Preston turned his attention to writing safe sex porn. Certainly, government agencies didn't want to promote sex - even safe sex. Their official party line was “the only safe sex is no sex.” This was a dumb message for straight people. It was downright evil in regards to gay men who had been told all of their lives to stay in the closet. They were not listening to “be gay but don't have sex” when it was coming from their childhood friends. They were certainly not going to listen when it came from a disdainful government agency.

Like many gay men, Preston knew that if there was going to be any safe sex education for the gay community, it'd have to come from the gay community. He's proud that his work has allowed men to explore their fantasies in safe ways.

Sadly, the story doesn't end there. By 1989, Preston was HIV-positive and finding it increasingly difficult to have sex. He'd meet interested men. They'd talk. They'd agree to practice safe sex, but then he discloses his status and they change their minds. He's being unfair when he repeats the “how dare you even think these things?” refrain in their case. These are men who don't want to catch a fatal disease. He's also offended when public health officials scorn HIV-positive men who continue to come in with new STDs. These are people who want to limit the death toll. They shouldn't be placed alongside his homophobic grandmother.

The essay ends with John Preston bemused that in his forties he's become an elder statesman. He tells young gay men stories about bath houses and leather bondage bars. He worries about the future of gay pron and free expression. You have to wonder what he would have thought of corporate sponsorship of Pride Parades and legalized same sex marriage. Sadly, he died in 1994, one of the many victims of AIDS and the Reagan administration.

Here’s the Goodreads Page for Preston’s most popular book Mr. Benson.

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