The Life and Times of the Legendary Larry Townsend

AN ORIGIN STORY

LIFE AS A MOVIE

THE ASTROLOGER’S WARNING

Larry Townsend, the charismatic author of the classic 1972 Leatherman’s Handbook, died at 2:40 Tuesday afternoon, July 29, 2008, at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Born Scorpio with Aries rising on October 27, 1930, in Jackson Heights, Long Island, he was 77 and HIV-negative when he was overcome by complications from pneumonia. Defining an era and a literary genre, he was one of the gay pioneers who changed the post-Stonewall fin de siècle of the twentieth-century. He was an urgent author in whose work fans saw the evolution of themselves in a performative S&M lifestyle. For over forty years, after meeting on February 13, 1963, he lived with his lover-partner, Fred Yerkes (August 27, 1935 – July 7, 2006), in the Hollywood Hills above the Sunset Strip and below the iconic white Hollywood Sign, the symbol of Los Angeles ambition, sex, politics, backstabbing, and dreams.

Two months after his birth, his mother in their five-room home on the top floor of 35-63 80th Street, Apt. 6A, Jackson Heights, New York, where he was conceived, paid for an astrology-like Old Gold Broadcast Character Reading that was answered with a three-hundred-word profile predicting her newborn son’s destiny.

December 18, 1930...After studying your name... you’re a lucky boy! Men in your group frequently become financial and scientific leaders. I do hope you won’t neglect your splendid abilities. You have good judgement, a fine mind, wisdom beyond your years, tolerance toward the views of others...but I urge you not to get in the habit of tyrannizing over your friends....You like to see people and money working for you....Your name and destiny combination...should not be changed....Petty trifles annoy you...Your type...often marry after 25....Do not change your name. Sincerely, Lorna Fantin

But change his name he did. And his destiny. He was a person of his own creation. He was a force of nature and of will. Introducing his identity and image to readers during the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, he wrote in 1970 that he was a very sexual Scorpio with Aries ascendant. At that time in gay popular culture, the number one pick-up line in a bar was What’s your sign? Writing for forty years under his primary pseudonym Larry Townsend, Irvin Townsend Bud Bernhard, Junior, authored dozens of novels including Run, Little Leather Boy (1968), The Faustus Contract (1969), The Fairy King (1970), Beware the God Who Smiles (1971), and the gay heritage guide The Leatherman’s Handbook at such erotic presses as Greenleaf Classics and the Other Traveller imprint of criminal literary thief Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press.

Larry dedicated his Handbook to, among others, Canadian writer Ian Young who had started his own gay publishing company in 1970 and authored The Male Homosexual in Literature. Young made a pop-culture point when he wrote that these early publishers were churning out sexually explicit pulp fiction in cheap paperbacks with deliciously lurid titles and succulent covers that in lieu of reviews in a then non-existent gay press sold the books—and have since become collectible gay pop art.

Larry’s Run, Little Leather Boy with scenes in castle dungeons in Southern Germany was a famous bestseller—and a private catch phrase. When the thin-skinned Larry would get royally pissed off over some person, some issue, or some slight, and would sometimes threaten thunderbolts, we’d sometimes dare tease him back to good humor—and to get him to tone it down—by stage-whispering at him, Run! Little Leather Boy! Run! which, of course, made him so mad he couldn’t help but laugh at how (during his whole life) he let his emotions in his private life be buoyed up or stressed by public responses to his politics, his writing, and his prized reputation as a dashing author in our gay Vanity Fair.

The Advocate, a tad wary of the sex in Run, reported on June 23, 1971:

Despite its very clear exposition and vivid descriptive passages, the sensitive undertones of this story reflect Mr. Townsend’s background as a graduate psychologist and student of human behavior. It also suggests an intimate knowledge of a subject [S&M] in which he is already an acknowledged authority.

3

PREPPIE, SERGEANT, SEX TOURIST, LEATHERMAN

As Larry’s family moved from New York to Boston to Los Angeles, he grew up as a big-boned blond boy of Swiss-German heritage a few houses from Noel Coward and Greer Garson. He ate cookies with his neighbor Laura Hope Crews who played Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind. At age fourteen in 1944, during World War II, he entered the elite Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, a non-denominational college-preparatory boarding school near Princeton where, before girls were admitted, he wrote for the school paper, swam in the pool known as the bathtub, and was nursed in the school infirmary by the long-serving and coincidentally named matron Miss Eva Townsend.

During World War II, the Peddie School was mobilized as an airplane spotting post with students like Larry acting—so like a Townsend sex story—as air-raid wardens keeping 24-hour watch against Nazi invasion. As wartime students came and went with military service during his four years there, his schoolmates in grades nine through twelve plus post-grad, included liberal Democrat Dick Swig who became the owner of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, and the conservative Republican author Richard Hornberger who later, after serving as a surgeon in the Korean war, took the pen name Richard Hooker and wrote the 1968 novel, movie, and television series, MASH, just as Larry was writing The Scorpius Equation. It was that kind of school, and he graduated in 1948 marked with the education he received.

In 1950 at age twenty, he photographed himself—a portrait of the artist as a young man—in a brooding black-and-white head-shot. He staged it framing himself against a writer’s filing cabinet topped with a bondage padlock. He intended it as his passport photo into the literary world of authors. He was a freshman at the University of California Los Angeles, and was about to join the Air Force. He was impeccably groomed, poised, and beautiful the way the young are beautiful.

From 1950 to 1954, he was stationed as Staff Sergeant in charge of NCOIC Operations of Air Intelligence Squadrons with the U.S. Air Force in Germany. In the election for president in November 1952, he voted Republican for Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. In August 1954, he saved that German boy (who would now be seventy-five) from drowning in the Rhine River, finished his military service, and returned to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) as a sophomore on the G.I. Bill.

Having cruised in the closet of his car since his teen years, he came out to his own formal satisfaction in 1955 at the primeval LA bar, Cinema, on Melrose Avenue which was likely the world’s first leather bar, predating the Argos leather bar founded in Amsterdam in 1957, Chuck Renslow’s Gold Coast leather bar in Chicago in 1958, and the Why Not and Tool Box leather bars in San Francisco in 1962. The dive was perfect for him and the new gay motorcycle clubs, like the Satyrs founded in 1954, hosting mixers for sadists and masochists who were also military veterans. In his Introduction to his Handbook, he describes the Cinema interior and action in detail, saying it was what a leather bar should be.

During his European service, he, whose father was a spy during World War II, worked with spies and spying. He told me he was lucky that, while he was stationed at Essen, a civilian bisexual who graduated Cambridge and was a Fulbright scholar, figuring Larry was gay, tutored him in discretion, and introduced him to reading such as Gore Vidal’s 1948 novel The City and the Pillar.

Traveling on his own more often in mufti than uniform, Larry, who based so many of his novels on historical people and epochs, day-tripped wandering through Europe on his motor scooter soaking up culture, food, and drink while reading around in sadomasochistic literature in quiet cafés and bierstubes. His knapsack on his back was a traveling library of books like Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs which he praised with passing mention of Gilles Deleuze in his Handbook, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, and Pauline Réage’s just-published Story of O. If he could spy for the Air Force for underground Nazis, he could spy for himself. So he set out gathering useful leather intelligence about sex dynamics in gay boltholes like public toilets—all later reported in The Leatherman’s Handbook.

Gathering intelligence ran in his family. He showed me his 1950s government Personnel Security Questionnaire in which he explained he had not been a child-spy for the Wehrmacht:

While on duty with USAF Intelligence Service (7050th AISW, Rhein Main ABF), my secret clearance was revoked for a period of approximately two weeks, due to the fact that my father (Irvin T. Bernhard, Sr.) had been active in collecting information for the FBI on German Bundest activities in New England during 1940. His name had been recorded on some subversive list at that time. A letter from J. Edgar Hoover, instructing him as to field offices and indicating that his help was appreciated is on file with security office, SDC. Also, refer to Mr. J. Frank Mothershead, 5241 42nd Street NW, Washington. D.C. This gentleman is former head of Patent Law Division, Dept. of Justice, and is aware of details to greater extent than I, since I was only ten years of age at the time.

Mustering out after his closeted tour of duty, he came out into a world of available men at UCLA before coming out into the 1950s underground of the LA gay scene where he and Hollywood star Montgomery Clift, who sported a wicked leather jacket in A Place in the Sun, shared a lover. That romantic triad ended when Clift, fresh off shooting Suddenly Last Summer, spirited the ham in their sandwich away to Cuba for the wild New Year’s Eve before Fidel Castro marched his revolution into Havana on January 8, 1959.

In the mid-1960s, Larry began photographing some of his leather partners for a scrapbook he continued most of his life, and for illustrations in the many magazine-size S&M short-story booklets he published in addition to his pocket-novel books. Always prepared, he kept rolls of film and a loaded camera on a tripod in his dungeon. His accounting parallels the Stud Files that erotic novelist Samuel Steward began keeping on his rough-trade tricks at the suggestion of Dr. Kinsey in the 1950s.

With his degree in industrial psychology from UCLA (1957), he began several years’ work in the private sector as a probation officer at a juvenile camp managing teenage delinquents shaped by 1950s rebel teen movies and rock-n-roll. As a counselor he had undergone the therapy required to advise others, but, he told me, he could find no guilt in himself about his own proclivities. During his forty-four-year home-relationship with his partner Fred Yerkes, a wisp of a lovely man who died two years before him in 2006, the S&M master was a committed animal lover favoring Doberman Pinscher dogs whom he called his Doberpersons, and Abyssinian cats who were the only creatures ever really able to top him.

4

FIRST GAY WRITERS SUMMIT,

SAN FRANCISCO 1970

SONG OF THE LOON AND GAY LUNATICS

GAY MAIL-ORDER WEBS GAYS TOGETHER

Famous in the Swinging 1960s, years before the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, the political, prolific, and best-selling Larry was so respected by his peer-group authors that Richard Amory, who conceived the meeting, invited him to join the first gay-pulp-fiction writers summit in San Francisco on June 15, 1970. This authors’ self-defense meeting was called at the same moment that the gay albino founder of Guild Press, the dysfunctional Lynn Womack, went to jail for printing photos of underage models after ten years of publishing dozens of gay 1960s novels for his Black Knight Classics line distributed by his Guild Book Service mail-order. This was at the expense of authors he held hostage like Sam Steward whose 1965 novel $tud Womack scandalously withheld from publication out of meanness while he hid out in a hospital to dodge his exploited authors. In gay history, this was ten years before the seven Violet Quill writers in Manhattan separated their literary selves from the pop genre of gay pornography and met for the first time to power up their own East Coast writers literary co-op in New York.

Larry drove from Los Angeles to meet the current San Francisco local authors for a panel discussion at the SIR Center, hosted by the Society for Individual Rights. This was the first time he met his host Amory who cloned his Song of the Loon trilogy out of Rousseau’s mythic homomasculinity of the Noble Savage in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales in which frontiersman Nattie Bumppo—clad in leathers and traveling with his Mohican brother/lover, garbed like half the Village People—scouted new American frontiers just as these writers were doing.

Amory introduced Larry to his fellow pre-Stonewall authors such as Sam Steward whom I had just met in 1969, Richard Fullmer, Peter Tuesday Hughes, and Douglas Dean who all admired his aggressive entrepreneurship, his sturdy marketing, and his best-sellers in a growing market where a total short stack of some thirty gay pulp paperbacks published in 1965 tripled to a hundred in 1966 and exploded to more than five hundred before Stonewall in the transformative year 1969 when gay director John Schlesinger’s movie of the 1965 gay novel by James Leo Herlihy, Midnight Cowboy, despite its homophobic X-Rating, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Larry listed Herlihy and John Rechy as required reading in The Leatherman’s Handbook.

Fullmer told Drewey Wayne Gunn at Lambda Literary on August 10, 2011, that he considered 1960s underground gay dirty books to be the fertilizer that nurtured the mainstream gay literature that followed. (Insert your own joke here.) In truth, these were men on the verge of a hybrid gay literature that was often both prurient and literary in their books that were illegal. These authors, all constantly threatened with arrest for writing their outlawed novels, looked to political activist Larry for ideas to resist arrest by police, exploitation by publishers, and persecution by puritans.

Dissatisfied with publishers’ corporate greed around royalties and copyrights, the writers convened to discuss founding a gay publishing collective to be named the Renaissance Group. God knows, it was needed. As a young author in 1969, I sent my first S&M novel, with its first line a literary homage to the first line in Studs Lonigan, to Greenleaf publishing, but refused its offer of $300 for the manuscript and all rights everywhere forever. When Frances Green, the editor of the Other Traveller gay series for Olympia Press, read of Larry’s San Francisco meeting, she invited the attending writers to send their manuscripts to her. Between 1970 and 1972, she and a second woman, Ginger Sisson, published many book titles with Greenleaf Classics in San Diego, including thirteen by Larry who was paid a flat thousand dollars per title, with no royalties, before Olympia went out of business letting his Handbook go out of print.

In the Townsend storyline, Larry lived as he died, stating his truth. Twenty-eight years after he began fighting for justice like a superhero around his literary rights in 1970, he died mad as hell in a raging firestorm of his own making in his lawsuit against gay bookstores and a publisher that tarnished his legacy in 2008.

Because in 1970 there was no gay publishing entity worth suing, and no court gay-friendly enough to hear such a case anyway, he channeled his frustration into action by starting his own boutique mail-order publishing house, LT Publications, in 1972, the same year the straight world was shocked open by the erotic art of Last Tango in Paris, and John Waters—whose first