ANONYMOUS and Badboy Books: a 1990s moment in the history of pornography

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the 1990s a diverse group of female and male former college students from The City University of New York (CUNY) started to write pornography for gay men. The organizing force behind the venture was a young Hispanic man from the Lower East Side, soon to be known either as ANONYMOUS or Julian Anthony Guerra. He revised Victorian, Edwardian, and inter-war classics, adding extensions, but did so without any period research. Astonishingly, he was a novice. In the space of only five years (1992–1996), ANONYMOUS and his amateur collaborators produced a dozen books. Their work, for Masquerade and Badboy Books, included both ANONYMOUS's reworking of the classics Sins of the Cities of the Plain, Imre, and The Scarlet Pansy, as well as Guerra's edited anthologies of gay pornography, written with his friends. Although chapters in these collections appeared under male names, most were by women and most of the writers were straight. This article focuses on these CUNY amateur pornographers, nearly all of whom, including ANONYMOUS, moved on to other things. It is a fascinating moment in the history of pornography.