What is your favorite Gordon Merrick novel?

I have read them all in the 80's before the Internet way before gay porn became so accessible. Beautiful men fucking each other, what more did a gayling need for wanking off. The earlier books have more romance, while the later books have more explicit sex, and many of the main characters tend to be needy bottoms.

My grandmother gave me several as stocking stuffers when I was 12, my parents were pretty pissed.

R2 12 year old should not be reading this stuff. LOL

I grew up in the south; at age 14, I discovered The Great Urge Downward at the bookstore at my hometown's only mall. Somehow, I got the courage to actually buy it. As unlikely as it may seem, it was one of those books "that changed my life": it helped me become comfortable with being gay and gave me hope for the future. Oh, and it provided jack-off material until I got older and discovered gay porn.

R2, wow lol, apparently grandma knew what's going on. Good for her. What did your parents say?

Dunno him.

I read "The Lord Won't Mind" when I was struggling with coming out. It was comforting and erotic.

When I was a horny tween, our neighborhood drugstore had [italic]Now Let's Talk About Music[/italic] stocked with the trashy sex novels like [italic]Scruples.[/italic] Looking back, I probably could have bought it without raising any eyebrows since they were clueless enough to be selling it in the first place.

The original mass-market paperback looked like this. Teen Me was too embarrassed to actually buy it, so I would stand in the "M" area of the fiction section of our local bookstore, reading it until I was so hard, I was afraid I might pop. Never had I seen such writing. I wasn't the only person like me in the world. Seminal, both ways.

[quote]I would stand in the "M" area of the fiction section of our local bookstore, reading it until I was so hard, I was afraid I might pop.

I did that wth [italic]The Spada Report.[/italic] LOL

This thread will hit 600 in no time..

Jinx, R11.

Bump

There's one last book finished by his partner, Charles Hulse, and published posthumously called "The Good Life".

They were dreck, but the only dreck I could find that was gay themed in my shitty southern town.

I remember shoplifting a couple of these novels when I was around 12 years old in the late 70s. Not that I couldn't afford to pay a few bucks for them. It was just the fear and embarrassment of bringing them to the cash register that I couldn't handle. It certainly confirmed my orientation when there was nothing else.

Weren't they all the same story? A gorgeous confused young guy meets a hot slightly older guy. Younger guy and older guy mysteriously look as though they could have been brothers. They have sex and fall in love. Then some conflict tears them apart. At which time, gorgeous young guy has sex with his mother (!). And then young guy and older guy are magically reunited for a happy ending.

Oh, yes, I read them all.

R17 And the gorgeous confused young guy is always an insatiable bottom (initially, at least) and the older one always has a huge cock ready to fuck. This is not too surprising, since they are romance novels with more convoluted plots and personal touches than the trashy mass-produced ones.

My favorite is the Great Urge Downward, where the gorgeous confused young guy gets gang raped by some local thugs. Thus begins his journey of discovery of his submissive sexuality!

My favorite is [italic]We, the Rich, Handsome, Hung, and Fabulous, to Whom Nothing Really Bad Ever Happens to.[/italic]

I don't remember which one I read first, but they were pretty badly written, but wonderful wank material. I LOVED Marion Zimmer Bradley's, The Catch Trap, which came out about the same time I "discovered" Gordon Merrick books.

The cover art is so amazing. who was the artist?

Victor Gadino, r21. Here's a 2011 interview with him from The Advocate. Regarding the Gordon Merrick covers:

I was very young and just starting out as an illustrator to make money. In those days you could make appointments with the art directors of the various publishing houses and walk in lugging a big heavy portfolio of original paintings and printed covers. Avon books decided to rerelease the Merrick novels as typical mass market romance paperbacks. Up until then they had simple covers and were sold in specialty shops or from "under" the counter. The head art director was a strong female with vision and a great eye. It was the early days of gay liberation and she recognized the time was right. She saw my talent and gay sensibility and gave me the assignment for the first cover, the most conservative one, An Idol for Others. I never met Mr. Merrick, but I was told he was not happy with the mature model I used and thought he looked too old. He was, however, very pleased with the eight covers that followed, all using handsome young models. I made sure to clear the gay issue with the modeling agencies before I booked the models. The guys that were comfortable with their sexuality, be it straight or gay, were fine posing. And those that were homophobic refused.

With each assignment I was given the book to read and the suggestion of a scene to illustrate. They were extremely sexually graphic for their time. Now that we are so desensitized by reality TV, I'm sure they seem tame. But they were are full of gorgeous muscle numbers, beautiful exotic locations, and they were well written. And I guess Avon Books was right about the timing. The books were so popular, men from all over the country wrote me fan mail about how much the books and the covers meant to them, helped them come out or cope with being gay. The one I wish I had saved was a glowing letter of appreciation from a Catholic archbishop! Go figure.

Here's page 2 from the link at r22, with more Gadino pictures and biography of Merrick:

My favorite covers are the ones that wrap around the book: 1) Perfect Freedom:

...and 2) The Quirk:

R24 It's not a book cover. It's just practically gay porn.

r26 Um there is nothing pornographic about it! If he was being donged maybe. They get away with worse than than on the regular romance covers

r25 that dude is like 'slip me the D daddy'

Great essay by Damon Suede here:

Waldenbooks late 70's - around Christmas time, i'm just wondering around and find a boxed set of these! I'm shocked and intrigued but too shy to buy it. but i'm a smart little gayling and head to the local used bookstore, and sure enough there they are, with the less gay covers. I buy them all, total wank material for months.

R25 Are those paintbrushes supposed to be a phallic symbols strategically placed near the ass of the other man? These covers are so clever... erotic without going over the line.

Trash. Utter trash.

They may be trashy, but I bet there's a bunch of former 70s/80s gaylings who are grateful for their existence.

I remember seeing a used copy of The Lord Won't Mind on sale on the beach as a teen. I was entranced by the cover. How I hovered around it but lacked the courage to buy it. I bought a copy decades later when I was in my 40s. I couldn't get into it. I still haven't read it. But I remember it fondly .

R34 The Lord Won't Mind felt dated even in the late eighties when I read them. But like others have said, at that time, there were very few books (or any other medium, for that matter) as explicit and unapologetic about gay love as well as sex at the time. Now you even have straight women writing gay stories all over the Internet and even getting published, although I think those books are more deserving of being called trash than Merrick novels, which at least contain some reflections on the sexual attitudes of his time.

Only 565 more responses to get to 600!

How come there was a 23 year gap between his first and second novels?

There's High Trash and Low Trash, R32. Merrick occupied the High Trash end of the spectrum along with Judith Krantz. It was an education in the tastes and mores of a certain segment of society at the time and you had the sense the writer was capable of a lot better but was happy collecting a paycheck.

I will say though, even when I was a gayling of 14, the casual racism of The Lord Won't Mind and the misogyny and incest of An Idol For Others put me off his other books, and I'm no hair-triggered snowflake. It was a look into another world but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

I ADORED Judith Krantz ! I still read her books on occasion,great fun.

Is there any gay writers today who write like Merrick?

r37, he wrote 3 novels between The Strumpet Wind ('47) and The Lord Won't Mind ('70), but they were not successful.

[quote] I ADORED Judith Krantz !

Mary!

r40, I've not read any fiction by William J. Mann (I've read his biography of William Haines, Wisecracker), but he cited Merrick as an influence.

If you guys like Merrick, you'll love Tory's by William Snyder.

It's a potboiler of the first water, about a hustler who ends up running a nightclub which is really a Mob front. There's a description of him giving a blow job that had my eyes bugging out of my head in the paperback section of the B Dalton in Western Plaza in Amarillo. I was too chickenshit to buy it, though, let alone shoplift it.

Do the Gordon Merrick novels hold up in terms of sexiness? Which one should i read first?

R45 Sexiness, yes. Plot, not so much, especially for the older books. Characterization can feel dated but actual holds up better than some other books from the 70's and 80's IMHO. I would recommend the last one he wrote, A Measure of Madness, for the young gays. It's mainly about an American and his relationship/obsession with a Greek hustler. More hot sex, less romance. If you can get through that one, then I would move on to Perfect Freedom and The Great Urge Downward.

they weren't well written but they certainly held my attention as a teen. I loved the Catch Trap, as the above poster mentioned, and of course the gorgeously elegant and lightly erotic historical novels of Mary Renault. And then there was the Front Runner and, best of all, Dancer From The Dance.

Dancer from the Dance moves into a different category of fiction--the whole Violet Quill group that aspired to High Art rather than Pop Markets. Holleran and White (and as time goes on, I find Holleran the better writer) succeeded, Picano not so much, and most of the others died too young to tell.

Dancer is The Great Gatsby meets Proust, but not in a simply imitative way.

I wouldn't mix gay lit with gay romance. Like with Mary Renault's Charioteer, you can literally read right through the sex scene and not realize it. No such problem in Merrick novels!!!

It made Mama's mussy moist!

It sure made my pants moist when I read them years ago when there was no access to gay porn. Merrick could write stimulating sex scenes within the context of a plot, which is not easy.

Currently reading Perfect Freedom and it's better than I had anticipated. No, it's not art, and the lack of chapters/sections combined with Merrick's penchant for constantly shifting the perspectives, even within paragraphs, is a bit disconcerting, but it genuinely engages the reader and Merrick clearly knew the world he's writing about. It's definitely better than the godawful, frau-written M/M crap that passes for "gay fiction" at Amazon.

I read "The Lord Won't Mind" and "One for the Gods" when they came out. I was old enough to buy books on my own without worrying what bookstore clerks thought of me or my purchase. I laughed every time Merrick referred to "his sex."

Was "The Strumpet Wind" about a prostitution whore?

I want to read "The Great Urge Dongward" someday.