THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CRUISING
First edition of this witty, thorough, and highly contextual advice for the mid-'60s cruiser at home and abroad — published by "the first publisher to market his materials exclusively to gay men" (Clark).
Near fine.
Price: $900.00
THE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CRUISING
"This is a good place to mention a General Rule for Cruisers: be polite, be gallant, but stay the hell away from chivalry."
Cruising in 1964, as understood by the author of these guides to the art, comprised a whole panoply of skills and practices not limited to merely finding an interested party and signaling one's own interest: from personal presentation, dress sense, partner evaluation and initial flirtation; to restaurant choices, wine selection, and general savoir-faire; to becoming a good conversationalist through reading the right kind of books; to decorating a garconniere with taste and without vulgarity; to the tactic of making an acquaintance by posing as a vacuum-cleaner salesman and getting invited in; to spinning a satisfactory single encounter into a longer-lasting affair or full-blown liaison; to the well-dressed man's proper sequence of undressing (tie first, then cufflinks), to detaching a clingy boyfriend with a proto-ghosting breakup technique ("fade away unobtrusively").
Guild Press was founded H. Lynn Womack. Womack was a pioneering gay publisher, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) to market his books explicitly and exclusively to gay men, and certainly the first to publish such a wide variety of titles. Fiction, porn, how-to's, photography, non-fiction: Womach's titles strove to reflect the totality of gay life and as such "served as important steps in the emergence of a new attitude about gay life in the mid-twentieth century" (Clark 81).
A scarce time capsule of American gay male social history from a landmark press.
Read more: Philip Clark, "Accept You Essential Self: The Guild Press, Identity Formation, and Gay Male Community," in 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction, edited by Drewey Wayne Gunn and Jaime Harker.
The Object
First printing. Washington, DC: Guild Press Ltd. / Guild Book Service, 1964. 8.5'' x 5.5''. Original saddle-stapled photographic self wrappers. [4], 55, [1] pages, including covers. respectively. Trace wear. Overall bright and sharp.
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