SONG OF THE LOON

San Diego: Greenleaf Classics, 1966. First printing. Near fine.. First edition of the classic gay pastoral romance once described as a cross between Andre Gide and Louis L'Amour. Though SONG OF THE LOON enjoys a secure status as the first gay Western, its Pacific Northwest setting is in large part a disguise worn by its heroes' true home: the Arcadia of the "highly erotic and extremely artificial sixteenth-century Spanish pastorals" the author judged to be "a perfect vehicle for a gay novel." Amory first encountered Gil Polo's DIANA ENAMORADA and Montemayor's LA DIANA during his graduate studies in Spanish literature, and explicitly pointed them out as his models in a prefatory note disclaiming any attempt at realism in his depiction of Native Americans: "He has taken certain very European characters from the novels of Jorge de Montemayor and Gaspar Gil Polo, painted them a gay aesthetic red, and transplanted them to the American wilderness." This pre-emptive defense against willful critical "misunderstanding [of] the nature of the pastoral genre" was as successful as such authorial pre-emptions ever are, which is to say, not very: most criticism has treated the Loon Songs books as publishing phenomena, as positive indicators of progress toward gay liberation, but not as literature. A welcome reassessment by Beth Boulokos places Amory's work in its proper context, in dialogue with not one but three genre traditions: gay pulp fiction, the Renaissance pastoral, and American utopianism, with all the deliberate anachronism, idealization, and improbability proper to that long and particular literary history. This combination proved a potent one, as each book in the series went through multiple printings and the series was formative for an entire generation of gay men. Uncommon in this condition. 7'' x 4''. Original color pictorial wrappers. 191, [1] pages. Trace shelfwear, rubbing. Overall, sharp and clean.