Barry Reay
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ANONYMOUS and Badboy Books
A 1990s moment in the history of pornography
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In the 1990s a diverse group of female and male former college students from the City University of New York started to write pornography for gay men. The organising 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 interwar classics, adding extensions, but did so without any period research. In the space of only five years (1992–96), ANONYMOUS and his amateur collaborators produced some dozen books. Their work, for Masquerade and Badboy Books, included both ANONYMOUS’s reworking of the classics 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 the majority of the writers were straight. This chapter, co-written with Nina Attwood, focuses on these CUNY amateur pornographers. It is an interesting moment in the history of pornography. ANONYMOUS gave us access to his private archive of his files of extensions and rewriting, so it is possible to discuss in some depth the recasting of erotic fiction from one era to fit the perceived tastes of another.

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Sex in the archives

Writing American sexual histories

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