A Guide For the Naïve Homosexual
Preface
About This Recreation

home page previous up next jump to foot of page Google search web for more information on this topic Pinterest pin button
©1971-2017 Roedy Green of Canadian Mind Products

Preface

Back in 1969 I wrote a book called A Guide For The Naive Homosexual which most people referred to as The Blurb. What follows is the 11th revision of A Guide For The Naive Homosexual self-published in 1971-03. In earlier revisions, it was known as A Gay Guide. It is of interest mainly as a historical document as part of the Gay Tides project to document our gay past. A lot has changed since then. It shows just how closeted and frightened homosexuals were in the late 60s prior to Stonewall. When I wrote this, it was considered ultra radical left. Now it appears reactionary. Even so, it stands up rather well as a metaphor for facing any fearful life change. The original was printed on goldenrod paper and typeset all in upper case in microscopic type, a limitation of the punch-card technology of that time and printed all in upper case on an IBM (International Business Machines) 407 lister. It looked like this:

blurb sample font

I have left it almost unchanged from the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scan, except for correcting typos and adding lower case and selecting a larger font. Other errors I have left untouched, such as confusing guilt and shame and being unduly hard on the Christians rather than the Kristians. This essay was written before we knew about HIV/AIDS and hence is overly casual about sex. I also painted an overly rosy picture of both what gays were like and what help I could actually deliver. For example, when I wrote the eleventh revision, I presumed the AA group and the chess club would soon take off. I wrote as if they already had. They never did. I made it sound as if all gays were just as altruistic as my closest friends.

I never did write another revision. I became too busy as chairman of G*A*T*E trying to end discrimination against gays.

You might notice a certain unevenness of style. That is because there were contributors who preferred to remain anonymous. Perhaps now they may be more willing to step forward and take a bow for the more memorable lines such as blackmail each other for amusement, smooth style, not crunchy please and put an a sou’ wester and gumboots and chase him around the room beating him with a wet salmon.

blurb front
front cover		 blurb back
back cover
Layout and art work by Robert Benn Best.

This page is posted
on the web at:

 http://mindprod.com/ggloss/blurb/preface.html

Optional Replicator mirror
of mindprod.com
on local hard disk J:

 J:\mindprod\ggloss\blurb\preface.html
Canadian Mind Products
Please the feedback from other visitors, or your own feedback about the site.
Contact Roedy. Please feel free to link to this page without explicit permission.

IP:[65.110.21.43]
Your face IP:[18.217.104.36]
You are visitor number