I tripped up over this remarkable study of fetish magazines in an academic second-hand bookshop, looking for something on magazine history.
When I did read it, at least two men of my acquaintance offered eagerly to borrow it, but I have to say, The Undergrowth of Literature is not a fun read. It made me glum and depressed. She very carefully avoids saying that readers took pleasure or relief, joy, happiness, or a welcome sense of community in this kind of reading.
In all other respects Gillian Freeman is a humane and empathic narrative voice, and mostly non-judgemental. She knows quite a lot about sex magazines. In she published The Leather Boys , her fifth novel, about working-class homosexuality, released as a biker film in , starring Rita Tushingham.
However, he drops a crashingly patriarchal brick in his Foreword, by criticising her use of humour when discussing these serious subjects.
The way she cocks a snoot is pure Monty Python, and I would like to think that her contemporaries, Messrs Cleese, Palin, Jones, et al could have been urged to read this book by Graham Chapman, who as a gay man and a doctor could well have known about it. So, onto the sex magazines.
