Jane Gallion and the Tao of the female smut writer

The counterculture of the late sixties and early seventies provided rich fodder for pulp writers. Just as they had done with inner city juvenile delinquents and the Beats before them, writers took the most sensationalist aspects – psychedelic drugs, free love and political radicalism – to use it as material for their stories.

Many of these books are unmemorable. They were quickly produced, often highly formulaic, aimed at white working class readers seeking a vicarious thrill from perusing the often-exaggerated sexual and narcotic goings on in the communes and ‘happenings’ of the alternative lifestyle movement that was sweeping much of the West. And a lot of the authors were similarly forgettable. Pulp hacks, who did their research reading the local tabloid on a bar stool, and probably thought youth subculture were the kids that wouldn’t get off their lawn.

But, amid the dross, there were some real gems that captured the zeitgeist of the time as well as, if not better, than many of the mainstream literary offerings of the period. One of these books was called Stoned and its author, Jane Gallion, was a very rare female explorer in the now vanished world of smut writing.

Stoned has just been re-released by an outfit called New Essex House Press (more on that later). This is as good a hook as any for this post, not that I especially need an excuse to talk about Gallion and her work. My fascination with her originated when I was working on the first of three pulp/popular fiction histories that I co-edited for PM Press, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980. That would’ve been about a decade ago. I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but I read Stoned, and thought it would be perfect for late 1960s/1970s ‘hippy’ section of Girl Gangs.

Then I got obsessed with trying to find out more about Gallion herself. Not easy task given that she had lived halfway across the world and, in any case was long gone. Famous literary authors maintain detailed diaries and keep all their papers, which usually end up going to a university library. Gallion had kept nothing and there was only bits and pieces about her online. Most of the people in her circle had similarly passed or were hard to track down. When I found them, some did not want to talk to me or their memories were too fucked by age to give me much. It’s a story that is familiar to anyone who has ever done research into marginal or formally undocumented forms of culture. Luckily, her fourth daughter, Amber Nichols, was happy to speak and generously provided me with vital information about her late mother’s life and work.

It is more accurate to say that Gallion wrote erotica. It was just marketed as smut or, as Gallion often referred to her work, fuck books. As she wrote in a letter to a woman called Harriet Emerson, which originally appeared in Making Our Own Way: Rural West Virginia Women Artists, Emerson’s 1990 unpublished Master of Science in Journalism thesis:

I was the only woman smut writer in America for a good long while. There were others before me, Anais Nin and a few others in France, and plenty of them since. I don’t think I was so much discriminated against as treated like a dancing dog… I loved the acclaim, but shrank from the conflict of being a woman smut writer, and from the spotlight that working in such a field turned on my private life.

Smut paperbacks sold in huge quantities in the US in late fifties and sixties through mail order catalogues, adult stores, back issue magazine parlours and newsstands. The publishers engaged in an ongoing cat and mouse game with the authorities, who tried various methods to close them down. By the late sixties the publishers were winning. One of these publishers was Brandon House, set up by a man called Milton Luros.

Milton Luros, California, 1963 (courtesy of David Saunders,)

According to Sin-A-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties (2005), Luros was born in the Bronx, New York in 1911. Prior to entering the smut book trade, he illustrated covers for leading science fiction magazines. When the sci-fi magazine market collapsed in the mid to late fifties, he shifted his focus to illustrating for men’s magazines. He moved to Los Angeles, where he set a publishing group called American Art Agency. He revolutionised nudist magazines - then hugely popular as a form of semi-legal thrills - by making them glossy and using attractive models. He then shifted into softcore publications, establishing his own printing operation, London Press, and developed an efficient mail order business to distribute his product. His operations eventually grew into one of the country’s largest producers and distributors of smut books and adult magazines.

In 1966, Luros responded to retreating censorship laws by developing a line of books under Brandon House Library Editions, translations of vintage erotica, mainly from Europe, most of which had never appeared in English. He hired a jazz drummer and rare book dealer from Detroit called Brian Kirby to oversee the operation. According to Sin-A-Rama:

Kirby designed the covers, wrote the cover blurbs, supervised his team of translators, and hired novelists and poets to write Introductions at a time when most industry Intros were written by bogus PhDs to provide legally required redeeming social value, now matter how tenuous.

Soon, under the imprint Essex House, Kirby was publishing original erotic novels by poets and writers – no pseudonyms allowed – including Charles Bukowski and Philip Jose Farmer. Essex House also published Gallion.

It appears that Gallion first started writing while active in the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in the mid-sixties. According to Nichols, Gallion was married at the time to sci-fi author William Bert Ellern (her second of four husbands), who wrote stories set in the universe of the Lensmen series originally created by Edward Elmer ‘Doc’ Smith. This marriage brought Gallion opportunities to attend parties with big name sci-fi authors and film people. She remained in L.A. after the marriage broke up. “Things went financially unstable,” says Nichols, “and she was scraping for ‘a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of’ as she would say… poor during the mostly communal living situations in L.A.”

She got a job writing for Luros’s London Press. Her impressions of London Press, which appear in her unfinished biography, are worth repeating here in full.

London Press was a vast, ramifying empire of smut. The New Jerusalem of pornography. Its business offices, editorial suites, typesetting rooms, production and photography studios, darkrooms, warehouses and helipads clustered on the carcass of Fulton Avenue like a flock of turkey buzzards, flapping, squawking, proliferating. The parking lots were ponds, in which limos and ruinously expensive sports cars multiplied like bacteria. Forklifts buzzed and clanked as they trundled loads of paper into the warehouses from ranks of delivery trucks, and returned with steel-strapped bundles of books and magazines to load up other delivery trucks. Jaded photographers criss-crossed with camera straps hustled groups of tired-looking girls in and out of discreet side doors.

Were we in the right place? I wondered, clutching my firstborn manuscript to my chest. This was no dim redoubt where dirty old men squatted at dusty tables, scribbling “fuck” on underground walls. This was an industry, whose captains held meetings, commissioned market studies, attended conventions in corporation Lear jets attended by squads of yes-men, and maybe (probably) even chased busty, mini-skirted secretaries around the desks. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Through the front door, past a haughty receptionist whose expression suggested that she had now seen everything, I was towed, numb with shock, by a grimly striding Gene Henry. He stopped abruptly before an open office door and shoved me inside. When I came out again, I was a fuckbook writer.

Her first novel for Essex House, Biker (1969), was a dystopian porn story set in a future California ravaged by nuclear war and dominated by bikers, drifters and cults. The main character is a “bikebroad” called Feather, a speed addict and prostitute for a local biker pack. She decides she’s finally had enough of being sexually abused, murders and castrates one of the bikers and escapes into the desert on a stolen motorbike.

New Essex House Press has also re-released Biker, but I warn you readers, it is not for the faint hearted. It opens with a visceral gangbang scene and is packed with violence and graphic sex, both forced and consensual. Gallion wrote in the introduction to the 2001 digital edition of Biker that she ran the manuscript past the local biker chief in her neighbourhood, Baron, to see if it had authenticity, before submitting it to Essex House.

Its [Biker’s] sources were in the Vietnam era and the resistance and hostilities of the new women’s movement. I’d been through three divorces, by that time, had three children and very few job skills apart from the obvious: keeping house, having babies, placating men. I had just recently encountered Women’s Liberation and the fledgling drug culture, and was consequently so full of old rage newly recognised and new fury emerging as I watched that I just couldn’t keep on being compliant as I was trained to be. There was a whole other world out there – terrifying, brutal, bewildering, full of danger and potential enemies. But also full of possibility, of odds against, of slim chances, and maybe even a few rewards. And I had – Feather had – not a whole lot to lose.

Original cover of Stoned, Essex House, 1969.

Also published in 1969, Stoned was her second book for Essex House. It’s the story of Elaine Stuart and her husband, Randy, who live in outer suburban Los Angeles. It’s the late sixties but their lives are a world away from the hippy scene and the bright lights and fast times of L.A.’s infamous counter-cultural hub, the Sunset Strip. Elaine spends her days at home, chained to their two poorly behaved children. There’s never enough money and her sex life with Randy is in the toilet. Randy is equally frustrated. He loathes his job as a truck driver, hates his right-wing co-worker and spends much of his day fantasising about cheating on Elaine with other women.

One day Elaine’s best friend gives her a joint to help her relax. Life seems more chilled when she is stoned and dealing with the kids is easier. Randy turns on as well and smoking marijuana and taking acid leads to a revolution in their personal life. She begins a relationship with a younger man, a rock musician, and starts sporting a bronze medallion of a Cretan snake princess. Randy also starts swinging, but finds the life more difficult to deal with. But, on a more fundamental level, nothing really changes. Elaine still does most of the cooking and housework and they are still behind in their rent.

A slew of books and films depict middle class America’s attempts to deal with the shifting sexual and social mores of the late sixties and early seventies. These include Susan Kaufamn’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1969), made into a movie in 1970, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966), released as a film following year, the 1966 film movie adaption of Mary McCarthy’s 1963 book, The Group, and the 1969 comedy, Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice. It’s easy to dismiss Stoned as a low rent, smuttier version of these. It does indeed have some first class sex scenes, including a couple of great descriptions of sex under the influence of various hallucinogens.

Perhaps most interestingly, Stoned is about a working class couple. Their decision to embrace aspects of the counterculture feels authentic, with a lot more at stake than there would be for an affluent, middle class couple. The other thing I liked about Stoned is that it never veers into the heavy-handed morality parable territory of later books exploring drug use, like the notorious Go Ask Alice. There’s no sense Elaine is going to start taking smack and become a hooker to pay for her habit. Drugs open doors to new experiences, as well as throwing up challenges and questions. Elaine can fuck someone or have another joint, but she’s still got to deal with the basic inequality between the sexes. While the book has an explicit feminist orientation, it avoids being didactic. Randy is not a particularly sympathetic character, but neither is he a caricature. He is as much a victim of their circumstances as she is.

In addition to Biker and Stoned, Gallion’s letter mentions two other novels she did for Essex House: The Phoenix Business (publication date unknown) and an erotic science fiction novel called Going Down, which was sold to them but which it appears they didn’t publish (it is now available in digital format). In terms of payment, her daughter recalls it was “Anywhere between six hundred to one thousand or twelve hundred per book. Depending on length. They always gave her a bump up front to buy things like typewriter paper and supplies which were very expensive.”

Gallion also worked as an in house editor for Essex House and Brandon House from 1968 to 1971. In the late sixties she wrote a non-fiction feminist book entitled A Woman as Nigger, published by Weiss, Day and Lord in 1970. According to the back cover, it

Really tells what inside every woman’s head… what they are going to do and what they’re not going to do any more.

“Woman as Nigger was such a stupid title that the publisher chose and I believe it ruined her chances at a national audience with that great piece of work on feminism,” her daughter told me. Gallion’s letter mentions numerous other books that she wrote, including a number of smut novels, but publication details about these are unavailable.

Gallion and her children left LA in the early seventies. Her daughter says of the decision: “She told me that when the older kids saw three blades of grass and screamed ‘Park, let’s go to that park’, she knew it was time to head for the hills.”

They arrived in West Virginia in 1973 as part of what was called ‘The Back to the Land Movement’. This saw people leave the cities and move to rural areas to live on a small-scale basis and grow their own food. Paralleling the desire to get in touch with nature was the desire to reconnect with physical labour. Elements of the movement were captured in the 1969 movie, Easy Rider, when Wyatt and Billy visit a rural commune and witness former city based hippies struggling to eke out a living in harsh conditions. The migration, which had peaked by mid-seventies, was significant enough that it was identified in the American demographic statistics.

As Gallion put it in her unfinished biography:

The Back-To-The-Land movement sprouted from the seed time of the Flower Children, sown in the Sixties. America was still fighting the longest war in its history, the ghettos still burned with an unquenchable fire, and the few hippies remaining in the fabled Haight-Ashbury had staged a funeral for the corpse of the Movement. Hip was officially dead, and from where we stood, Amerika and maybe the whole planet might be following it. Apocalypse soon.

I found myself waking up sweating and trembling a lot in those days. I was haunted, as so many were, by dreams of nuclear holocaust. Most often the Night Mare caught up with me knelen [sic] on my kne [sic] in a jumble and chaos of possessions, scrambling and sorting, gathering together and casting away, unable to decide what to take with me as I fled from the approaching terror. It was a time of immanent [sic] destruction, the time of the Change, and if I didn’t get my act together pretty soon I was going to find myself understudying Lot’s Wife, turned to a pillar of salt as she looked back over her shoulder regretting her new slipcovers. Independence, possibly bare survival, began to look like a couple of acres in the country somewhere – far out in the country – with a pocketful of garden seeds and half a dozen chickens. In addition to the looming specter [sic] of nuclear disaster, the sixty-mile by forty-mile sprawl of metropolitan Los Angeles had become a howling inferno, populated by four million monsters and me. Seeking a solution to all this, I ate a hit of acid one night and in the morning descended through the smog and sirens with a piece of inside information not even Gene Henry [one of her partners] could pick holes in. I’d gotten the solution to both spiritual and temporal entanglements in one knock.

Gallion and her daughters left West Virginia and moved to Austin Texas in 1988. She eventually ended up back in Los Angeles, where she died of cancer in July 2003, aged 65.

Gallion gave up fiction when she moved to West Virginia but took up writing poetry. As she so evocatively put it in the letter to Emerson mentioned earlier:

I quit writing smut when I moved to West Virginia, because the topics I was being given to examine didn’t seem relevant any more. I could still write erotic fiction, but non-fiction was impossible. I never completed my last smut assignment, which was a 55-page piece about what bored housewives did with their free time- fuck the mailman, fuck the guy who mows the lawn, join a swappers’ club, etc. I ask you, who can get it up to write about shit like that when you’re living a couple miles up-holler from the hard road and cooking dinner for six to eleven hippies on a Coleman stove by lamplight?

“Over time I think her cynicism was a byproduct of doing the best she could with a, many times over, broken and trampled heart,” recalls her daughter. “I think she was also hugely disappointed with the sixties free love movement being pretty much a farce and full of mind games and sexual tension that she wished wasn’t there. She felt lied to about the ‘sexual revolution’ and set on a path of her own liberation - which SHOULD HAVE opened doors for many but her work was not taken seriously or didn’t land in the right publishers’ hands.”

Don’t let anyone tell you that writing pulp or smut or whatever you want to call it was ever anything other than a tough gig.

You can find the newly released versions of Stoned here.

Biker is available here.

And keep your eye on New Essex House Press. The man behind it Howard Griggs is doing it as a labour of love and has plans to release more books in the future, including other material published by the original Essex House.

As I noted earlier, the bulk of this article appeared in the book I co-edited, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980, which you can pick up from the publisher PM Press here.

The photo at the top of this post is Jane Gallion and daughter, West Virginia, early seventies, courtesy of Amber Nichols.