Through this first Checklist, I came into contact with Miss Damon, and because paperback lesbiana was blossoming on all the stands, we quickly resolved to publish another Checklist. I had fully intended to give Miss Damon full credit for her work last year; however, the mimeograph work on last year’s list was so poor, the quality of the paper so bad, and some unreliable reviewers fouled me up so badly on data, that I refused to foist off any portion of the blame on other shoulders.
The relaxing of censorship of recent years—as documented in the Supreme Court judgment relevant to _Lady Chatterley’s over_, etc.—has meant, in recent fiction, fewer taboos and in general a franker treatment of sexual themes. On the whole this is a good thing. However and unfortunately, it has also released a flood of trash and borderline erotica, of no literary worth and “interesting” only for the sexual content. Your editors have conscientiously waded through all this newsstand slush (and believe me, we get no kick out of it) because experience has taught us that even the worst peddlers of commercialized sex-trash sometimes come up with exceptionally well-written, honest and sincere work. For instance, Beacon Books (a subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Company)—some of whose paperback originals can be called printable only by the uttermost charity,—are currently also publishing the work of Artemis Smith, one of the major writers in the variant field today.
However, actually reviewing the majority of this stuff is impossible. Most of these books are not novels at all. They have impossibly complex plots—or no plots at all—since the story exists only as an excuse for the characters to jump into amorous exercise with the closest male, or female, or sometimes both. This sort of thing, “lesbian” only remotely, belongs more properly to the field of curiosa. One can, of course, display a Place Pigalle post card in a gallery with the Botticelli Venus, and classify them both as “nudes”. I personally consider this an insult to the Venus, and the devotee of “feelthy peectures” will find the restraint and taste of fine art too tame for his jaded tastes.
We are unalterably opposed to most censorship—but after wading through almost a hundred books whose only excuse for existence is to provide phony “thrills” for people too inhibited, too ignorant or too fearful to provide their own, well—we think wistfully of some self-imposed standards of taste.