Oh Dear!. This item is unavailable.Oh Dear!

First edition/first printing, with dustjacket: book fine, dustjacket good plus. Light blue paper-covered boards, red spine lettering, 8 1/4 x 5 5/8 inches, 181 pp. Dustjacket not price-clipped and in an archival mylar cover. A scarce title. (K051) Per Professor Drewey Wayne Gunn: Particularly in the immediate years following Stonewall, critics were hampered by political agendas that dismissed works that did not meet current activist standards. (How Gore Vidal escaped their disdain continues to amaze me. What other important gay writer has been so uniformly negative in his portrayal of gay men?) So writers such as Jay Little, when noticed at all, were reduced to being fantasy romance writers, and such a campy work as Milton Rebow’s Oh Dear! was completely dismissed. The latter is one of the funniest novels I have read, yet I would wager that almost no gay reader today has heard of it. Even a writer one might think would be recovered and praised—Ward Thomas, whose novel Stranger in the Land ends with the gay protagonist committing the perfect murder to dispatch his would-be blackmailer—has been forgotten. A myth has grown that all pre-Pride novels had unhappy endings. That’s pure nonsense. Even before the pulp explosion beginning in 1965, there were more than a score novels whose heroes found some degree of happiness. When one adds in just the late 1960s pulps, the number jumps to nearly five hundred.…