John Preston’s Followers (75)

John Preston

Born

in Medfield, Massachusetts, The United States

December 11, 1945

Died

April 28, 1994

Website

http://www.duskpeterson.com/preston/index.htm

Genre

Gay & Lesbian, Literature & Fiction, Biographies & Memoirs

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John Preston wrote and edited gay erotica, fiction, and nonfiction.
He grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, later living in a number of major American cities before settling in Portland, Maine in 1979. A writer of fiction and nonfiction, dealing mostly with issues in gay life, he was a pioneer in the early gay rights movement in Minneapolis. He helped found one of the earliest gay community centers in the United States, edited two newsletters devoted to sexual health, and served as editor of The Advocate in 1975.

He was the author or editor of nearly fifty books, including such erotic landmarks as Mr. Benson and I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love. Other works include Franny, the Queen of Provincetown (first a novel, then adapte John Preston wrote and edited gay erotica, fiction, and nonfiction.
He grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, later living in a number of major American cities before settling in Portland, Maine in 1979. A writer of fiction and nonfiction, dealing mostly with issues in gay life, he was a pioneer in the early gay rights movement in Minneapolis. He helped found one of the earliest gay community centers in the United States, edited two newsletters devoted to sexual health, and served as editor of The Advocate in 1975.

He was the author or editor of nearly fifty books, including such erotic landmarks as Mr. Benson and I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love. Other works include Franny, the Queen of Provincetown (first a novel, then adapted for stage), The Big Gay Book: A Man's Survival Guide for the Nineties, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS, and Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong.

Preston's writing (which he described as pornography) was part of a movement in the 1970s and 1980s toward higher literary quality in gay erotic fiction. Preston was an outspoken advocate of the artistic and social worth of erotic writings, delivering a lecture at Harvard University entitled My Life as a Pornographer. The lecture was later published in an essay collection with the same name. The collection includes Preston's thoughts about the gay leather community, to which he belonged. His writings caused controversy when he was one of several gay and lesbian authors to have their books confiscated at the border by Canada Customs. Testimony regarding the literary merit of his novel I Once Had a Master helped a Vancouver LGBT bookstore, Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium, to partially win a case against Canada Customs in the Canadian Supreme Court in 2000. Preston also brought gay erotic fiction to mainstream readers by editing the Flesh and the Word anthologies for a major press.

Preston served as a journalist and essayist throughout his life. He wrote news articles for Drummer and other gay magazines, produced a syndicated column on gay life in Maine, and penned a column for Lambda Book Report called "Preston on Publishing." His nonfiction anthologies, which collected essays by himself and others on everyday aspects of gay and lesbian life, won him the Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Award. He was especially noted for his writings on New England.

Although primarily known as a gay fiction writer, Preston was also hired by a local newspaper, The Portland Chronicle, to write news articles and features about his adopted hometown of Portland. He wrote a long feature about the local monopoly newspaper, the Portland Press Herald, as well as many food articles movie reviews and other writing.

In addition, Preston wrote men's adventure novels under the pseudonyms of Mike McCray, Preston MacAdam, and Jack Hilt (pen names that he shared with other authors). Taking what he had learned from authoring those books, he wrote the "Alex Kane" adventure novels about gay characters. These books, which included "Sweet Dreams," "Golden Years," and "Deadly Lies," combined action-story plots with an exploration of issues such as the problems facing gay youth.

Preston was among the first writers to popularize the genre of safe sex stories, editing a safe sex anthology entitled Hot Living in 1985. He helped to found the AIDS Project of Southern Maine. In the late 1980s, he discovered that he himself was HIV positive.

Some of his last essays, found in his nonfiction anthologies and in his posthumous collection Winter's Light, describe his struggle to come emotionally to terms with a disease that had already killed many of his friends and fellow writers.

He died of AIDS complications on April 28, 1994, aged 48, at his home in Portland. His papers are held in the Preston Archive at Brown University.

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Combine Editions
John Preston’s books

Average rating: 3.91 · 1,581 ratings · 199 reviews · 44 distinct works • Similar authors

	Mr. Benson 3.85 avg rating — 492 ratings — published 1983 — 13 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Franny, the Queen of Provincetown: A Novel 4.06 avg rating — 134 ratings — published 1983 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Flesh and the Word: An Anthology of Erotic Writing by John Preston (Editor), Ray Waldheim (Contributor), Lars Eighner (Contributor) 3.69 avg rating — 111 ratings — published 1992 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	I Once Had a Master 4.14 avg rating — 95 ratings — published 1984 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Love of a Master 3.98 avg rating — 58 ratings — published 1987 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Entertainment for a Master 3.78 avg rating — 58 ratings — published 1986 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Hometowns 3.76 avg rating — 50 ratings — published 1991 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sweet Dreams (The Mission of Alex Kane, #1) 3.91 avg rating — 46 ratings — published 1984 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Winter's Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer 4.06 avg rating — 34 ratings — published 1997 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	My Life as a Pornographer & Other Indecent Acts 4.19 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 1993 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Series by John Preston

The Mission of Alex Kane (6 books)
by

John Preston

3.94 avg rating — 142 ratings

Quotes by John Preston (?)

“The way to get better pornography is to give pornographers better sex.”
― John Preston, My Life as a Pornographer & Other Indecent Acts

tags: pornography

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“Where we come from is important to who we are….Do we sense that we fit? Do we feel welcome? Do we experience ourselves as valued members of the community? How are we perceived by our neighbors and peers? These are among the most fundamental questions we have to answer.

Most men begin with the promise that we are, in fact, welcome. The boy child is, in almost all our known contexts, the heir. He has a right to assume that he will acquire whatever is possible in his world. If his background includes being the member of a disenfranchised group because of race, religion, ethnic background, or class status, he still has the expectation of achieving the most that background will give him.

The gay man, since he is primarily a man, begins with those assumptions. It isn’t until he comes of age and understands his sexual identity and the way it separates him from his birth community that a gay man achieves a perception of being a member of this particular minority….

One of the first questions that a gay man has to answer revolves around the basic issue: Where do I belong? Having grown up as a privileged member of his community, he will now have to ask himself if he can stay there. For years, gay men thought they only had two choices: They could either sublimate their erotic identities and remain in their hometown, or they could move to large centers of population and lose themselves in anonymity. There was no way for a gay man to have a hometown and still be honest with himself. He had to hide his social and sexual proclivities, or else he had to give up communal life in pursuit of them.”
― John Preston, Hometowns

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John Preston’s Followers (75)

John Preston

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