The Outward Side by James Colton(The Other Traveller, 1...

The Outward Side by James Colton

(The Other Traveller, 1971)

 

The Other Traveller was a publisher affiliated with the Olympia Press that published books with frank homosexual content.  The Outward Side takes place in the 1960s in a small Californian town outside of San Diego.  Marc Lingard is a Protestant minister and a well-liked and respected participant in the civic life of the town.  He has a lovely wife named Margaret and is handsome and charming.  The problem is he is homosexual, but has successfully repressed his sexuality except for a passionate and affectionate affair with a visiting theatrical director the summer he was 17.

Six months after his marriage he replaces the marital double bed with singles and stops having sex with Margaret.  He masturbates compulsively and fantasizes about having sex with the young hunky California boys who parade around town in their tightly-fitting swim trunks.  When a (male) librarian in the town is arrested for hosting a "ring" of high school boys for orgies in his (nicely decorated) bachelor pad, Marc is thrust into a drama that results in him coming out and moving out of town with a hot blond 17-year-old, who after one night of sex pledges himself to Marc for the rest of his life.

James Colton is a pseudonym  for the well-regarded writer Joseph Hansen (1923 -2004; best known for his series of Dave Brandsetter gay mystery novels), and there is an attempt to make Marc a sympathetic and believable person.  The book is pro-gay and liberal, advocating for sex education and the rights of migrant workers.  The sex scenes (both real and imagined) are plentiful and explicit, and the writing about sex is, within the constraints of a pornographic vocabulary, erotic and unsensational.

 

So an odd book -- a strange combination of tones and genres that is an interesting depiction and product of a specific time and place: small town America on the cusp of Stonewall.