Victor J. Banis


Victor Jerome Banis was an American author, often associated with the first wave of West Coast gay writing. For his contributions he has been called "the godfather of modern popular gay fiction." He was openly gay.

Life

Born in 1937 in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, Victor J. Banis was the tenth of eleven children born to William and Anna Banis. As a small child, Banis moved with his family to Eaton, Ohio, where he lived on a farm and finished high school in 1955. While still in grade school, he began writing Nancy Drew-inspired mysteries featuring his classmate Carol Peters, now the writer Carol Cail. In his memoirs, he writes about growing up in severe poverty.
On his own, he lived for a brief time in Birmingham, Alabama, before moving to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked in sales and floral design. In 1960 he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for 20 years and had his first literary success. He rapidly turned out a number of important novels, and he and his partner, Sam Dodson, collaborated on a number of nonfictional gay works as well as a few, generally insignificant novels. They also published magazines and edited for DSI, a Minneapolis publisher. Banis served as a tutor for various aspiring writers and acted as their de facto agent. He championed the early writing of mystery writer Joseph Hansen, among others. In 1980, he moved to Big Bear in the San Bernardino Mountains, and then in 1985 to San Francisco, where he worked as a property manager. In 2004, he retired and took up residence in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There he returned to writing full-time.

Writings

Banis's first published work was a short story, "Broken Record," that appeared in the Swiss gay publication Der Kreis in 1963. His first long work of fiction was The Affairs of Gloria, a heterosexual romance with a few lesbian scenes inspired by the recent popularity of novels with lesbian themes; it was published in 1964 by Brandon House, a Los Angeles paperback publisher. The novel was indicted by a federal grand jury in Sioux City, Iowa, for conspiracy to distribute obscene materials in a government scheme to crack down on materials deemed pornographic. Although some of his co-defendants were found guilty, Banis himself was acquitted.
He continued to write both straight and bisexual novels for Brandon House, but incensed by government censorship, he was increasingly drawn to depicting the struggling gay scene that was yet barely chronicled in American literature. His first significant work of fiction was the innovative novel The Why Not, 1966. A series of intertwining sketches of habitués of a Los Angeles gay bar, it was the first gay work published by a San Diego firm, Greenleaf Classics.
Finding the novel sold well, editor-in-chief Earl Kemp asked Banis to submit other gay novels. Thus was born The Man from C.A.M.P.. The success of the original novel was so great that Banis went on to write eight sequels. The series is historically important for several reasons. It was the first gay mystery series, already five in number before George Baxt could follow up on his success with A Queer Kind of Death, and the C.A.M.P. novels depicted what is probably the first openly out and joyfully unrestrained gay hero in American letters, the indomitable undercover agent Jackie Holmes.
Banis wrote under a number of pseudonyms for Greenleaf, Brandon House, and Sherbourne Press. They include Victor Jay, J. X. Williams, Jay Vickery, and others for his gay pulp fiction works. However, upon the success of The Gay Haunt, published by Maurice Girodias in his Traveller's Companion series, Banis moved away from the gay genre. He began writing heterosexual Gothic romances, again under a variety of pseudonyms. Jan Alexander and Lynn Benedict were two of the most popular. In 1977, he moved into more mainstream publishing with a historical novel, This Splendid Earth, written under the byline V. J. Banis and published by St. Martin's Press. Its success led to a sequel and opened doors at Warner Books and Arbor House. But by 1980, he was feeling burned out and ceased publishing.
In the early years of the new millennium, Banis found himself approached by various scholars seeking information about the history of gay publishing during those crucial years in the 1960s. Their number included Hubert C. Kennedy, Michael Bronski, Susan Stryker, Fabio Cleto, and Drewey Wayne Gunn. In 2004, Professor Cleto of the university in Bergamo, Italy, contacted Haworth Books about republishing three of the early C.A.M.P. novels and convinced his own university to publish Banis's memoirs, Spine Intact, Some Creases. In 2006, Bill Warner of GLB Press brought out a second trilogy of C.A.M.P. novels, and Michael Burgess of Wildside Press began republishing others of Banis's long out-of-print novels.
Banis began writing fiction once again. He appeared in a number of anthologies. Come This Way, a collection of new and some old stories along with excerpts from earlier novels, was published by Regal Crest Enterprises in 2007 with an homage from Drewey Wayne Gunn. The same year, Wildside Press published Avalon, a heterosexual romance set in the 1940s through the 1970s, and Carroll and Graf published the gay Western romance Longhorns, with an informative essay by Michael Bronski, his first new novels in more than thirty years.

List of selected works

  1. "Broken Record," in Der Kreis, 1963, by Victor J. Banis – short story
  2. "David Victorious," in One magazine, 1963, by Victor J. Banis – poem
  3. The Affairs of Gloria by Victor Jay – novel
  4. The Why Not by Victor J. Banis – novel
  5. The Man from C.A.M.P. by Don Holliday; included in That Man from C.A.M.P. – mystery
  6. Color Him Gay by Don Holliday; by Victor J. Banis – mystery
  7. The Watercress File by Don Holliday – mystery
  8. The Son Goes Down by Don Holliday; included in That Man from C.A.M.P. – mystery
  9. Gothic Gaye by Don Holliday; e-book by Victor J. Banis; included in Tales from C.A.M.P. – mystery
  10. Good-bye My Lover by J. X. Williams; e-book ; Goodbye, My Lover by Victor J. Banis – murder mystery
  11. Rally Round the Fag by Don Holliday; e-book by Victor J. Banis; included in Tales from C.A.M.P. – mystery
  12. The Gay Dogs by Don Holliday; by Victor J. Banis – mystery
  13. Holiday Gay by Don Holliday; included in That Man from C.A.M.P. – mystery
  14. Stranger at the Door by Don Holliday; by Victor J. Banis – novel
  15. Three on a Broomstick by Don Holliday – novel
  16. Sex and the Single Gay by Don Holliday – advice
  17. Blow the Man Down by Don Holliday;, e-book by Victor J. Banis; included in Tales from C.A.M.P. – mystery
  18. Brandon's Boy by Jay Vickery; The Greek Boy by Victor J. Banis – novel
  19. Man into Boy by Jay Vickery – science fiction
  20. Gay Treason by J. X. Williams – World War II romance
  21. Homo Farm by Victor Jay; Kenny's Back by Victor J. Banis – mystery
  22. The Pussycat Man by Victor J. Banis – novel
  23. Friar Peck and His Tale, published anonymously – novel
  24. The Gay Haunt by Victor Jay; by Victor J. Banis – supernatural novel
  25. Shadows by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  26. The Wolves of Craywood by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  27. House of Fools by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  28. The Second House: A Novel of Terror by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  29. White Jade by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  30. The Devil's Dance by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  31. House at Rose Point by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  32. The Girl Who Never Was by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  33. The Glass House by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  34. The Glass Painting by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  35. Moon Garden by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  36. The Bishop's Palace by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  37. Darkwater by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  38. The Haunting of Helen Wren by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  39. Blood Ruby by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  40. The Sword and the Rose by Victor Banis; by Victor J. Banis – novel
  41. The Lion's Gate by Jan Alexander; by V. J. Banis – Gothic romance
  42. Green Willows by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  43. This Splendid Earth by V. J. Banis – historical romance
  44. Blood Moon by Jan Alexander – Gothic romance
  45. The Earth and All It Holds by V. J. Banis – historical romance
  46. The Moonsong Chronicles by Jessica Stuart – The Moonsong Chronicles #1
  47. A Westward Love by Elizabeth Monterey; by V. J. Banis – romance
  48. San Antone by V. J. Banis – Western romance
  49. Spine Intact, Some Creases: Remembrances of a Paperback Writer by Victor J. Banis, edited with an introduction by # Fabio Cleto; revised – memoirs
  50. That Man from C.A.M.P.: Rebel without a Pause by Victor J. Banis, edited with an introduction and an interview by Fabio Cleto – anthology
  51. Tales from Camp: Jackie's Back by Victor J. Banis, with an interview and checklist by Drewey Wayne Gunn – anthology
  52. Avalon by V. J. Banis – romance
  53. Longhorns by Victor J. Banis, with a foreword by Michael Bronski – Western romance
  54. Come This Way by Victor J. Banis, edited by Lori L. Lake with a foreword by Drewey Wayne Gunn – collection of short fiction
  55. The Wolves of Craywood by V. J. Banis – supernatural romance
  56. The Devil's Dance by V. J. Banis – supernatural romance
  57. The Astral: Till the Day I Die by V. J. Banis – supernatural romance
  58. Life and Other Passing Moments by Victor J. Banis, edited by Robert Reginald – collection of short fiction
  59. Drag Thing by Victor J. Banis
  60. Lola Dances by Victor J. Banis
  61. A Deadly Kind of Love by Victor J. Banis