Strait to Hell: Remembering Gay Trailblazer Guy Strait

 

In his 1977 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, Guy Strait recalled, “I wrote in 1953, I believe it was, I published a small book called The Right to Go to Hell, wherein I said that I believe a man has the right to go to hell or heaven, whichever he chooses, at whatever speed he wishes, so long as he does not take anybody with him by force.” [1] The ironically named Strait would go on to make his mark in the publishing world, albeit not in the field of theology.

Strait, who was born in Texas in 1920 and died in San Francisco in 1987 – thereafter, presumably, departed for Hell – “was the tenth of 11 brothers and sisters and was about fifteen years old when he obtained his first camera,” relates Clifford Linedecker in his out-of-print and scarce 1981 true crime study Children in Chains:

Almost immediately, the young man began shooting photographs of flowers, plant buds – and nudes.

He was eighteen when he walked across the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico passing out Bibles and photographing natives of the area who either did not wear any clothing or very little. Years later, he would remember that he was a Baptist, and “quite a religious young man. But even as a Baptist, I was never convinced that the body was anything dirty.” [2]

 “And I know people may find this hard to believe, but I am an arch conservative,” Strait is quoted as saying in the Senate report [3], and he even purports to have campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon in Texas [4]. “The events of his life between 1961 and his death in 1987 are full of myth and speculation,” observes Edward Bear, a contributor to the gay Usenet group MOTSS [i.e., Members of the Same Sex] [5]. Linedecker describes the aged and incarcerated Strait as having “a barrel body, thinning white hair that sticks straight out from his head in unruly clumps, a hearing aid, and reading glasses that slide down his nose disclosing watery blue eyes. He looked every bit a mischievous old troll.” [6]

Before he was an incarcerated old troll, however, Strait was a prominent activist in the San Francisco gay community.  Harvey Milk’s 1977 election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors made him the first openly homosexual man to attain public office in California [7], and Kathy Kozachenko had become the first openly gay candidate to win an election in the United States with her successful 1974 bid for the Ann Arbor City Council [8], but the first openly gay person ever to run for office in the United States was José Sarria, who ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961 [9]. Known as “The Nightingale of Montgomery Street”, Sarria had originally planned to become a teacher, but an arrest for solicitation made that impossible. Taking work as a drag queen, Sarria became a local celebrity, a “homophile” activist and a critic of police treatment of homosexuals [10]. It was in this capacity that he made a connection with Strait. “The League for Civil Education [called LCE, or “Elsie”] began in March 1961 as the brainchild of Guy Strait and José Sarria,” relates Nan Boyd in Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 [11].

“Unlike the later Stonewall Riot in New York City in 1969, Sarria’s symbolic candidacy did not spark nationwide organizing among gays; but it did help set in motion developments that fed a steadily growing stream of gay political activity in San Francisco throughout the 1960s,” writes John D’Emilio, author of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:

In April 1961 […] a new homophile group, the League for Civil Education, appeared in San Francisco. Originally conceived as a “democratic” alternative to the tightly controlled [Mattachine Society] operation run by Hal Call, LCE boldly canvassed in the bars for members. However, its initiator, Guy Strait, proved as incapable (or undesirous) of presiding over a participatory organization as the Mattachine leadership, and LCE’s membership had only a paper status. But in October 1961, spurred by Sarria’s campaign, Strait began printing the LCE News and circulating it in the city’s gay bars to publicize the effort.

LCE News constituted the first sustained attempt to bring the movement into the world of the gay bar. Financing the endeavor through advertising from tavern owners, Strait distributed the free paper in the city’s bars. By the spring of 1962 its circulation in San Francisco alone exceeded the nationwide figures of ONE, the Ladder, and the Mattachine Review – 7,000 copies came off the presses. Even the Mattachine Review, which disapproved of the paper’s inflammatory copy, conceded that “LCE News captured the fancy of the gay bar crowd.” Lengthy articles about police abuses filled its pages, and Strait emblazoned the cover with headlines like “WE MUST FIGHT NOW.” The paper encouraged its readers to exercise their potential political muscle by registering to vote and casting their ballots as a bloc. In 1963, three mayoral candidates purchased ads in the paper. When police targeted Strait’s advertisers and coerced one into cancelling, the irrepressible publisher exposed that, too, and threatened to file suit in court. [12]

“Guy Strait’s newspapers survived their organizational roots,” Boyd continues:

The League for Civil Education folded in May 1964, when its board of directors walked out amid allegations of financial mismanagement, but long after LCE had ceased to exist, Strait’s gossipy newspapers continued to churn out lively commentary on bar culture and police impropriety. In 1963, the LCE News changed its name to The News, perhaps to signal a break from the League for Civil Education. In 1964, the periodical’s name changed again to The Citizens News, and it ran under this title until March 1967. […] In 1965 Strait began producing the Cruise News and World Report, a less serious publication aimed at a national readership. Ever mindful of police action and abuse, the Guy Strait newspapers were the first of their kind. With no intention of winning a Pulitzer Prize, they sacrificed style and aesthetics for gritty commentary that reached into the everyday lives of bar-going queers. [13]

“According to Strait, he moved into the porn business when an associate offered him $2,000 each to lay out two magazines,” notes Linedecker. “I was doing some publishing and it was no secret that I had thousands of negatives,” he quotes Strait: “It was pretty easy money.” [14] The Senate report characterizes Strait as a “nomadic child abuser” who “scoured the country searching for young victims for his pornographic films.” [15] It continues:

California police […] have a voluminous file on Strait, including detailed order blanks from his subscribers requesting sex-action photography for children as young as four years old.

Police estimate Strait made $5 million to $7 million from his business […]

“He had it all,” said Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Lloyd Martin. “Warehouse, editing lab, studio, pamphlets, magazines, books – you name it. The children would constantly file in and out of his house. California was his base.” [16]

“He was a specialist” and started producing pornographic films for niche perversions, Linedecker recounts:

Strait produced both heterosexual and homosexual material for specific markets. “If a man was into older women and younger men, I had it for him,” he says. “If he was into vice-versa, I had that for him. If he was into incest, I got that for him. If he was into pederasty, I had that for him.” Strait says he filmed his movies to order […] [17]

“A file in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office suggests that Strait operated a male brothel for little boys in Miami,” notes Robin Lloyd in the 1976 book For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America [18]. Strait “started making a considerable amount of money with what might well have been the first of the commercial chicken magazines: Hombre, Chico, and Naked Boyhood were among the titles,” Lloyd details:

At the same time, Strait launched a mail-order operation called DOM STUDIOS to sell the magazines, movies, and sets of photographs. Just what “DOM” stands for is a matter of debate. Police officials say it stands for Dirty Old Man, but Strait claims DOM stands for Dominus, the Latin word for “Lord”.

Once the DOM studio was rolling, Strait teamed up with another leading photographer in the chicken literary business, Billy Byars, thirty-eight, of Houston. One must assume that Mr. Byars was in the business strictly for art’s sake or whatever other fringe benefits there might have been. It certainly wasn’t for the money, since Mr. Byars is one of the heirs to the Humble Oil Company fortune. [19]

Strait’s new partner was well-connected. While vacationing in California, J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed a connection with Byars, Jr., “son of the oil magnate who had used the bungalow next to Edgar’s at the Del Charro hotel in La Jolla,” writes Anthony Summers in Official and Confidential: “With the help of an acquaintance [possibly Strait] he had made through knowing Byars, Jr., […] Edgar made the contacts necessary to have teenage boys brought to him at La Jolla.” [20]

Byars, Jr., is best known for producing The Genesis Children, a glorified chicken nudie film made in Italy, described in the Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film as a “psychedelic allegory awash in religious symbolism and youthful male nudity […] as a quasi-Luciferian figure summons American children to perform a religious rite on a desolated Roman beach.” The entry continues:

The only feature film of British naturalist and travel writer Anthony Aikman (1942-2011), The Genesis Children is a fairly pretentious mix of new-age mysticism and Christian allegory […] The film attracted considerable controversy – and is mainly remembered for – the abundant nudity of its young male cast, aged about ten to seventeen. […]

The Genesis Children grew out of producer and cowriter Billy Byars’s Lyric International, a company that in the 1960s had produced physique magazines and 8-mm and 16-mm shorts of adolescent […] nudes, available to an underground clientele by mail order. In 1971, Lyric attempted to break into the (semi)mainstream with The Genesis Children, shot in 35 mm. In the same year, the company also launched Zipper, a Playboy-esque periodical for gay men that featured nude photo spreads alongside “legitimate” interviews with the likes of Rod Stewart, David Cassidy, and Rock Hudson. Lyric International came to an ignominious end through the legal troubles incurred by Byars’s relationship with Guy Strait […] who engaged several of Lyric’s underage models in illicit sexual relations. [21]

In October of 1973, Byars, Strait, and twelve other men – including Christopher Lewis, son of actress Loretta Young and brother of Moby Grape guitarist Peter Lewis – were indicted by a Los Angeles County Grand Jury “in connection with a countrywide homosexual ring” on “sex charges involving boys 6 to 16 years old.” [22] At the time of the indictments, “Byars was by then abroad, reportedly in Morocco, and stayed out of the United States for many years to come” according to Summers [23]. “I wasn’t convicted,” Strait told Linedecker: “I was told to jump bail and they never did put out an interstate warrant for my arrest. Then when I tried to get tried for it (years later), they dropped the charges.” [24]. Strait ended up in Rockford, Illinois, “by invitation”, Linedecker continues:

It was April 23, 1976, and Strait was in Phoenix, Arizona, when he was arrested. He had left Rockford long before, edited “a small newspaper in New York”, and “bummed around the country” for a while. Nevertheless, the warrant was not tied to his activities in California, nor his bail jumping there. It was based on a nearly four-year-old incident in Rockford. He was charged with taking indecent liberties with a minor, one of three foster children of a friend, after filming them in a pornographic movie. They boys were thirteen, fourteen, and sixteen years old, and he was specifically accused of performing fellatio with the fourteen-year-old. […]

The boys testified against him in the trial, and he was found guilty. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison and served approximately three. [25]

The curious claim that Strait was “told to jump bail” and was not pursued for the California offenses raises the question of whether he had some benefactor in a position to protect him in that state. He told Linedecker about his plans after release to campaign for prison reform and to publish “three books he had already written. One is Memoirs of a Dirty Old Man. The others are Hell in Illinois, about prison life, and Tyranny’s New Home: Rockford.”  These titles never seem to have found their way into print, however. “He swore that he would not reenter the smut industry after his return to California,” Linedecker cites his subject, “although ‘if I was [of] a mind to, and I’m not, I could take the negatives I have and make a fortune.’” [26] Gay trailblazer Guy Strait was, as a 1977 Chicago Tribune article summed him up, “a child pornographer whose only regret is getting caught.” [27]

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation: Hearings of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978, p. 30.

[2] Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York, NY: Everest House, 1981, p. 228.

[3] Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation: Hearings of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978, p. 145.

[4] Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York, NY: Everest House, 1981, p. 228.

[5] https://archive.ph/DmZXZ

[6] Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York, NY: Everest House, 1981, p. 227.

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Kozachenko

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Sarria

[10] Ibid.

[11] Boyd, Nan. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, p. 221.

[12] D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 188-189.

[13] Boyd, Nan. Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 222-223.

[14] Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York, NY: Everest House, 1981, p. 230.

[15] Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation: Hearings of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978, p. 144.

[16] Ibid., pp. 144-145.

[17] Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York, NY: Everest House, 1981, p. 232.

[18] Lloyd, Robin. For Money or Love: Boy Prostitution in America. New York, NY: Vanguard Press, 1976, p. 85.

[19] Ibid., pp. 83-84.

[20] Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993, p. 377.

[21] Dymond, Erica Joan; and Salvador Jimenez Murguia, Eds. Encyclopedia of LGBTQIA+ Portrayals in American Film. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, pp. 138-139.

[22] Dore, Richard. “Sex Case Nets Playa del Rey Man Probation”. [Torrance] Daily Breeze (September 19, 1974), p. A6.

[23] Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993, p. 377.

[24] Linedecker, Clifford L. Children in Chains. New York, NY: Everest House, 1981, p. 239.

[25] Ibid., p. 240.

[26] Ibid., p. 242.

[27] Sneed, Michael. “His Only Regret: I Got Caught”. Chicago Tribune (May 17, 1977), p. 8.