At its height, the list boasted at least three thousand subscribers. Johnson, who describes the book service in “ Buying Gay,” his book about the legacy of gay men’s physique magazines, told me. mailing list in the country, and maybe in the world,” David K. “In early-nineteen-fifties America, Donald Webster Cory had probably the largest L.G.B.T. The card, Segura recalled, had a note: “If you liked this book and you would like to keep notified of further books on a similar matter, please let us know.” Segura wrote down his address and sent it to the publisher.Ī few weeks later, he received a two-page newsletter announcing that month’s selection of titles from something called the Cory Book Service. Inside was a card from Greenberg, the small New York-based press that had published both Wahl’s novel and Cory’s book. In one store, on Forty-second Street, he found Loren Wahl’s novel “The Invisible Glass,” which depicts homosexuality and racism in the military. Segura returned to New York and, using the list as a guide, visited bookstores up and down Manhattan, snapping up all the titles he could find.
In the back of the book was a list of other titles addressing homosexuality. Cory argued that homosexuals were not troubled individuals but members of a distinct minority group who needed to organize and fight for their rights.
“I immediately bought it, and was quite entranced with the book,” Segura told Katz. He’d always assumed that, by the time he entered his twenties, he would develop desires for women, then marry and have kids.īut in 1954, on a business trip to Cleveland, Segura stopped by a bookstore and saw a copy of “ The Homosexual in America,” by Donald Webster Cory. “I learned very early in life, when I was a child really, that that and all sexuality were things to be kept to myself,” he told the historian Jonathan Ned Katz, in 1977. As his career in radiochemistry progressed, he kept quiet about his growing attraction to other men. Under strict secrecy, Segura tested which cleaning agents removed radiation most effectively from human hands. Snell, a New York-based engineering and chemical-consulting company that the United States Army hired to run radiation tests. He graduated in 1942, and subsequently took a job at Foster D.