Queer Places:
Richland Cemetery, Florence, MS 39073
Carl
Vernon Corley (December 15, 1921[1]
- November 3, 2016) is an author and illustrator. Beginning in the 1950s, he
drew physique art for male beefcake magazines and for sale as posters. In the
1960s and 1970s, he wrote twenty-two novels of gay male pulp fiction. From the
1970s into the early 1990s, Corley continued to write stories for gay
pornography magazines. Corley also has written and illustrated non-erotic
projects, including Louisiana history and religious books. Gay historian John
Howard, who rediscovered Corley's gay pulp novels in the 1990s, argues that
Corley's work "complicates queer cultural studies by unsettling its urbanist
roots." Corley's texts are not typical stories of gay young men from rural
areas finding their ways to sexual liberation in cities, but instead describe
"many complex nodes of circulation, not just aggregation".[2]
Carl Vernon Corley was born in Florence, Mississippi, in 1921, growing up
there to graduate from Florence High School. During World War II, Corley
served in the South Pacific in the United States Marine Corps. From 1947 to
1961, he lived in Jackson, Mississippi, and worked for the Mississippi State
Highway Department as an illustrator and staff artist. From 1961 to 1981, he
worked in a similar position for the Louisiana Highway Department. In both
jobs, he designed and illustrated tourist guides, manuals, pamphlets, road
maps, and traffic surveys. He provided the cover art for at least one book on
Louisiana history.[3]
In the 1970s and early 1980s, he drew a comic strip dealing with Cajun
folklore for the Eunice (LA) News. He also wrote and
illustrated a Louisiana state history for a small press.[4]
Carl Corley in the 1950s contributed homoerotic art to physique magazines,
signing the work for publication with his own name. John Howard identified ten
Carl Corley posters sold by Sir Prise Publishers of Chicago. He describes them
as using master-slave imagery, but inverting the roles, where the
darker-skinned figure dominates the lighter-skinned one. When Howard
interviewed Corley in 1997, the older man told him, "One of my ambitions [was]
to be the greatest male physique artist of all".[2]
When Corley moved to Louisiana in 1961, he spent more time writing gay pulp
fiction. Between 1966 and 1971, Corley published twenty-two erotic novels for
the French Line by P.E.C. (Publishers Export Company) of San Diego and the Pad
Library of Agoura, California, publishers of erotic gay pulp novels. Providing
his own cover art, Corley also had the novels published under his own name, a
usual act for most writers in the genre.
Corley's work seems to have many autobiographical elements. His early
novels are set in rural Rankin County, Mississippi, including his hometown of
Florence, in the early 1900s. Many plots deal with young Southern farm boys
discovering gay sex, sometimes crossing racial or class lines. Some novels
involve urban plots in places such as Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Perhaps
most autobiographical is A Chosen World (1966),
whose narrator, Rex Polo, is born in Florence, Mississippi, in 1921, just as
Corley was. In the novel, Rex discovers gay sex in high school in 1936 with a
football player. Rex goes on, like Corley, to serve in the military in the
Pacific during World War II, and the novel details his sexual experiences,
including a gang-rape by drunken soldiers. By the end of the novel, Rex is
back in his hometown, becoming a physique artist, in love with his male model. Howard comments on Corley's novels that compared to
other gay pulp erotica, they "stood out as more sober, more earnest . . . .
[T]itles . . . evoke literary aspirations." Howard suggests that they
challenge distinctions of high-brow and low-brow writing.[2]
Carl Corley in his writing and illustrations provides a nearly unique
example of out gay expression in a predominantly rural, Southern setting in
the pre-Stonewall era. His work illuminates popular cultural expression as
well as gay experience and imagination in the rural South.
In 1998, Duke University bought from Corley his papers, including
typescripts and published copies of his novels, for their special collections
in gay and lesbian studies.[4]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Corley
- Men Like That, A Southern Queer History, by John
Howard