![]()
The following is an excerpt from 'Sin-a-Rama: Sleaze Sex Paperbacks of the Sixties,' a new anthology about the smut-filled porno novels that sold by the millions throughout the decade. In the following essay, Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer Robert Silverberg divulges how he and other authors learned their sleaze craft. 'Sin-a-Rama' is out now through Feral House publishing.
This is how I might write it if I were writing it
today:
"Come on," she said, her green eyes wild
with hunger for it. "Are you ready to fuck or
aren't you?"
Her clothes dropped away and instantly,
at the sight of her full, hard-nippled breasts
and the dense, dark thatch of hair at the
base of her belly, his cock sprang up into
aching rigidity. She grinned and came toward
him and knelt before him, slipping one hand
under his balls and grasping his stiff shaft
with the other.
"Go on," Holman said hoarsely. "Suck it!
Oh, Jesus, suck it, babe!"
She tickled the tip of his dick with her
tongue and rubbed it voluptuously for a
moment or two between the heavy mounds of
her tits, and then her lips slid over him and
she took him into her mouth. Deep. Amazingly
deep. And moved slowly back and forth, back
and forth, wringing moans from him, driving
him wild with sensation. Her mouth was as
soft and as sweet as a velvet cunt. She
squeezed his balls lightly as she sucked. He
could feel the jism starting to pulse within
him, on the verge of leaping forth into her
throat. But then she pulled back and spread
herself for him, and an instant later, to his
amazement and delight, his hard cock was
plunging into the hot, throbbing depths of her
moist pussy, and—
The year was 1959, though, and the
American government's ideas of what was
permissible to print and sell through normal
commercial channels was very different, so
this is what I actually wrote:
She undid the garter-belt herself, and rolled
down the stockings, and then she was nude,
and he stood up, dropping his trousers, and
she reached out and caught his arm and
pulled him down again, and they rolled off the
couch together, down onto the carpeted floor.
For what might have been an hour they lay
there, side by side, lips glued, hands roaming
up and down bodies, breath coming shorter
and shorter. Holman opened his eyes and
saw her staring at him, her eyes moist and
the pupils that peculiar shade of green again.
He smiled into her eyes and brought his fingers
lightly down the small of her back, pausing
at the dimples just above her firm,
swelling buttocks.
It was like pulling a trigger. She began to
gasp excitedly, and she dragged him over on
top of her, her eyes going tight shut, her lips
drooping open, moist and passionate.
"Now, darling! Take me now!"
She shuddered convulsively as the
moment of union came. Her thighs tightened
around him, and she began to writhe and
moan—an animal moan, low and deep in her
throat, coming from the same place that
those deep, sad blues came from.
Holman clenched his teeth and gripped her
shoulders tight, and she cried out three times,
a whimper of excitement following, and then
they were thundering away together on a tornado
of passion, and she dug her fingernails
into the skin of his back and gasped out
breathlessly, "Oh oh oh oh," and Holman felt
the explosion in his loins, and then they were
lying quietly all of a sudden, limp and sweat-soaked,
and he could feel the pounding of her
heart when he touched her breasts, and the
fireworks stopped.
It was over.
Hot stuff, yes? Well, actually it is, in its quaint fashion. No tits or cocks or cunts are mentioned, or any other nasty Anglo-Saxon words, no clits, no moist pussies, no vivid descriptions whatsoever of genital organs, erect or otherwise—not even of pubic hair; and an orgasm isn't a fountain of hot jism or anything else anatomically specific, it's a metaphorical "explosion in the loins." People don't fuck or screw, they experience "union." The tone is very antiseptic, almost prim, you would say. Even so, all the basic ingredients of the good old beast with two backs are there, the moans and groans, whimpers of excitement, and, yes, the explosion in the loins—everything you would want in a scene describing passionate sex, if you were living in 1959.
This was, in fact, the opening erotic passage in Love Addict, published by Nightstand Books of Chicago in October of that year—the first of about 150 novels of what we now would regard as very innocent softcore porn that I would write over the next five years for Nightstand under the pseudonym of "Don Elliott."
That's right. 150 full-length novels in five years. 30 a year, better than one every two weeks, month in and month out, between 1959 and 1964. Written on a manual typewriter, no less. (There were no computers then, not even IBM Selectric typewriters.) Other writers whose names would surprise you very much were turning the books out at almost the same sizzling pace. We were fast in those days. But of course we were very young.
I was 24 years old when I stumbled, much to my surprise, into a career of writing sex novels. I was then, as I am now, primarily known as a science-fiction writer. But in 1958, as a result of a behind-the-scenes convulsion in the magazine-distribution business, the whole s-f publishing world went belly up. A dozen or so magazines for which I had been writing regularly ceased publication overnight; and as for the tiny market for s-f novels (two paperback houses and one hardcover) it suddenly became so tight that unless you were one of the first-magnitude stars like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov you were out of luck.
![]()
'Spicy Meatball Swap' by H.C. Hawkes cover art by Robert Bonfils
I had been earning a very nice living writing s-f since my graduation from college a few years earlier. I had a posh five-room apartment on Manhattan's exclusive West End Avenue ($150 a month rent—a fortune then!), I had fallen into the habit of spending my summer vacations in places like London
and Paris, I ate at the best restaurants, I was
learning something about fine wines. And
suddenly two thirds of the magazines I wrote
for were out of business, with a slew of older
and better established writers competing for
the few remaining slots.
But I was fast on my feet, and I had some
good friends. One of them was Harlan
Ellison, a science-fiction writer of my own
age, who—seeing the handwriting on the
wall in the s-f world—had left New York to
accept a job in Chicago as editor of
Rogue,
an early men's magazine that was trying
with some success to compete with its
crosstown neighbor,
Playboy. The publisher
of Rogue was William L. Hamling, a clean-cut
young Chicago suburbanite whose first
great love, like Harlan's and mine, had been
science fiction. Bill Hamling had published
an s-f magazine called
Imagination, which
bought one of my first stories in 1954. From
1956 on, he had paid me $500 a month to
churn out epics of the spaceways for him on
a contract basis. Now, though, Imagination
was gone, and Hamling's only remaining
publishing endeavor was his bi-monthly
girlie magazine.
Harlan, soon after going to work for him,
convinced Bill that the future lay in paperback
erotic novels. Hamling thought about it
for about six minutes and agreed. And then
Harlan called me.
"I have a deal for you, if you're interested,"
he said. "One sex novel a month, 50,000
words. $600 per book. We need the first one
by the end of July."
It was then the beginning
of July. I didn't hesitate. $600 a month was
big money in those days, especially when you
were a young writer at your wits' end because
all your regular markets had crashed and
burned. One book would pay four months'
rent. They were going to publish two paperbacks
a month, and I was being offered a
chance to write half the list myself. "You bet,"
I said. By the end of July, Harlan had
Love
Addict—a searing novel of hopeless hungers,
demanding bodies, girls trapped in a torment
of their own making, et cetera, et cetera. (I'm
quoting from the jacket copy.)
Bill Hamling loved Love Addict. By return
mail came my six hundred bucks and a
request for more books. I turned in
Gang Girl
in September. I did The Love Goddess in
October. Later that month I wrote
Summertime
Affair
also. Two novels the same
month? Why not? I was fast, I was hungry, I
was good.
In October, also, the first two Nightstand
Books went on sale—mine and something
called
Lust Club, by another young writer who
also was making a quick adaptation to
changes in his writing markets. His book, like
mine, was really pretty tame stuff. What we
were writing, basically, were straightforward
novels of contemporary life, with very mild
interludes of sexual activity every 20 or 30
pages. But the characters actually did go to
bed with each other, and we did try to
describe what they were doing and how they
felt in as much detail as the government
would allow.
At that time, fairly rigid censorship still
prevailed in American publishing. It was illegal
to publish or sell such classics of erotic literature
as
Tropic of Cancer or Lady Chatterley's
Lover, and even the presence of words like
"fuck" or "cunt" in a book could bring its publisher
a call from the district attorney's office.
To a reading public eager for vicarious sexual
thrills, Bill Hamling's Nightstand Books,
which were openly and widely distributed,
offered a commodity that was in instant and
enormous demand. Incredible quantities of
the first two books were sold. It was impossible
to reprint them fast enough.
Hamling sent me a bonus of $200 for each
book I had written thus far, and raised my
price to $800 from then on. And he decided to publish four titles a month instead of two.
"Can you possibly write two books a month
for us?" he asked.
![]()
'Mata Harlot' by Gregg Stevens, cover artist unknown 1969
A Nightstand Book, you understand, was a
212-page double-spaced manuscript. I was
setting myself up for an unthinkable amount
of typing—not to mention the problem of
inventing plots, characters, setting, all that
stuff. But I didn't hesitate to say yes. I could
type quickly and I could think quickly. And I
had arrived at a perfect formula for these
books. They were stories about ordinary people
who were in the grip of powerful sexual
obsessions that got them into trouble.
What I did was take a sympathetic character
(male or female, it made no difference) who
has normal, healthy sexual desires that are
somehow being frustrated—the hard-working
husband who suddenly feels a powerful need
to have an affair, the woman who unexpectedly
discovers that drinking too much makes
her want to let go of her sexual inhibitions,
with all the risk that that involves. Remove
the frustration. But the fulfillment of the
desires leads to complications and then
more complications, which create tensions
that can best be satisfied by more sex, and
so on and on, in and out of bed and in and
out of trouble, until in the end everything is
resolved and the protagonist's life shows
signs of becoming calmer.
Any setting would do. I just had to pick my
characters and set them in motion against a
vivid background. I told tales of illicit goings on
at plush Caribbean resorts, of high school
kids learning what to do with their bodies, of
suburban swap clubs. Where I could make
use of my own experiences, such as they had
been at the age of 25 or so, I did. The rest
I spun out of whole cloth, or out of my own
teeming, steamy fantasies. (I had grown up
in the repressed 50s, and had plenty to
fantasize about.)
I wrote Pawn of Lust and Nudist Camp in
November, 1959. I wrote
Warped Lusts and
Suburban Wife in December. January produced
only
Sin on Wheels, but in February
came
Sin Ranch and Trap of Desire. And so
on and so on, month after month. Each book
took me exactly six days: one chapter of
16–18 pages before lunch, one of 16–18
pages after lunch, 12 chapters and 212
pages in all. No book came out short and
none, of course, ran long: I became adept in
moving my characters around in such a way
that the climax of the plot always arrived on
schedule in Chapter Twelve.
The books sold well and more retroactive
bonuses were paid me for the early titles.
Now I was getting $1200 a book for the new
ones. That was an income of better than a
thousand dollars a week at a time when dinner
for two at the finest restaurant in New York cost about $40, including a bottle of
first-rate French wine. My new career in
pornography was rapidly making me rich.
I felt absolutely unabashed about what I
was doing. Writing was my job, and I was
working hard and telling crisp, exciting stories.
What difference did it make, really, that
they were stories about people caught in
tense sexual situations instead of people
exploring the slime-pits of Aldebaran IX? I
experienced the joy—and there is one,
believe me—of working hard and steadily,
long hours sitting at a typing table under the
summer sun, creating scenes of erotic tension
as fast as my fingers could move. Of
course, what I was writing was not
"respectable," not even slightly, and so when
people asked me what I did for a living I told
them I was a science-fiction writer. (I was still
writing some of that, too, as a sideline.) I
could hardly tell my neighbors in my elegant
suburban community that I was a professional
pornographer.
But was I really writing pornography?
Not if the use of "obscene" words or graphic
physiological description is your definition of
pornography. As the sample I quoted above
should show, the stuff was really laughably
demure. Everything was done by euphemism
and metaphor. No explicit anatomical
descriptions were allowed, no naughty words.
About as far as you could go was a phrase
like "they were lying together, and he felt the
urgent thrust of her body against him, and
his aroused maleness was penetrating her,
and he felt the warm soft moist clasping and
the tightening..."
![]()
'Mistress of Satan's Roost' by Jack Kahler, cover artist unknown 1967
Unmistakably these people are Doing It.
But his "maleness" is what's penetrating her,
not his cock or his prick or his dick, and
something is clasping and tightening, presumably
a vagina, but we aren't told that in
so many syllables. Characters didn't "come"
—they reached "the moment of ecstasy."
Men had neither cocks nor balls; they had
"loins." Foreplay was a matter of cupping
breasts and letting a hand "slip lower on her
body." Anal sex? No such concept. Dildos
and other sex toys? Forget it. Oral sex was
indicated by saying, "He kissed her here and
he kissed her there, and then he kissed her
there." And so forth. None of it was much
spicier than Peter Rabbit.
I limited myself to words that were in the
dictionary because I had been warned at the
outset that the publisher would not tolerate
what he termed "vulgarisms" in the books.
One reason for this was that he genuinely didn't like them—he was basically a very
earnest and straight type of guy, who would
much rather have been publishing science
fiction—but also he knew that might very
well go to jail if he started printing them.
Jail, yes—no matter what the First
Amendment might say. (And eventually he
did, many years later—not for publishing
sexy novels, but for violating the postal code
by sending an advertisement for an illustrated
history of erotic art and literature through
the mails!)
The list of what was a "vulgarism,"
though, kept changing in line with various
court actions and rulings affecting
Nightstand's competitors in the rapidly
expanding erotic-book business. All across
the nation, bluenosed civic authorities were
trying to stamp out this new plague of smut.
Whenever a liberal-minded judge threw out
a censor's case, the word came down to us
that we could take a few more risks in what
we wrote, although our prose remained
exceedingly pure by later publishing standards.
And whenever some unfortunate
publisher was hit by a fine, the word was
passed to the little crew of Nightstand regulars
that we had to try to be more proper.
One day the word "it" became a vulgarism.
"It" as in "'Do it,' she cried," I mean. By this
time Harlan Ellison had moved along to
Hollywood, and my Nightstand editor in
Chicago was Algis Budrys, another top science-fiction
writer who had found it necessary
after the s-f crash to switch from freelance
writing to editing. Budrys phoned me to say
that I must restrict my use of "it" from now
on. I took a look at a recently published
book of mine and saw that they had indeed
changed all my "it"s to "that"s, creating
stuff like: "Do that,' she cried. 'I want that!
I want that!'"
This sounded nuts to me, and I told
Budrys I would refuse to abide by it. To prove
it, I turned in a book in which "it" was just
about every other word: "Give it to me! I
want it! It! It! I must have it!" I was the star
of the line, the first and most reliable and
prolific writer they had, and I got my way. "It"
was removed from the list of vulgarisms.
![]()
'Donnie and Clyde' by Sam Dodd, cover art by Darrel Millsap 1968
By this time—it was about 1962—I was
turning out three Nightstand books a
month. It was a fantastic amount of work to
do, but I had no choice. Like many writers
(Sir Walter Scott, for example, or Mark
Twain) I had gone in for owning fancy real
estate. I had bought myself an enormous
mansion in the finest residential neighborhood of New York City, close to the
Westchester County line, for the immense
sum (then) of $80,000. The place had 20
rooms, all of which needed to be painted
and furnished, and then too I had to think
about the heating bill, property taxes, etc.,
etc. So I upped the output. The record for
June, 1962, for example, shows
Unnatural,
Illicit Joys, and The Flesh is Willing—a typically
productive month. That month the plumbing
in the house broke down and I remember a
team of five plumbers digging around in the
back yard, simply trying to locate the water
main, while I sat upstairs trying to turn out
words fast enough to earn more than their
combined hourly rate. And did.
One way I managed to keep up this amazing
level of output was to assemble a sheaf of
what I called "modules"—prefabricated sex
scenes that I could simply plug into any
book. Plots and characters had to change
from book to book, of course, but under the
highly restrictive rules we were forced to use
there were only so many ways to describe
what my people were up to in bed, and so I
extracted relevant scenes from my books—a
basic seduction scene, a copulation scene,
a voyeurism scene, a rape scene, a lesbian
scene, and so on—and recycled them into
the new manuscripts in the appropriate
places, as needed. Nobody ever objected. (If
computers had existed then, I could have
done it all with a single keystroke. Instead I
had to type it all out, over and over.)
The Nightstand line now was running to
eight or ten books a month, maybe more,
and as the list grew, a lot of other clever
young men joined the roster of writers.
(Entry to the list was by invitation only—the
publisher didn't want to deal with amateurs,
only with crafty young pros.) In an insecure
career like freelance writing, those guaranteed
monthly checks were very tempting.
You would probably be astonished at how
many eventually-famous writers were among
my colleagues at Nightstand. We were like a
bunch of future major-leaguers getting a
chance to sharpen our skills in Triple-A
minor-league baseball.
I won't name names, because it's not my
place to do so. But I can tell you that two of
today's most widely admired mystery novelists,
now enormously popular and successful,
were Nightstand regulars under the names of
"Andrew Shaw" and "Alan Marshall." Their
work for Nightstand usually had a broadly
comic touch, which mine never did. (Sex was
always Serious Stuff to me.) Another, who wrote under the name of "J.X. Williams,"
became a major best-selling author of historical
novels, specializing in American history,
and I mean major. The author of the "Don
Bellmore" books went on to a career as a
Hollywood writer. "Clyde Allison" was the
pseudonym used by a brilliant young mainstream
novelist who died of alcoholism
while still in his thirties. And, though I have no
proof of this, I was told on good authority
long ago that one of the Nightstand writers
was a man who was already a best-selling
author even then, and who was knocking
out Nightstands on the side for the fun of it,
without his wife's knowledge (or his regular
publisher's) and having the payments sent
to the mistress he was keeping.
We were all working hard, and having fun,
and making plenty of money. (So was the
publisher, who left Chicago for a Palm
Springs estate.) Of course, all sorts of governmental
units right up to the Federal level
were trying to put us out of business, and
there were indictments all over the place,
and a nasty censorship trial in Houston.
Since we writers worked under pseudonyms,
and got our checks from a dummy
corporation, we weren't involved in that.
But one day the FBI came to talk to me.
It was all very silly. I received them in the
paneled library of my imposing mansion.
We chatted about my writing—my science
fiction writing. I showed them a few recent
books on archaeology and science for
young readers I had written—I was doing
that too, in my spare time, and I just happened
to have the books close at hand. The
word "pornography" was never mentioned.
They did ask me if I had ever done business
with a company called Such-and-Such
Enterprises. Evidently that was one of the
dummy corporations that paid the writers
for the Nightstand Lines; but it so happened
that my checks came from This-and-That
Enterprises instead, a different
dummy corporation, and the nice FBI men
had gotten things mixed up. "No," I said,
absolutely truthfully. "I've never done business
with Such-and-Such. I've never even
heard of them." And that was that. The FBI
men left, probably thinking there was some
case of mistaken identity here, and no one
ever bothered me again.
![]()
'No Virgins in Cham Ky' by John Dexter, cover art by Robert Bonfils 1967
But I did stop writing for Nightstand a year
or so later—not because I was afraid of more
government harassment, but because after
150 erotic novels in five years, I was getting
pretty tired of marching my characters in
and out of bedrooms. I wanted to get back
to the intellectual challenge of science fiction,
which was making a strong commercial
recovery after its slump of the late 50s.
And my non-fiction books on archaeology
and science were very successful too; I
wanted time to do more of those. So in a
final flurry—E for Eros, One Night Stand, Sin
Kitten—I went out of the business of writing
erotic novels.
But I have no regrets about those five
years in the sex-book factory—none. I don't
think any of us who wrote Nightstands do. It
isn't just that I earned enough by writing
them to pay for that big house and my trips
to Europe. I developed and honed important
professional skills, too, while I was pounding
out all those books.
Working at fantastic speeds (I once did a
complete novel in three and one-half days,
just to see if I could) we mastered the knack
of improvising plots from scratch and making
everything work out neatly at the
required 50,000-word length: a wonderful
exercise in structural discipline that has
stood me in good stead ever since. There
was no time to make mistakes: we had to
get it right on the first draft, and we did,
telling good stories in crisp, no-nonsense
prose. And because we worked under pen
names, we were free to let all inhibitions
drop away and push our characters to their
limits, without worrying about what anyone
else—friends, relatives, book reviewers—
might say or think about our work. We had ourselves a ball, and got paid nicely while
we were doing it.
And also we never forgot that we were
doing the fundamental thing that writers are
supposed to do: providing pleasure and
entertainment for readers who genuinely
loved our work. Huge numbers of the books
were snapped up as fast as they came from
the presses, which meant that they filled a
need, that somebody appreciated them a
whole lot. It meant something to me to know
that my novels were brightening the lives of
a vast host of people in those dim dark days
of 30-plus years ago when puritanism was
riding high and sex was in chains.
150 novels! Passion Patsy!
Flesh Flames! Sin Hellion! The Orgy Boys!
Writing those books was a terrific experience
and I look back fondly on it without shame,
without apologies.
'Sin-a-Rama' is out now through Feral House publishing. To order a copy or learn more about the anthology, visit their website here.
Yoido Full Gospel, where one in 10 Korean Christians is baptized. Photos by Jo Turner
Cody Legebokoff photo via RCMP
Legebokoff under RCMP interrogation in 2010. Screencap 
Jill Stuchenko, Cynthia Maas, Loren Leslie and Natasha Montgomery
Sigh. Screencap 
Irene
Photo by Zak Krevitt
