Alexander Akin 

Well, it is high noon right now, so I'd like to get things rolling. My name is Alexander Akin. I'm the president of the ABAA [the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America] and one of the members of the committee that puts on this fair. And I'm just utterly delighted to see such a crowd for this. This is just wonderful. [applause] So I want to introduce our panel members:

Gerard Koskovich is a public historian and book dealer who divides his time between San Francisco and Paris. A founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, Gerard has curated many exhibitions and presented and published widely in both English and French. It's a point of pride for me personally that I had the honor of sponsoring his successful application to join the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America.

Ms Bob Davis, founder of the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive, has presented talks on trans history at colleges, universities, museums, international conferences, and the first Pride Day at San Quentin prison. And she's published widely on topics related to trans history. She's curated trans history exhibits at the GLBT History Museum, Vallejo Museum, Solano Pride Center, and the Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP’s) Black Trans Cultural Center.

Joey Cain is an activist and historian specializing in the history of queer men's consciousness and self-conception. He's curated exhibits for the San Francisco Public Library and the GLBT Historical Society. He also co-edits the Edward Carpenter Circle website and has been published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and on the OutHistory website. Besides queer books, his other collecting interests are Doves Press and Essex House press editions, books designed by Bruce Rogers, and books by and about Walt Whitman. He's also a forty-five-year veteran of the Bound Together Anarchist Collective Bookstore here in San Francisco.

Our moderator today is Tony Bravo, the arts and culture columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. So, take it away, Tony.

Tony Bravo 

Thank you everyone for joining us here bright and early — at least it feels early — on a Saturday morning. See, queer people can get up before one o'clock on a weekend. What a time for us to be having this panel; we were talking about this earlier in . Before we get into the questions we prepared, I'm wondering if any of you just want to say anything about the moment we're living in and the importance of preserving these materials.

Ms Bob Davis 

For the trans community, I think there's no secret about the pressure and the forces of erasure, absolute erasure, that we're facing right now. They're denying our driver's licenses; they're denying our names; they're denying everything about our identity. And so I feel that maintaining my archive and the GLBT Historical Society and others is crucially important at this time. We cannot allow erasure. We cannot allow the misrepresentation of our history, of who we are, what we desire, what our aspirations are. So I feel that the current era has given me a different sense of purpose, where before I was collecting because I've always collected things, seashells, turtles, whatever it was. As my mother said, “If I had three of anything, they called it a collection.”

Tony Bravo 

That is the rule, in fact, I was told. Your mother was right.

Ms Bob Davis 

Mom is always right. But I started this collection in 1980. I wouldn't give it up for the world. One of my greatest concerns, at the end of my life, is what is going to happen to all this stuff, but I won't let it go in the trash. It's too important, especially now.

Tony Bravo 

Joey, Gerard, do either of you have anything you want to add about your feelings about the importance of this work right now?

Illustration of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, published in 1924. Courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the Magnus-Hirschfeld Gesellschaft.

Gerard Koskovich 

Yes, I'll certainly jump in, having done a lot of research for over forty-five years on the early German homosexual emancipation movement and on the Nazi occupation of France. And what I can say is that we're in a very unpleasantly resonant moment. Within a few weeks of the Nazi regime coming to power in Berlin in 1933, one of its first targets was the Institute for Sexual Science, founded by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919—one of the first libraries, probably the first library and museum anywhere in the world to give real visibility to what we would now call LGBTQ people, our cultures, our history. It was a center that was bent on engaging in knowledge production that was different from what society had told us — you're wrong, you're sick, you're bad, you're criminal, you should be invisible. Instead, Hirschfeld wanted to create a heritage, a culture, a sense of self for our people, a sense of community. And within those first three months of the Nazis coming to power, they seized his institute, they took his library and archives to stage the first massive book burning. You may have seen newsreel footage of a Nazi book burning. Half of what's being burned there is Dr Hirschfeld's Institute library.

So right away, fascism wants to do away with independent, alternative forms of knowledge production, not just LGBTQ, but a lot of other kinds too, to produce a unitary — in the case of our country — cisgender, straight, white male, fundamentalist Christian nationalist fantasy in place of this beautiful, varied and diverse country in history that we all live in and carry with us. So for me, it's been very important to do this work, remembering that. But also then watching that within the first three weeks of the MAGA [Make America Great Again] regime in the White House, they went on a campaign of what I call digital book-burning to identify LGBTQ knowledge hosted on federal websites, including historical knowledge, and to vandalize it or erase it completely. I was a co-author of a big report in 2016 for the National Park Service that provided an overview of American LGBTQ history. I was one of the thirty people who wrote chapters. The report was completely suppressed from all federal websites within three weeks of MAGA taking charge — an immediate demonstration of the desire of authoritarian regimes to impose a single, unitary, authorized form of knowledge and thinking that serves only their interests and marginalizes and demonizes the rest of us. Well, we're right back in it. And for me, I have a lot of lessons from how it went the first time around. History is very useful to know about in times of trouble.

Tony Bravo 

Another strong endorsement for historians, I think. If anyone wants to see a screen depiction of the Hirschfeld Institute fire that you were referring to, I believe Season Two of Transparent has an episode dedicated to it.

Joey Cain 

And you know what I would say, from the historical stuff I've read and the people that I have been really influenced by throughout history, is learning not just about the oppression, but about the resilience, how people have survived terrible things in the past, and we're going to get through this. I'm actually hoping what comes out of this is maybe a little bit less of the identity splintering that the left has been obsessed with, and realizing that we all are in this together--straight, gay, black, white, Latino, trans, non-trans--and drop some of our attitudes about that and really see ourselves maybe reconnecting with the working class in America. Because quite honestly, a lot of this stuff is captured by the elite academics who came up with ridiculous theory that we probably all tried to read and couldn't make any heads or tails of it. But I see this as a really good opportunity, a time to cross our identity borders, cross our national borders, and join together.

Tony Bravo 

Yeah, fabulous way to start today. Let's talk about some books and some materials now, and go to the prepared section of this so you will all stop being anxious. Who is presenting first?

Gerard Koskovich 

This is a bit of a show and tell, where I asked each of the panelists to pick three things from their collection, or in my case, from my holdings as a dealer, that are surprising, interesting, have stories to tell, and to just do a bit of kindergarten Show and Tell in its grown up form, with our favorite things.

Tony Bravo 

I cannot wait to see your favorite things, and I am so excited to hear the stories that they reveal.

Joey Cain 

Okay, so just a little bit of background. I came out when I was fifteen in Buffalo, New York, back in the 1970s, and one of the things that we had then were books and printed materials to understand who we were. We weren't getting it from TV. We weren't really getting it from movies. So I've always had an affinity with the written material and inadvertently started to collect stuff really early on, saving the GLF flyers, Gay Liberation Front flyers, and other material from that period of time. I was very involved with the Radical Faeries, with Harry Hay back in the 1980s, and started to develop this idea of gay men's consciousness or self-understanding. That there's an actual history of how we've conceived of ourselves throughout time and trying to identify that, as opposed to going with what the society has identified us as. So a lot of my collecting is around that, but anything I get interested in, I'm kind of a compulsive completist. If there's an author I like, I have to get every book by that author, even if I've only read three of the books.

Tony Bravo 

Can you quantify your collecting at all? Do you know how many objects are in your collection?

Joey Cain 

Books? I have about five thousand books, again across a lot of areas, and then boxes of ephemera. The ephemera is mostly from the anarchist movement and the LGBT movement since the 1970s. That is sort of where the affection for books came from. Here we go. For me, one of the great progenitors of a gay men's consciousness, or a particular way of seeing ourselves, was Walt Whitman. And up here on the upper left is the 1860/61 edition of Leaves of Grass. This is where he first published the Calamus poems, and the Calamus poems were this watershed moment in the history of the written word in terms of identifying. He called them adhesive people, based on phrenology, phrenological terminology, but his conception and his writing about men being comrades and loving one another influenced just about everybody afterwards. Certainly in Britain he influenced the important theoretician John Addington Symonds. He influenced the poet anarchist Edward Carpenter. It was just a groundbreaking moment in the establishment of an idea of men being comrades and co-equal. Previously, gay men's conception of themselves had sort of come from the Greek where it was, you know, the older, the younger, the erastes. And that had sort of dominated Western gay men's thinking up until Whitman. So the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, as I said, influenced a man named Edward Carpenter. And up on the upper right-hand side is a copy of Carpenter's book, Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship. It was tagged “The Buggerer’s Bible” back in the early 1900s. It was published in 1902.

Tony Bravo 

Tell me about that title, “The Buggerer’s Bible.” Was that a self-tag?

Joey Cain 

No, that was a disparaging term.

Tony Bravo 

And for people who don't know, buggerer meant sodomite. We can go into all the terms.

Portrait of Edward Carpenter by Fred Holland Day, c. early 1900s. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Joey Cain 

What I was able to acquire was actually Carpenter's copy of the Iolaus. And I have to say much apologies to all the book dealers here. I get a lot of stuff through auctions, and then other stuff through dealers, but auctions have become a major source for collecting for me. Carpenter was hugely important. He had published in 1895 an important pamphlet on homogenic love. One of the things we've always had is that we're constantly figuring out what to call ourselves. And we've had Uranian, we've had homogenic, we've had homosexual, we now have queer. We had whatever we're always going to be, I think, struggling with or playing with the terms. But Carpenter published a pamphlet in 1895 that was a major groundbreaking pamphlet on homogenic love. He then put out Iolaus in 1902 and then in 1910 he did a whole book on gay people and then a second one. So he's pretty important in terms of the development of gay consciousness. He influenced a local man from San Francisco called Gavin Arthur. And Gavin Arthur was the grandson of President Chester A. Arthur and went over and visited Edward Carpenter and slept with him and wrote about it. And he then became an astrologer here in the United States. He ended up here in San Francisco in the 1950s, where he met Neal Cassady, who introduced him to Allen Ginsburg. And he then wrote a lot of articles for the Oracle magazine, which was an important journal of the hippie thing that happened, the countercultural thing that happened in the 1960s. So he was the grandson of a president, kind of a grandfather of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. I was at the Albatross bookstore way back when, going through books, and they had an Edward Carpenter book. And I picked it up and I looked at it, and you probably can't see it, but it turned out to be Gavin Arthur's copy of Towards Democracy. Carpenter's great work was Towards Democracy. It was these poems that he kept on adding to. So again, this is how you often acquire stuff. As a book collector for $3 I got this book, which was owned by the man who had slept with Edward Carpenter and lived here in San Francisco. It was very funny: as I was checking out, the person who was working the shop said, “Oh yeah, it's too bad about all that writing, but it's interesting writing.” And I said, let me pay for the book and then I'll tell you about it.

Tony Bravo 

Okay, so I'm assuming that most people in the audience have heard of Walt Whitman, but how many of you--can we get a show of hands--have heard of Edward Carpenter? [show of hands] So a few people got an education here on him today. And how about Gavin Arthur? Well, even less. Great.

Photograph of Gavin Arthur. Courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

Joey Cain 

A good friend of mine is about to come out with a full biography of Gavin Arthur in the future, so you'll be hearing more about him. The one book Gavin Arthur did complete and write was called The Circle of Sex. And that over there is the first edition, which was published by a local kind of porno gay publisher called Pan-Graphic Press, so it's published here in San Francisco. And Arthur, who had met Havelock Ellis, he had met Hirschfeld, I believe. He met a lot of people in Europe. He conceived of the sexual continuum. Unlike Kinsey's straight line, zero to six, he conceived of human sexuality as a circle, kind of as a joke, but also half seriously. So in 1961 he published The Circle of Sex. Just in terms of other things that I'm really happy to actually have and discovered, there was a British writer named Rupert Croft Cooke, writing from about 1917 to 1977. He had been friends with Lord Alfred Douglas. He knew Kipling. He was kind of a go getter when he was a young kid and sought these people out and met them. He wrote a twenty-seven-volume memoir over about forty years.

And so, if you're interested, this is how you get into collecting. The first one I got was up there in the middle. It was The Verdict of You All. In 1955 he was busted for homosexuality, one of the few, one of the last people to get busted in Britain. This is in Britain, and he managed to write a book about his experience without actually saying he was homosexual, because it was still illegal in Britain. He also wrote a book about the house that he was living in called The Life For Me, before he got busted. And then after he got busted, he moved to Tangier and wrote a book about the house there. His books are really interesting because he was kind of an anti-Bloomsburyist. He was writing for the middle class, not for the avant garde. He not only wrote this twenty-seven-volume set, which I've managed to finally find all of them. And again, if you're new into collecting, it's kind of finding the areas that people aren't doing. And I got a lot of his books really cheaply through AbeBooks and through Biblio. He also wrote something like twenty detective books under a pseudonym, and he wrote like thirty novels. He was incredibly prolific, but I've limited myself just to his memoirs, because I just don't have shelf space for the whole thing. So if you're looking to be a collector, you identify something. If it's insane, identify a particular part of their work. He, as I said, knew Lord Alfred Douglas when he was like a teenager. He went and visited him.

Tony Bravo 

The lover of Oscar Wilde, a.k.a. Bosie.

Joey Cain 

Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas. And I think it was on AbeBooks I found this copy of Douglas's, New Preface to The Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde By Frank Harris. I bought it. It was signed from Lord Alfred Douglas to Rupert Croft Cooke. So, it was like, “Oh my god, I can't believe this guy who I'm collecting.” And I'm kind of interested in Lord Alfred Douglas, too. I kind of collect his stuff. But tipped into it is a signed Frank Harris autograph and an Oscar Wilde autograph. There was just this major Oscar Wilde auction, I think, at Bonhams, about two weeks ago, and the prices were just astronomical. This I got, again, through a book dealer online. I paid less than $900 for it a number of years ago. But it's one of the places you look to collect, and every now and then you spend a lot of money on something that's amazing.

Tony Bravo 

That is amazing, both of them.

Joey Cain 

 I could give you a little story. Harris and Douglas had a big fight. They made up. Harris could not publish his Life of Oscar Wilde in England because Douglas would sue for libel. He and Douglas sort of made up. And Harris said, “Well, what do you want to do for me to be able to publish the book here in England?” And Bosie said, “Oh, I'll write a new preface for it.” And Harris said okay, but by the time Douglas was done writing it, he and Harris had fallen out again. Douglas was a piece of work. He became a rabid Catholic, denounced his own homosexuality, claimed he never really went after Oscar, wrote two books denouncing Oscar Wilde, one book not denouncing him. I mean, she was all over the place. So basically that's it.

And then over here on the lower left, because, let's face it, how are there no lesbians on this panel? This could not have happened ten years ago.

Tony Bravo 

Do not look at me.

Gerard Koskovich 

I can answer that question. All of our lesbian collectors who we invited were unavailable for this date. That was a top priority, but alas you can't manifest people out of thin air.

Tony Bravo 

If there are any lesbians in attendance who would like to join our panel.

Joey Cain 

So I thought, well, I need to do some lesbian representation here. And so what I've chosen, which is one of my favorite books, is this: Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. It's the history of the Buffalo, New York, lesbian community from about 1940 up until maybe 1970. And this is, I think, the book on the whole thing of butch lesbians, butch and fem lesbians. And it's documented. It has photos. I knew Madeline and I knew Liz, who wrote the book, and I knew a number of the older butch lesbians who are portrayed in the book. And this copy is a signed copy by the two of them. So it's one of my great things. And the final one over here is Gay American History, published in 1976, which is essentially the foundational text of gay American history, written by Jonathan Ned Katz. He dedicated the book to Jeannette Howard Foster and to Harry Hay. And this is the copy that Jonathan inscribed to Harry Hay. It's what is known as a dedication copy. And Harry was a close friend of mine. I inherited it from him. It's one of the great things in my collection.

Tony Bravo 

Okay, all right, okay, we'll move on. We'll move on. Totally fabulous. Thank you. [applause]

Ms Bob Davis 

Okay, well, this is Die Transvestiten. It's from 1910.

Tony Bravo 

Speaking of Hirschfeld.

Ms Bob Davis 

Yes, yes. And speaking of the Institute, it was probably there, perhaps. Let's talk about book dealers. I've been dealing with Bolerium Books and Alex, who was here and has been one of the partners of Bolerium for a couple of decades. I walked into the store one day and he said, “Got something for you.” And this was it. And it was only $200. The reason it was so cheap is that it has no covers. The back spine is there. All the pages are there. I haven't been able to look at them. And the other thing about this book is there's a section of maybe forty or sixty pages of photographs in the back that I have seen in other places but haven't dared to look at in this book. This book has sat in this box for at least twenty-five years, due to a combination of lack of funding and also the fact that I don't know a reliable book binder I would trust this book to. So part of the reason I put this up here is the hope that somebody will be able to refer me. Because right now, thanks to the Horizons Foundation, I've got a grant that includes getting this book a new binding and boxing. So anybody got a contact?

Tony Bravo 

Yes, I see some hands. Okay, we will see Ms Bob after the conversation for some recommendations. What an amazing treasure this. I'm just amazed that this still exists, given everything we know about what happened to the Institute.

Ms Bob Davis 

George got three of them.

Ms Bob Davis 

Here is another book. This is another story about a book dealer, in great contrast to Bolerium. There was a store on Valencia, between 16th and 17th, and I'm looking at this book, Emergence: A Transsexual Autobiography — “the first complete female-to-male story,” 1977, right? Probably about twenty years after Christine Jorgensen's autobiography came out. And I already had the book. I saw it on the shelf. I thought I'd pick it up and take a look. And this publicity photo was in the book. Now the dealer was selling it for, I think, maybe $8, so I took the book up to the counter, showed him the photo, offered to buy the photo for $8 and let him keep the book. He wouldn't do it. He insisted I take the book and the photo. How long do you think he was in business? They closed rather quickly, but I'm very happy to have both, to have that photograph. And that is Mario on the right and Mario pre-transition on the left.

Ms Bob Davis

One more. This is Harvey Lee. Harvey Lee figures in a major way in the Louise Lawrence Transgender Archive, and this was still the collection that was mostly on the shelves and under my bed. Someone gave me a box full of photos of female impersonators that belonged to Harvey Lee. Now I'm emboldened by the fact that my pal took so long. I'm going to tell you the whole story, which I hadn't intended to originally. Harvey was a female impersonator at Finocchio's when he was older and settled in San Francisco. When he was young, impersonating females all over the country, he worked as a secretary at PG&E [Pacific Gas and Electric]. In the evening, he walked up the hills in North Beach and then put on his female impersonation clothes. Harvey left his collection, which is many, many, many boxes of female impersonator material, to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, because he was from there, and they took it. They sent a truck, they sent a librarian, they sent a driver. The stuff was stored in a garage belonging to a friend of his. So they were taking stuff out and putting it in the truck. And Harvey's sister, who came along, was taking stuff out and putting it in the trash. And when the truck left, there was a box full of stuff in the trash. And that's what came to me.

Tony Bravo 

Amazing.

Ms Bob Davis 

It's amazing how it went through other people's hands before it got to me.

Tony Bravo 

Including this incredible Jane Harlow drag shot.

Ms Bob Davis 

Yes.

Tony Bravo 

Wow.

Ms Bob Davis 

If you take a look at the Harvey Lee photo, that's Dundee, his Scotch terrier. Read the caption: it says that the photo was taken in 1936.

Tony Bravo 

That's not long after Finocchio's opened. That's pretty early.

A program flyer for the New Orleans club My O My featuring Harvey Lee. Courtesy of QueerMusicHeritage.com.

Ms Bob Davis 

Oh, no, he didn't get to Finocchio's, I think, until probably the late 1950s, but he was at the club My O My for many years in New Orleans. But he inscribed it for someone in 1969, and if I looked that good in 1936 I would still be using that photo. [laughter]

Tony Bravo 

I love also the fact that 1969 was Stonewall. There's a nice little bit of poetry there.

Ms Bob Davis 

When I interviewed Minette, she was a much older female impersonator. But in 1971 she made a movie called The Last of the Worthingtons with Harvey Lee about vampires in England. I can't find the complete synopsis anywhere.

Tony Bravo 

So that's the second request of this panel. Someone find the synopsis.

Ms Bob Davis 

So Minette, when I interviewed her in the 1990s, in the middle of dinner, she said, "Did you know Harvey Lee? He was gorgeous. He'd just come out on stage and stand there. He didn't have to do anything." We have photographs of female impersonators from vaudeville from the 1920s and 1930s that were collected by Harvey Lee. And that's it. That's the eye candy I show people when they come in and say, “Oh, I don't know what I want to look at.” This will get them interested.

Tony Bravo 

And the archive is available for visits, you were saying.

Ms Bob Davis 

The archive is available by appointment. I forgot to bring brochures, but I have business cards. We're in Vallejo, and Louise would love to meet you. So come on out and say hi.

Tony Bravo 

Thank you, Ms Bob. Fantastic.

Gerard Koskovich 

I'll just add one heartbreaking footnote to Ms Bob's story. Harvey Lee lived in San Francisco for twenty-five years, and members of the GLBT Historical Society cultivated him nonstop, taking him to lunch twice a year, buttering him up to donate his collection to the Historical Society. Then the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake hit. He was utterly terrified, packed everything and ran back to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he grew up. He died there about eight years later. But he had the foresight to make a deal with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to acquire his papers so they're now there in an archive open for public research. Hurts our feelings that they're not in our archive, but the first goal is to make sure that they end up safe somewhere.

Ms Bob Davis 

Exactly. I'm going to interrupt, sorry. When I told Walker, who was one of the other founders of the Historical Society at the original meeting, about where the stuff ended up and how I had some of it, he got in touch with the University of Arkansas and ended up getting a box full of duplicates. So there is a pretty substantial Harvey Lee collection at the GLBT Historical Society. Susan Stryker went there to see it and she sent me a copy of the finder's guide. If you look at the finder's guide, for the beginning boxes, they're listing every single female impersonator. But by the time you get to about box 10, they're just saying twenty-seven photos of female impersonators. They're tired. I offered to give them the stuff back, because Harvey wanted it to go there, and it seemed appropriate. They said,  “No, we got enough.”

Gerard Koskovich 

All right, so I'm the one dealer on the panel. I'm also a crazed collector. But I decided to show three items from my current stock in part to give you a sense of the range of materials that we handle, the range of materials that one might collect as individuals or as institutions. Here we have marvelous French vintage postcards from 1902. Real photo bromide print. Real photo postcards are an actual photographic print, so not as many are produced compared to an offset printed postcard where you can print thousands from a single run. If you're producing actual photographic prints, you get a lot fewer of them. These are two of the ten postcards in a numbered series of Charles Gregory and Jack Brown, an American vaudeville performing duo that went to Paris in 1902 to perform in a show called the Joyful Blacks in a music-hall show.

Gregory and Brown performed the cakewalk, a dance developed by enslaved people on American plantations, not only to have a community celebration of their own, but to mock the absurd high society dances of the plantation owners. The cakewalk then moved into minstrel shows in the United States, usually white performers offering racist blackface caricatures. But in Europe, you had African American performers performing the dance respectfully. And in this show, there were also two white performing troupes who did not wear blackface and who performed on stage with black performers, not the same racial politics as in the United States. What I really love about these is Louis Lumière, the great film pioneer, did a five-minute silent short of all the acts in this show. You can find it on YouTube if you search "Nouveau Cirque." And you can actually see these two in these costumes, doing their performance.

Tony Bravo 

Isn't the cakewalk, in some communities, considered a precursor to the vogues that come up in the 1970s and 1980s?

Gerard Koskovich 

Exactly right. It's one of those dance forms that's about putting on a show in community and building community and building resistance. What I also love about these two performers is that they're playing all kinds of sly gender games. The taller one is the one who's dressed as a woman. And of course, stereotypically, the woman should be shorter than the man. And while you can't see it here, in some of the postcards, at the end of the dance they swap their two accessories that are gender marked, the fan and the top hat:  the fan goes with the girl, the top hat goes with the boy, and in the course of the dance, they trade those two things and are dancing with them. There's a lot of gender trouble going on here. Postcards of Gregory and Brown are often now reproduced on the web and social media as showing William Dorsey Swann, the first black drag queen. That's because in 2020 The Nation magazine reproduced one of these postcards as an illustration for an article about William Dorsey Swann and didn't caption it to say, “This isn't William Dorsey Swann.” Had nothing to do with him.

Tony Bravo 

We do not trust algorithms. For that reason, we always double check.

Gerard Koskovich 

Double check, double check. It would have been hard for a working-class black drag queen in Washington, D.C., to be appearing on stage in Paris and in a movie by Louis Lumière. Doesn't quite make sense.

It's important that there are no known images of William Dorsey Swann, a figure whose story very much merits being uncovered and told. But we've yet to find any images of him. So these are the kinds of things you can collect. Because they're drag, they're African American, they're French, they are now going for very strong prices. This lot I have as a dealer comes along with a double page spread from a 1902 issue of a French magazine, Illustration, with an illustration inspired by Gregory and Brown’s act transformed into eight different couples dancing for other black people, all with the gestures and facial features transformed into racist caricatures—an opportunity to trace the transformations and contradictions of racial politics in representations of these performers.

Tony Bravo 

You said that they were banned because they're black French drag queens, like they were banned in our archive or something?

Gerard Koskovich 

No, no, the postcards are much prized. And they're hard to find. When they do come up on the market, they're going for a pretty good price. The two cards I’m showing, along with the two-page spread illustration, are in my current catalog at $1,625. [audible gasps]

I also handle entire archives, because until recently, most of my customers have been institutional libraries, research libraries, university libraries. I’ve sold to major institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, the Wellcome Library in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, and so on. I really like to offer research collections that will then be turned into the raw material of historical and cultural research.

For example, here’s an archive I currently have on consignment where I've done the catalog and I'm now trying to convince institutions to buy it. These are the remaining family papers of the American gay photographer George Platt Lynes, one of our great, great gay photographers, who died in 1955 of lung cancer at the age of forty-eight. Never married, was out to his family by the time he was in his teens in the early 1920s, and went on to build a photographic career as a portraitist, a fashion photographer, and a dance photographer. He was the American Ballet Theater’s official photographer from the time it was founded.

Tony Bravo 

And took many pictures of the Christensen brothers, by the way. The founders of the San Francisco Ballet.

Gerard Koskovich 

Precisely. Some are in the box you see on the screen. Lynes also did surreal photographs, tableaux that he called “Mythologies” portraying figures dressed up and posed almost entirely nude with props to enact various Greek and Roman mythological personages. In addition, privately, he took photos that were never seen until well after his death: lots of really gorgeous male nudes. What's great about the archive I’m handling is that it's on consignment from the Lynes family, from the widow of his nephew, and it's all his correspondence with his parents and his brother. He was a beautiful writer, long letters, talking very frankly about his life as a gay man, and very frankly about his involvement in international queer and avant garde networks in Europe and in the United States. He was friends with Gertrude Stein from the time he was seventeen years old. He knew everybody who was anybody, and the letters are amazing.

The box of photos that constitutes part of the archive holds Lynes’s studio proofs of portrait sessions. These are the prints he kept after doing a portrait session: you take twenty photos of someone, they pick the one they like. It's printed and distributed — and the remaining ones no one's ever seen. His portrait negatives are lost, so out of these one hundred fifty or so portraits, for about three-quarters of them, the print in this box is the only surviving evidence. And who appears in the portraits? Some of you may recognize the person on the top of the box there: André Gide, openly gay French novelist and winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature. Then you go through the box, and it's Thomas Mann, it's Bertrand Russell, it's Arnold Schoenberg, it's Oscar Kokoschka, it's Edward Hopper, it's Katherine Anne Porter. Out of all the photos, we’ve only failed to identify eleven of the subjects—most of whom we presume are rich society ladies who paid Lynes a bundle for a really pretty portrait, and that helped pay his bills.

Tony Bravo 

Fabulous that this is now in your possession.

Gerard Koskovich 

I now have this collection on consignment, and I've been working with institutions to potentially place it in a research archive. The family doesn't want to break it up and sell it piece by piece. They want it to be preserved as documentation of George Platt Lynes’s work. It also includes all the records of what happened to his estate. His brother Russell managed his estate and went on trying to keep the photographer’s work alive. The collection also includes the records of Russell Lynes’s research to write a memoir about George—all the notes and interviews and correspondence and drafts. He ultimately didn't publish the book. So, we have all of these materials from the photographer’s models, his studio assistants, his friends sending in their memories twenty-five years after his death.

Tony Bravo 

Has there ever been a full bio of him?

Gerard Koskovich 

There is a full bio of him. Another one could be written. And there are about three monographs of his photos. There's a portrait monograph, there's a male nudes monograph. His work is on the upswing. Again, it's really beautiful, beautiful work.

Tony Bravo 

Thank you.

Gerard Koskovich 

Let's look at one last example from my stock, where we see representations of lesbian and bisexual women. I'm particularly interested in searching out material of this sort that’s far outside the recognized collector’s market of modern first editions. Here we're looking at a great item that a colleague in Paris picked up for me—a pocket-sized notebook titled The Adventures of Lucette made up of sheets of cardboard with copper wire to bind it together. It contains an illustrated porn story of a young woman who comes home to study with one of her female college classmates and discovers her college classmate owns a dirty novel. They start reading it, and, well, they just get all bothered. One thing leads to another, and as you turn the pages, you have the story.

What's great about this is that anyone who knows French culture, you can see the text was written on graph paper. The notebook holds photographs made from a manuscript, but it is written in classic, likely purple ink on gridded paper. That's how you were taught to write correctly in France.  It's a grade school notebook to show proper penmanship. Alongside are photographs of two models that slowly take you through as they disrobe and get busy.

What's really amazing about this notebook is that it was produced almost certainly during the Vichy Regime, during the Nazi occupation of France, almost certainly no later than 1945. You can see the high 1940s styles in the photos. Clearly some photographer made these up and probably produced ten of them and sold them privately to his friends and clients. The copy in my stock is the only one known to exist. It's a really interesting look into the pornographic imagination of the pre-World War II era in France, where, in fact, one thing often portrayed as unnatural is exclusive heterosexuality, described as some kind of weird social imposition that people have to submit to. Instead, polymorphous perversity is portrayed as the natural human condition. If you're going to become respectable, you have to be browbeaten and shamed into being a heterosexual. Which I think sounds kind of fun.

In the case of the story in The Adventures of Lucette, the female narrator first talks about her boyfriend, and then she's busy getting on with her school friend, because they read this dirty book. In the French pornographic imagination of the era, when people are given the slightest opportunity, they're going to run off in every direction, unless they’re shamed into not doing so. No one has done a doctoral dissertation or a big monograph on that whole era of the pornographic imaginary in France, say from the 1880s to World War II. It is just an absolute riot of sexual anarchy we can't even begin to imagine. There also are very frequently BIPOC people, a wide range of social classes, a wide range of body types, occasional fantastic moments of uppity political doings. For instance, one of the novels I sold, Entre Femmes from 1934 by the pseudonymous Longin, tells the story of two young female sex workers who have a patron who dies. They take all his money to run off to Spain together, but first they go and find a police officer who persecuted sex workers and forced them to have sex with him. And well, let's just say they do something that left him no longer capable of having sex with anyone, because they were going to bring a little sex worker justice to this monster.

Tony Bravo 

It was like an emerald finale film, the way you're describing. And I'm all for this.

Gerard Koskovich 

That whole world is not the Catholic school boyhood I grew up in. Or maybe it is. You just have to look behind the curtain. If you want to take a look at my online shop, you can use that QR code. I’ll also hand out some cards. I have a shop on the ABAA website where I offer all kinds of treasures with a wide range of prices from $35 upwards. Take a look: it's all this kind of really hard-to-find LGBTQ stuff.

Tony Bravo 

I love that you ended with a piece with the connection to the Vichy Regime. It feels very fitting, based on where we started the talk. Okay, so in the interest of time, I'd like to do a rapid fire round of questions now to the group. First of all, I'm curious if you all have a piece you consider the most unusual piece in your collections or most unusual piece you've dealt. Something that startled you.

Joey Cain 

I've already shown it, the Gavin Arthur copy of Carpenter's Towards Democracy.

Tony Bravo 

Ms, Bob, anything unusual that you didn't already show us?

Ms Bob Davis 

I guess I've been working with the unusual for so long that it's become the usual.

Tony Bravo 

Let us all strive for that.

Gerard Koskovich 

I can probably point to two where it was the finding of the item that was so shocking. One is a book by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a mid-19th century German lawyer who invented the theory of the third sex to explain homosexual desire. If you were a man, he posited that you had a woman's soul in a man's body and that's why you desired other men. It was really a beginning of trying to come up with a natural explanation to say same-sex desire is not a sickness, it's not a sin, it's not a crime, it's an ordinary human variation. I have one of his twelve books in the reprinted edition from 1898 edited by Magnus Hirschfeld, the great pioneer I already spoke about. I ordered the copy online from a dealer in London. The book arrived in the mail. I opened it and found the dealer hadn’t mentioned the binding and hadn’t mentioned the pencil scribblings, which he fortunately hadn’t erased.

It turns out I had ordered the personal copy of Edward Carpenter, a great early British pioneer of homosexual liberation, with his owner's signature and then two pages annotated in his hand in German and French. The notes mark the passage of the text that he translated for publication in the appendix of his book The Intermediate Sex. So I had acquired Carpenter’s personal copy that he used when he was doing his research. And then the binding was from the British Sexological Society, the organization which he co-founded as a proto gay rights organization in Great Britain. The dealer had no idea what any of that was and I was completely floored when I opened it.

One other example: I have mentioned the Nazi book burning of Hirschfeld's Institute library, and I have in my personal collection a volume known to have survived the book burning, as demonstrated by the library rubber stamps. Somebody probably just pocketed it as a souvenir during the whole chaos of the book-burning and took it home. Almost all of Hirschfeld’s library, 12,000 volumes, is lost, but about forty-five of the books are known are known to survive. I happen to have one at my house. I had a custom case made to protect it.

Ms Bob Davis 

One of the things you should take away from this is that the way to get the best prices if you're looking for rare books is to know more about the book than the dealer does. [laughter]

Tony Bravo 

This actually feeds into my last question perfectly. Where do you start collecting? If you're somebody that has an interest and has not begun their collection yet, what would you all recommend?

Cover of the first edition of Karla Jay and Allen Young, eds., Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (New York: Jove/HBJ, 1977). Courtesy of the Book Merchant Jenkins Book Dealers.

Joey Cain 

Well, a couple of places. I have found amazing things on eBay, just mind blowing, and people often don't know what they're worth. I was also going to say, if you're just starting to collect stuff, one thing I'm recommending to people is that they're going to discontinue paperbacks, the small paperback books, while gay pulps have been very fashionable, highly collectible. You get a lot of money for them. I think there'll be a future for the paperback, the pocket paperback for gay books that aren't pulp, things like in the early years, Out of the Closets: The Voices of Gay Liberation. That was a major text in the 1970s. It was issued in a small, little paperback copy eventually. So I think if you're looking to start to collect stuff that's going to be cheap and affordable, that's a place to look, but again, you should only collect what you love. You shouldn't collect stuff because it'll be worth more later on.

Tony Bravo 

Remember Beanie Babies? Yeah.

Ms Bob Davis 

One fact about buying on eBay. There are two people who sell on eBay — those who don't know what the hell they got and those who have an inflated idea. There's been a photo up there for $600 for months. I wouldn't pay $75 for it. The price just came down to $350, it's going to be there for months.

Gerard Koskovich 

I'll add a couple of other things. If you're a really new collector and you have very little money to spend, look around for things you find interesting that people haven't started collecting yet and start building a collection. I first started spotting those vintage cross-dressing postcards in France thirty-five years ago and came to learn some of them portrayed vaudeville acts or plays or operas where people cross dressed or just illustrations because they were funny. And I started gathering them up. Didn't even know what to do with them. When I was starting to buy them, I was paying, oh, fifty cents, a dollar for each. More than three decades later, I've gradually put together a collection for the Human Sexuality Collection at the Cornell University Library that holds approximately 1,700 vintage cross dressing postcards from forty different countries from before World War II. I'm still finding them.

Here's the other tip. You want to find the postcards that match your theme? Go to used postcard dealers and junk sales and be prepared to look through literally 200,000 postcards to find three postcards that you want. Once a few years ago in France, I said I'm going to estimate how many postcards I look through. In the course of three weeks visiting postcard dealers and book stalls and flea markets, I ended up with about forty-eight vintage cross-dressing postcards. And I had literally looked through 350,000 postcards to find them. That's how I scouted those postcards, for modest prices but with lots of travel and work. They were lost in the mass.

Similarly, collect free materials any place where ephemera still exists. If it deals with a topic that interests you, grab it. As an example, let me mention that over the course of twenty years or so of annual or twice annual stays in France, I collected all of the HIV/AIDS-related ephemera I could find. I would go to community centers, go to bars, go to the public health HIV services providers, show up with a sack, collect everything, tell them what I was putting together a collection of documentation. They'd come out and say, “Oh, here you need a copy of each one of our twenty posters we produced, as well.” Over the course of time, I put together quite a major collection. Ultimately, the Wellcome Library in London, which is the world's most important medical history library, bought the entire collection from me. The only thing I had spent on it was my travel and my time to go collect it and the time to organize it into a coherent catalog. The collection now provides a great research tool—in fact, the library has digitized most of it and put it online in open access. So you can readily collect club advertising cards or stickers that are being handed out and start to put together a pretty good collection—and twenty years from now, you'll be the only person who has all of those. There might be fifty handed out today, but next week, you have the only one. So it's easy to collect with really no budget if you are ingenious.

Joey Cain 

It's what you love.

Tony Bravo 

Really. Collecting what you love unless you're going to become a sophisticated dealer.

Gerard Koskovich 

As a dealer, you collect what you love and you collect what you know other people are going to love, or you help them to love.

Tony Bravo 

Thank you so much, panelists. [applause]