Summer in Sodom by Edwin Fey

Title: Summer in Sodom
Author: Edwin Fey
Publisher: Argyle Book Company
Length: Novel, 156 pages
Buy the Book: Abe Books

Blurb:

Ian Raymond wanted Ted Randall more than he had ever desired anyone–and he would use every device of desire and pain to get him!

Set against the strange background of erotic, forbidden acts performed on moonlit beaches, Summer in Sodom is the explosive story of the fateful decision virile Ted Randall had to make–to give his lean, hard-muscled body to a woman, or be enslaved by the overpowering masculinity of a hot-blooded male.

Review:

Meet Ted.

Ted is eighteen, stunningly well-built and handsome, and so far in the closet he’s wrapped in tissue paper and ready for dry cleaning. See, Ted has just left Buffalo for only the second time in his young life, headed for the lake resort town of Silver Beach, which in this novel, happens to be the gay cruising mecca of the late ’50s Tri-State area. Ted’s mother has just died, leaving him their house and enough mommy issues to keep him in therapy for the next three decades. The major one, of course, is that every time Ted tries to Do The Deed with a young lady, right at the crucial moment of Deeding, he hears his dead mother’s voice.

But wait, there’s more.

Funnily enough, when Ted succumbs to the charms of Ian, one of Silver Beach’s bad boys, his mother is thankfully silent.

Did I mention the bit where Ted tries to re-Deed with his ladyfriend, and at the crucial moment Ted has a vision of his mother’s body wearing Ian’s head?, Needless to say, Ted scraps penetration for the night and goes running screaming off down the sand, leaving this poor girl grinding her teeth and stomping back to her mother’s boardinghouse.

A gay pulp novel from 1964, Summer in Sodom is heavy on the gay and the pulp. There’s blackmail! Murder! Unprotected sex! Guilt! More murder! Catfights! A ferris wheel! Drug fiends! Honey-traps! More guilt!

Verily, this book has it all.

What I found most interesting about the book is how deeply ingrained it is in all the characters that being gay was this horrible curse brought about by some moral failing or traumatic event. Bad-boy Ian, for instance, was “brought out into the life” by a camp counselor who molested him. Ted’s would-be girlfriend, on the other hand, gives him many peppy speeches about how his mother’s browbeating turned him gay, and if he would just man up and you know, MARRY HER AND GIVE HER AND HER MOTHER HIS HOUSE, he’d be cured!

To his credit, Ted gives her the brush-off (although not until after making one last attempt at that whole sex-with-girls thing, this time with what amounts to a running start and a tailwind).

The whole blackmail scheme, too, hinges on the very real consequences of being outed in America during the 1950s. As one of the blackmailers says–well, he snarls it, because this is pulp, so no one does anything so mundane as simply saying something, “You’ll lose your job to start with…and you won’t be able to get another one that’s decent. You won’t be able to work for any government office because you couldn’t stand a security check. You’ll be blackballed from teaching school or working in a bank. You won’t even be able to get in the service. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you don’t end up in prison. Homosexuality is a criminal offense, you know.”

And that was a very sobering reminder for me, as I routinely read these m/m romances that feature exactly none of those consequences as part of the plot and culminate in very public displays of same-sex affection that were simply unthinkable in this country only a few decades ago–and in some parts of it, still are today.

Still, with that said, the book is your basic boys-on-boys bodice-ripper: “Impaled on a spear of endless, relentless ecstasy he felt himself careen through space. Every nerve and clamored [sic] with frantic delight, every fibre responded to this new, hard-driving need. He shot wildly toward the stars, brushed against their white-hot luminescence, dived crazily downward through the fantastic heat of spatial friction, shuddered, then careened directly into the fiery tale of a soaring comet.”

Apparently Ted’s made his decision.

There’s also a frankly hilarious scene at the beginning of the story where Ian and another Silver Beach Boy both throw themselves at Ted. But because this all has to be done on the down-low, the scene’s a masterpiece of codewords: it devolves from offers of interior decorating and cruising double-entendres until the two suitors begin staring at each other’s jeanclad-packages and making nasty comments. Throughout, Ted remains staunchly oblivious. I mean, c’mon Ted. Even your poor non-girlfriend gets what’s going on there.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the book: Ted.

It’s not that Ted is staunchly closeted, or that he’s having the whopper of all mommy issues, or that he’s dumb as a bag of rocks. It’s that he’s all these things combined, as well as being prudish, duplicitous and worst of all, uninteresting. And yet we’re supposed to believe that the three other main characters are all gagging for a chance to make him their one true love. Yes, love.

The l-word comes busting out all over and yet no one stops to think that possibly Ted is not the catch they make him out to be. Perhaps they are all attracted the combination of Ted’s curious naivety and internal conflict: “Ted began the motions of sex, his body intrigued by the fluid warmth of her. He allowed the rhythm to increase warily, measuring his passion against his will power.”

(No no, this is before his dead mother starts screaming.)

I just personally prefer protagonists who are a little more honest with their partners, a little more willing to open up and live a little, even if they have to take the course of the book to get the courage to do so.

But then again, I’m no blackmailing, ferris wheel-riding honey-trap. A fact for which I am sure, we are all grateful.

Except Ted.