Preston, John

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PRESTON, John

PRESTON, John (b. 11 December 1945; d. 28 April 1994), writer, editor, activist.

John Preston, the writer of gay male erotica and gay rights activist, was born and raised in the rural town of Med-field, Massachusetts, the oldest of five children of Jack and Nancy Preston. During the mid-1960s, he participated in a number of progressive movements, including African American civil rights and anti–Vietnam War protests. He attended Lake Forrest College, where he continued his activism and came out. He graduated in 1968 and moved briefly back with his parents. In late 1969 he moved to Minneapolis, where, in 1970, he helped to found Gay House, Inc., one of the first lesbian and gay community centers in the United States, and worked on its administration. In 1973, while taking classes in the University of Minnesota's sexual health consulting program, he began a short stint as an editor working for the newsletter of the Sex Education Council of the United States. He left this job in 1975 to be the editor of The Advocate, a national lesbian and gay biweekly magazine then published in San Francisco. He edited The Advocate for a year, and then spent two more years living in San Francisco working part-time jobs and hustling. It was when Preston moved to New York in the summer of 1978 that his writing career began. Preston worked at various writing and editing jobs, the primary one being at Mandate, one of the gay male lifestyle magazines that, taking their inspiration from Playboy, had emerged in the mid-1970s and were in the vanguard of promoting gay male issues, sexual and otherwise, to a wide audience.

In New York Preston began writing fiction and, under the name Jack Prescott, began to serialize Mr. Benson, a novel, in the San Francisco–based Drummer magazine, which catered to a homosexual sadomasochistic sensibility. The increasing popularity of Mr. Benson—which was aided by clever promotions as Mr. Benson tee-shirts, produced and sold by Preston himself—convinced its author to write full time. Aside from writing erotica for gay male magazines, Preston also produced a number of mass-market paperbacks of male adventure and soldier-of-fortune novels under the names Jack Hild and Mike McCray. He left New York in 1979 and moved to Portland, Maine, where he lived until his death.

In Portland Preston began to publish impressive amounts of both erotic and male action fiction. From 1984 to 1987 he wrote seven novels featuring Alex Kane, a former Marine, who spent his time righting wrongs done to gay men. (These titles were republished in 1992 and 1993 with more explicit sexual material added.) In the early 1980s he also began publishing his "Master" series—beginning with Once I Had a Master, and Other Tales of Erotic Love in 1984—that have, along with Mr. Benson, become classics of gay male sadomasochism erotica. In 1983 he published his novel Fanny: Queen of Provincetown, which was later dramatized by Robert Pittman. All of these titles were published by Alyson Books, a Boston-based gay publishing firm.

In 1987 Preston was diagnosed as HIV-positive, although he was to remain relatively healthy until late 1993. His response to this news was to work even harder. In 1988 Preston published his Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS, one of the first books from a mainstream press that dealt with the epidemic. During this time Preston moved from smaller gay publishers to mainstream publishing houses. This was also the beginning of Preston's most lasting contribution to gay and lesbian letters, editing a series of anthologies—which included Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong (1991), A Member of the Family: Gay Men Write About Their Families (1992), Sisters and Brothers: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together (edited with Joan Nestle, 1994), and Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About the Families They Create (1995)—that brought some of the country's best writers together to detail the emotional and psychological nuances of gay and lesbian life. Between 1992 and 1995 he also edited three volumes of the Flesh and the Word series that featured a variety of literary erotica, and also published a collection of autobiographical essays, including My Life as A Pornographer, and Other Indecent Acts (1993) and Hustling: A Gentleman's Guide to the Fine Art of Prostitution (1994).

During these years, Preston continued his activism, working with the Maine Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance as well as with the AIDS Project of Portland. He worked for such publications as Lambda Book Report, OUT, and other periodicals while maintaining a full schedule of public speaking on writing, AIDS, and activism. Richard Kasak, the publisher of the imprints Richard Kasak Books, Bad Boy, and Hard Candy, published Preston's autobiographical essays and reprinted the Alex Kane and Masters series, thus giving Preston a whole new audience.

As Preston's health failed, writer and novelist Michael Lowenthal became a collaborator and editor. Under Lowenthal's supervision and guidance Flesh and the Word 3 and Friends and Lovers were published. Preston's companion during this time, in a loving and nonsexual relationship, was Tom Hagerty. John Preston died on April 28, 1994. After his death a collection of essays, Winter Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer, edited by Michael Lowenthal, was published.

Preston's manuscripts and correspondence were acquired in 1992 by the John Hay Library at Brown University for its Katzoff Collection.