A bawdy love story set on the Texas plains. Longhorns ranges from hard riding action and sex as hot as the blazing Texas sun to lyrical descriptions of the Old West.
From Publishers Weekly
Gay pulp veteran Banis's pseudonymous soft core novels of the '60s are hailed as "foundational" to gay literature in Michael Bronski's fulsome introduction to this new novel, Banis's "re-emergence." Bronski goes on to call this Western a "response" to Brokeback Mountain, and a "queer meditation" on the cowboy as American icon. Forty-year-old Les, the trail boss of the Double H Ranch, works for its beloved chatelaine, the elderly widow Miz Cameron, "a little dumpling of a woman, dressed in black." Les rides herd over a crew of rowdy cowboys, roping steer and sleeping around prairie campfires. Young drifter Buck, part Nasoni Indian, catches up to them on a roundup. After proving himself an expert sharpshooter, rider and roper, Buck celebrates his initiation to the group by luring one of their number, Red, into his bedroll. But Buck is really after Les, sandy-haired and significantly endowed. Banis provides a well-researched, detailed panorama of wrangling steer and the narrowing of the American Southwest, but his characters fail to convince and his sex scenes are pallid. Buck unleashes a stream of single-entendre wherever he goes (it feels good to be "rode hard"), and after the first 10 pages, it becomes tiresome.
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About the Author
Victor Banis headed two small publishing related corporations in the sixties and seventies, producing packaged books and magazines, along the way he launched the careers of underground photographers Pat Rocco and Tom de Simone. He was an early rabble rouser for gay rights and freedom of the press, and went through a major obscenity trial in the 1960s which advanced the cause of freedom in publishing. Drewey Wayne Gunn (The Gay Sleuth in Print and Film) has called him a "national treasure," and Michael Bronski dedicated his book Pulp Friction to him. Social historians have credited his early gay books, The Why Not and The Man From C.A.M.P. as launching the gay publishing revolution of the sixties and seventies. He is the author of over 100 books, and his verses and shorter pieces have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
