Dirk Vanden. The author's official homepage.

This is Dirk Vanden's personal website – a companion to, but not closely associated with, www.dirkvanden.com which is owned and operated by GLB Publishers, in San Francisco, and features 3 of my novels for sale as downloadable e-books: I WANT IT ALL, ALL OR NOTHING & ALL IS WELL, all written & published between 1971-73. Referred to in reference books as “THE ALL TRILOGY.” Republished by GLB in 2006. You can buy all 3 for $20! That’s a saving of $4 over buying each book separately @ $8 each. Select the little white box that says “See the special price arrangement below (white box). ”

In this more-personal space I have posted notes about the above books, how & why they were written, along with reviews published by various Gay magazines & newspapers of the time. (>REVIEWS<) I have been called “A Pioneer of Gay Erotica,” so these published reviews & comments are legitimate parts of Gay History & not merely attempts at my own self-promotion – although, they are admittedly that, as well.

I will encourage you to download & print anything that interests you, including the artwork & pictures. Images have all been downsized pixelwise to move them faster through the ethers, so they won't produce frameable images, but they'll look OK on bulletin boards or refrigerator doors. Frameable Art is available via Dirk@DirkVanden.net ask for sizes & rates.

There are probably very few Gay men, or women, now living, who know my pseudonym, Dirk Vanden, or my books, from anything besides reference works -- such as THE GAY & LESBIAN LITERARY HERITAGE, 1995, from Henry Holt, edited by Claude J. Summers, which mentions me twice: first by Edmund Miller, in Erotica and Pornography & then in Robert Nashak's Sadomasochistic Literature. Thank you! Thank you! And now on the World-Wide-Web: I just GOOGLED myself (sounds ‘dirty’ doesn’t it? Feels good!!)) & counted 49 hits in 20 pages! My books are still on the market - after 36 years - although the web-prices sometimes amaze me, remembering that they originally sold for $2.95 & $1.95! Long Ago, when we were still “criminals!” Remember? Unless you’re a collector, buy the trilogy from GLB on www.DirkVanden.com & download it. Much cheaper for an exact copy of the original text, spelling errors, lost paragraphs and pages, etc. It’s a Gay History Project. So nothing is changed from the historical original.

* A “newer” revised, printed version of I WANT IT ALL, is also available, online & by mail> www.alibris.com

In 1995 I was encouraged by several sources to try to get the All Trilogy republished. Gay historian, Gayle Rubin, wrote a letter to me which read, in part: “I just want you to know how much these books have meant not only to me but to many of the men I’ve known and/or interviewed. Despite the fact that the books have been so long out of print, they are fondly remembered and quite influential.” She urged me to get the trilogy reprinted & I happily decided to follow her advice. The whole book-writing-publishing episode from 1969 to ‘73 seemed like a sex-dream where you wake up just before ejaculating - & then can’t finish. Like un-cumming! It had seemed like a closed, exciting-but-painful chapter of my life, without the desired ending. I was hoping that republishing the books would reopen that door for me. Maybe this time would be more satisfying.

As the republishing project took shape, I re-read the books - for the first time in twenty years - & decided that I wanted to change a few things. I was planning to revise all three, so some changes were made to make the 3 works more of a whole.

When I WANT IT ALL was written in 1969, I had no idea it would be part of a series. When the publisher asked for a new novel, he suggested a sequel, and I decided to make the story about the best friend of the hero of the first book. I intended to call it ALL THE WAY because of a certain sex-act in the next-to-last chapter. Instead, for a reason I can't remember, I called it ALL OR NOTHING. Upon re-reading, I decided that the main characters in the two books were too similar. They both swore like sailors & that characteristic seemed more appropriate to the character in ALL OR NOTHING, so I cut much of the gratituitus profanity in I WANT IT ALL.

Also, I realized that I had no black characters, so I changed one of the minor but pivotal roles.

The two versions of I WANT IT ALL are still the same story, with the same events & eventual outcome; they're just different. I prefer the new version.

Jack Fritcher told me that my rewriting I WANT IT ALL was like Margaret Mitchell rewriting GONE WITH THE WIND! Well, thanks, but not hardly!

In 1995, as Brass Ring Books, I republished “Dirk Vanden’s Revised Seminal Gay Classic, I WANT IT ALL.” Copies of that book are currently available at Bolerium Books, both the real store & the virtual one www.bolerium.com as well as www.alibris.com.

One of the sellers on Albiris is me, Richard Fullmer, & if you buy the one for $5.95 (from me), you get a personal note “from the author”(me) about why & when the book was rewritten. You buy it from Alibris with Pay Pal, but I mail it to you personally. Thank you very much!

By the time the printers were ready to print the covers, I had run out of money and couldn't afford a full-color cover, but here's my original painting:

Below is a very recent (7/14/08) unsolicited review by Gay Mystery Writer, Josh Thomas, who recently discovered my website & re-read my revised novel:

Dirk Vanden Gives His All
Pre-Stonewall Novel Broke the "Fag-Hot" Mold

By Josh Thomas

When is the last time you read a stroke-book twice?

Have you ever even finished a stroke-book once? Did you then display it on your bookshelf in the permanent collection, or tear it to shreds and toss it in the landfill before your mom, your wife or your lover found it?

In 1969, a few months before the Stonewall Riots broke out in June, a fly-by-night publisher issued a title by Dirk Vanden called "I Want It All" as part of a throwaway series called Frenchy's Gay Line, sold only in dirty bookstores, two bucks a pop. But "I Want It All" turned out to be a real novel, winning a respected place in the history of Gay Lit. The wonder is, it's just as hot and every bit as readable today.

I've just finished my second read of the 1995 reprint from Brass Ring Books; it's a remarkable little piece. Yes, it will get you hard, but it also takes you on a young man's 1200-mile journey of self-discovery, love and affirmation.

Through Richard Nixon's America! "I Want It All" is quite an achievement.

Vanden knows how to tell a story as Aristotle taught: starting in the right place, where the action must start; through the middle on to the end, where it must stop. The hero Warren Miller, a 27-year-old Colorado cowboy (who mostly shovels manure for a living), transforms by becoming true to himself. It's Gay Liberation, baby, before the Stonewall drag queens invented it.

The violent opening chapter, featuring a gang rape, not only sets the action in motion, it begins Warren's transformation. A second reading actually makes the scene less repulsive than this description, as Vanden provides clear signals of the characters' motives and reactions. There's more than one layer here, which makes the reader want to find out what's going on.

The book also ends with seeming violence, but the participants get off, understand each other better (and trade phone numbers).

Along the way we get treated to Warren's unhappy experiences with hustling, the hostility between old-school "sweater girls" and Leather-Levi Marlboro Men, a mild pup-play 3-way, interracial tearoom highjinks, a toss in the sling, a psychedelic mushroom-and-piss orgy and Warren's first fuck by the man of his dreams in a San Francisco bathhouse.

Through it all Vanden wrestles with the Gay self-destructive impulse we now call internalized homophobia. Warren notices it in every Gay guy he meets—and rejects it. The novel isn't preachy in the least, but it does probe real issues we haven't yet resolved: how, in a homophobic world, do we undo the hateful programming we grew up with and come to an understanding of what it means to be human?

Don't miss the Preface; Neil Armstrong had just landed on the Moon after a superhuman, multi-billion-dollar effort, and Vanden wonders why we can't spend the same kind of money to figure out Homo sapiens.

"I Want It All" is ultimately a love story by one Gay guy to all Gay guys. I disagree with his ending, but many will find it understandable and satisfying; Warren gets the guy, but not on the terms dictated by The World.

What's amazing about this book is that it isn't a period piece, though it is very much of a certain flower-power time. It reads today like a modern movie which, though set in the past, is still contemporary. We're still working through many of these issues, politically, psychologically, spiritually and in our physical health. Much has changed but much has not.

For Vanden to produce a work like this in 1969, on stroke-book wages, is a singular achievement. The main character doesn't kill himself, he fucks his way across the West and falls in love. Wow.

Just in time for a 40th Anniversary Edition next year: order it today, starting here www.alibris.com. > Dirk Vanden, I WANT IT ALL.

Josh Thomas is the author of Murder at Willow Slough and Andy's Big Idea.
http://joshtom.wordpress.com

What followed publication in 1995 was almost-total-rejection, severe depression, psychotherapy, bankruptcy & a change of occupations: from Gay Author To File Clerk. Still employed.

I sent review-copies of the newly published book to every Gay publication listed in Gayellow Pages, but they all refused to review the book unless I bought advertising. I had borrowed from relatives & maxed out all my credit cards. I couldn't afford advertising. Still can't. Buy my book on Albiris & I'll include a personal dedication & "Thanks" for helping me pay the rent! www.alibris.com.

Thirty years ago my books were banned in Canada! Last year a Canadian publisher, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, republished Richard Amory's SONG OF THE LOON, one of the most influential Gay books ever written, (see my review on www.amazon.com) & included in a critical appendix, two of my Gay magazine essays about Richard & his groundbreaking book & our doomed attempt to start an all-Gay Publishing Company! (It also features a fascinating & informative Introduction by Michael Bronski.) Thanks again, Richard Love, aka “Amory,” for your support & all-too-brief friendship! His website is www.RichardAmory.com which is manned by his son, Cesar Love. (Who is not Gay.) If you haven’t read Richard’s excellent reviews of other Gay books of the time, PLEASE take the time right now to go there and do so.

When SONG OF THE LOON was republished, Cesar asked me to write a review of his father’s book on www.amazon.com which I did – it’s still there – & I was very pleasantly surprised by the review that followed mine, in real time, but which appeared before mine in the "first = latest" style of e-mail, written by an avid reviewer whom I don’t know, Jessee Monteagudo, who wrote: “I hesitate to follow Dirk Vanden, who is himself one of our greatest gay erotic writers...” Thank you, Jessee! Thank You Very Much!

Most recently, one chapter from I WANT IT ALL was just reprinted in a collection called "HOMOSEX: Sixty Years of Gay Erotica," by Simon Sheppard, www.simonsheppard.com. Also available on Amazon.com, Bolerium.com, Alibris.com & your local Gay bookstore. Thank you, Simon!

Thirty years ago, John Francis Hunter, a Gay author/reviewer for GAY - the New York Gay newspaper - wrote a 2- (newspaper-size) page essay on my book ALL IS WELL, entitled “The New Gay Erotica: ALL IS WELL!" He finished his salute to "The New New Gay Literature:" “It seems to me that ALL IS WELL is presently the Zeitgeist novel of early ‘70's gaydom... It is a paean to a way of life that is counter-culture all the way....with some astoundingly erotic scenes that are as profound a manifesto of the right to discover and be one’s total self as any non-fiction rhetoric on the subject that I’ve heard of or read...I recommend it wholeheartedly as a must to today’s – or tomorrow’s – American male homosexuals.” Thank you very much John Francis! The whole essay is posted on > REVIEWS.

Richard Amory's review in San Francisco's Vector Magazine said: ALL IS WELL "is Vanden’s best book, which makes it a very good book, indeed.” www.RichardAmory.com.

The first 3 chapters of my 8th novel, "ALL OF ME,"is posted on this site. Go to ALL OF ME. While searching for a publisher for this and #9: SEE DICK RUN, I discovered that "Gay Publishing" is now mostly by straight women for straight women. My books are not for straight women, but gay & bi men.
Read the first chapters. If you want to finish the book, email me at Dirk@DirkVanden.net & I'll send you a PDF free. I'd rather have somebody reading it than wasting time quarrelling with editors & publishers. >> ALL OF ME <<

Most of the Gay men who would remember my books are dead now, of AIDS, most likely. Thanks to Ronald Reagan's legacy to the world there are very few older Gays, my age, still living. I believe that several generations of Gay Men are missing because someone in Washington decided to get rid of the Niggers & Queers using an experimental Germ-Warfare virus. I'm not alone in that belief. (Please see Dr. Alan Cantwell Jr.'s QUEER BLOOD - The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, 1993, Aries Rising Press, ISBN 0-917211-26-X &/or Dr. Cantwell's AIDS AND TO DOCTORS OF DEATH, 1988 - the year Herb died.)

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, MD (AIDS: THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE) AIDS AND THE DOCTORS OF DEATH is "a corageous, wonderful, honest book written by a physician and scientist who has come to the conclusion similar to mine that AIDS is not a natural occurrence, but a man-made creation with horrible implications."

"...AIDS is not an accident of nature caused by green monkeys, but a deliberate man-made holocauset of unspeakable evil." QUEER BLOOD.

If nothing else, President Reagan, "The Great Communicator," deliberately & knowingly did nothing to stop the spread of AIDS.

My Life-Partner & best friend, Herb Finger, died at age 51, too-briefly known as "Sacramento's Celebrity Chef, (he cooked for Governors & Presidents!)" died of AIDS 22 years ago, after we’d been together 18 years. All of our friends who took part in those coast-to-coast Hepatitis B tests back in the late 70s, are now dead of AIDS. I didn't take the tests; I'm still alive.

I have just learned what happened to my first Lover, Winson Strickland, after we split in Las Vegas, 1969. He became a famous Porn Star named Mike Davis!

An old friend who knew us both in the early 60s found my website with the early information about Winn & emailed me to inform me of Winn’s death by AIDS in 1986, after he had joined COLT STUDIO sometime in the early 70s. As Mike Davis, he appeared in a fairly long list of Colt & Halstead movies. He was 41 when he died. As far as I'm concerned, Our Government killed both these good men.

There are a number of websites devoted to him, so he must have had some adoring fans & friends. Apparently he found the fame & admiration he wanted so much. It killed him, but at least he had it for awhile.

For some pictures of him, AD (after Dirk), copy & paste the "bjland" address below into a search engine.

Even fewer of my still-alive fans know or knew (or cared) that they were possibly influenced by my artwork in the Gay media on the west coast: paintings, drawings, posters published for several years as advertising in Gay magazines & newspapers & posters, during the late 1960s & early ‘70s, in Los Angeles & San Francisco. I've posted most of my artwork, from the early '6o's to last year > IMAGESBYDIRK < Please feel free to downlaod anything that interests or pleases you. Just give me credit if anyone asks. & maybe send me an email saying “Thanks.”

Also I have posted the first several chapters of my “official” autobiography, PISSING IN THE OCEAN > AUTOBIO < An earlier version of that opus is available in the Collections of Robert Prager, which he donated to the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society upon his death in 2003 - of AIDS, of course. It was written shortly after Herb died in 1987, & I was convinced that “I had nothing to live for,"& would be dying soon, myself. I wrote what I considered “an extended but unfinished outline”of my life, which I committed to CD & shared with my self-chosen biographers, Edmund Miller & Robert Prager, who had declared himself my “number-one fan!” (I've just discovered he died recently. He had saved all of my letters & stuff! They’re in a vault somewhere! That amazes me.) Thank you, Robert.

I've survived the last 20 years on the love of dogs: Frankie & Ernie, Buddy, Andy, and my current “Significant Other:” Buddy Jr., who looks like the result of a tryst between Buddy #1, my wonderful Aussie-Shepherd & an Australian-Cattle-Dog ("Queensland Heeler").

So here I am, still very much alive, albeit 20 years "older," with even more experience in, memory of, and insight into my 75 years of life on Planet Earth – 60 of them sexually & romantically involved with other men, Gay & otherwise – & have decided to revise that earlier version accordingly. I’m still reasonably healthy. I have known many wonderful men - my True Loves, Winn Strickland & Herb Finger chief among them. I've lived with Luv & Frankie & Ernie & Buddy & Andy & now Buddy Jr. ("If you've never had the love of a dog, you have never experienced LOVE in its purest form.") With a wonderful dog and several dependable “gentlemen callers,” I have as much love as my spirit needs & as much sex as my body can handle. Sorting & filing invoices & delivering the mail pays the rent & stuff.

In 1976, The Advocate ran a story about two Mormon boys, students at BYU, both of them getting ready to go on Missions, who confessed to their Bishop that they were both Gay & in love with each other. He told them they were both "Abominations in the sight of God" & to repent the feeling they had for each other & never indulge it or they would go to Hell & burn forever. They went out into the canyons beyond Provo and killed themselves. Or each other.

The article made me so angry that I finally did what I had only thought about doing for many years. I sent a package to the president of the LDS Church, including a copy of ALL IS WELL, & told him that in my experience, Gay people were vastly better people than Mormon bigots & hypocrites & that I did not want to belong to a religion that caused young men to kill themselves because they loved each other. I concluded that my enclosed book, ALL IS WELL, (the title taken from the refrain of an old Mormon hymn, "Come, Come, Ye Saints!") should provide sufficient reasons to give me my walking papers. I'm quite sure that the president never read my little opus, but SOMEBODY down the ladder did, & contacted the Bishop of the ward I was living in, in Roseville, CA, and told him to give me my requested "release" which he did, just after my 43rd birthday.

I met some young Mormons Missionaries the other day, all neat & clean in their black & white uniforms, & their black & white helmets, out pedaling their bicycles around the neighborhood where Bud & I walk. I even crossed over to the other sidewalk to avoid them, but they were unavoidable, of course, that's their mission. Smiling the patented ("Show-me-your-braces") Mormon smile, one of them said "Hi, I'm Elder Smith & this is Elder Jones," and I said "No you're not!" They said "What?" & I said "You're not elders. I'm an elder. You're still boys. You won't be elders for another 50 years!" They wished me "Good Day" & pedaled away.

Eventually, if there is any interest, I may also decide to convert one or more of my earlier-published novels: LEATHER, THE LEATHER QUEENS, TWIN ORBS &, WHO KILLED QUEEN TOM? (no image is available of WKQT? but it, too, was red with a phony woodcut illustration & upside-down on the back of the book - for some bizarre, reason known only to the publishers) to digital files which can be downloaded as e-books or mailed on CDs. These titles are the "FAG-HOT" titles assigned by the publisher, Greenleaf Classics, in San Diego, for the books I originally called HATTERS & HARES, THE STAG IN THE TREE, EXILE IN PARADISE & TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON, (once briefly known as WHO KILLED QUEEN TOM? RIP!) All are long since out of print but sometimes show up for sale on the web for a great deal more than they cost 30 years ago: $1.95 & $2.95!

ALL OF ME - The Dirty Book Murders - a Gay Romance, will be a multi-media novel. The “appendix” will be an online e-book called THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GABRIEL HORNY. If you want to read it now. click above.^

Before reading further, please be aware that my books, paintings, this web-site & my life are anti-religious.

I firmly believe that religion is the cause, not the cure, for most of the worlds problems.

I agree with Jesus that religion is "The abomination of desolation sitting in the holy place."

If you disagree, please stop right here. Reading further will only make you angry with me & anger is not good for your soul.

4:Jesus is the most misunderstood man in history.
He claimed to be not the “Son of God”
but “The Son of Man,” i.e.,
the next-step in the evolution of humanity.

6: Jesus named Peter "Satan," therefore the Christian Religion is really Satan's religion.

8: We all have Miracle-Power,
but no one has taught us how,
nor allowed us to use it.

9: The Missing Ingredient: “Shewbread.” (See "Religion - THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GABRIEL HORNY)

10: If you’ve never experienced the love of a dog,
you have never known love in its purest form.

11: Wisdom is a treasure which cannot be hoarded,
but must be shared to have any value.

12:Most Gay People are Jesus-clones - & totally unaware of it.

A certified Theologian has called my 2 "Gay Jesus" paintings (IMAGES PART II): “confusing & threatening.”

DIRK VANDEN'S PERSONAL WEBSITE. WELCOME!