'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.'
- Gayle Rubin, historian.
'I hesitate to follow Dirk Vanden, who is himself one of our greatest gay erotic writers...' - reviewer Jessee Monteagudo.
'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.' - John Francis Hunter, writing in GAY newspaper.
'ALL IS WELL is Vanden's best book, which makes it a very good book, indeed.' - Richard Amory in Vector Magazine.
'A book...the S&M-leather-bike crowd should make sure not to miss is Dirk Vanden's I Want It All...
Vanden writes beautifully, and his stories are always extremely readable... If you dig leather, you almost have
to dig Vanden. Even if you don't go the route, it's still exciting to read about it.' - Ralph Collins, The Voice Magazine, 1970.
'All Is Well...should be required reading on any gay booklist. Read it. You might learn something about yourself and gay life in general.'
- 'KC', David Magazine, 1972.
Full Reviews
Dirk Vanden Gives His All Pre-Stonewall Novel Broke the "Fag-Hot" Mold
By Josh Thomas, 2008
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.
Josh Thomas is the author of Murder at Willow Slough and Andy's Big Idea.
All is Well reviewed by Richard Amory
This is Vanden's best work to date, which makes it a very good book indeed. Freed finally from the fourth-rate visions
of at least two fourth-rate publishing houses, Vanden is finally able, with Olympia Press, to do what he wants to do.
All Is Well is a very ambitious book. Vanden takes an emotional casket named Robert Thorne, one of those hollow men that seem to
abound inn the Middle West, and brings him through a series of beautifully suspenseful trauma into the warm, loving sunlight of
self-realization. In Thorne's case, the new self happens to be homosexual, but it is more than that too - it is pro sex, pro-love,
pro-life; the real enemy, as Vanden sees it, is the desiccated Puritanism of a dead and dying culture, no matter what form it
might take, straight or gay.
Right on, brother!
Vanden knows what he is talking about. He can give you the smells and textures of a dirty old Turkish bath in Salt Lake City
(Yes, Virginia, there is a Salt Lake City), the strident sounds of an old-culture gay bar on Polk Street, the feeling of mescaline
(talk about contact highs - whew!), and the simply incredible hostilities generated by the old, lead-pipe, preacherish morality.
Thorne, like Vanden himself, is a Jack Mormon in chapter One, which says a lot right there. Lots of garbage has to be hauled out
of his skull before he can even start to define his problem, but define it he does, and deal with it.
Vanden is the only writer I can think of who knows his way around inside the heads of two generations: mine, the unbelievably
fucked-up generation now in its forties, the one that sees itself fulfilled in Judy Garland and which will walk a mile out of its
way to step in a pile of shit, and the generation now in its twenties, those beautiful, shaggy-headed freaks who seem to know ten
times more about loving than we ever dreamed of. He knows these things, and takes his time about developing them and getting them
down, starting with a beautifully controlled first chapter and ending in a place I won't tell you about. This is a thick, prosy work,
introspective, thoughtful, sometimes much too essayistic, but always ingenious, probing, suspenseful.
If you're a Judy Garland fan, read this. Read it if you're not a Judy Garland fan. It is not a jack-off book; the catharsis is on
another level, and besides, jack-off isn't where it's at any more.
Highly recommended.
Closet Novels Called Dangerous From an article by Peter Hadley in Gay Magazine, 1971.
...I've found that some of the most positive literature for homosexuals, in terms of stressing the idea that gay and what gays
do is good, is to be found in the paperback novels of several porn writers.
A novelist like Dirk Vanden...who has written several very sexy novels like I Want It All and All or Nothing, is more than
just a sex book writer. His characters go through some very erotic scenes, but their coming out, their growing awareness of
their homosexuality and its positive meaning is much more important to the book than the erotica. He makes some very important
positive points about homosexuality and this is a good thing.
Review of All Or Nothing Michael Perkins in Screw Magazine, 1971.
All or Nothing is 'a sequel to one of the best homosexual porn novels I've ever read, I Want It All.... What's good about both
All Or Nothing and its predecessor, besides the requisite fuck scenes, which to both hetero- and homosexual seem very arousingly
done, is Vanden's ability to create two basically American/Vacant characters living in (Colorado) and make both them and their
environment seem real and believable. To do this Vanden has to be able to convey the feeling that he was there, and he does.
The dialog is good, the descriptions of life in a small (Colorado) town are convincing. He is especially good at showing us the
feeling of comradeship that exists among homosexuals.
Put all these abilities together, and you have a novelist, not just a fuckbook writer. A novelist who has decided to write
about gay life realistically and even propagandistically, the latter because the straight reader finds himself believing - as
the author wishes him to - that the gay world is somehow tenderer and more feeling than the straight world. Not a bad accomplishment.
Place that next to the many erotic scenes...and you've got an excellent gay porn novel which raises the standards for the genre.
Review of All Or Nothing Victor DeStefano in California Scene, 1971.
Dirk Vanden's All or Nothing is the sequel to his successful I Want It All ...
Always written in a style and with smoothly structured syntax that rival those
of our top-flight novelists, Vanden's story describes the overwhelming guilt felt by Bill Thorne, instigator of the gang-rape
in I Want It All... The action takes us to the West Coast, first to Los Angeles and later to San Francisco. At first,
out of his need for atonement, and later because of his own increasing desire for sexual release...Bill finds himself
involved with the San Francisco leather-set after some other interesting encounters along the way. In this highly
masculine atmosphere, he discovers that same-sex love need not reflect the stereotype mannerisms of the 'fairy.'
If you thought that Vanden's I Want It All said it all, you are mistaken. Read All or Nothing and see if you agree.
Whether All or Nothing marks the apex of Vanden's writing career remains to be seen but he does reach a new height
for a homosexual novelist. I recommend this novel highly but at the same time realize that it is not for the sexual
novice nor for the old-fashioned sexualist. Of its genre, it has to be the best book ever written.