From 1960s Gay Pulp Fiction: The Misplaced Heritage (University of Massachusetts, 2013), pp. 78-119 “Accept Your Essential Self”: The Guild Press, Identity Formation, and Gay Male Community by Philip Clark J. Edgar Hoover was troubled. There had been a steady increase in sex crimes in the United States, including forcible rape, which Hoover tied to what he saw as a concurrent increase in commercially available pornography. On January 1, 1960, the FBI director issued a letter to all law enforcement officials, instructing them to move against “unquestionable [sic] base individuals” who were spreading obscene literature, comic books, photographs, and “salacious magazines.” What, Hoover wanted to know, was being done to protect America’s youth “against the tainted temptations of muck merchants”? 1 In less than two weeks’ time, on January 13, the first obscenity indictment— thirty-one counts—was handed down against Herman Lynn Womack for sending physique magazines through the US mail. A second indictment, another thirty-five counts, came on December 8, 1960, months after Womack had been convicted on the first set of charges but before the appeal of his conviction was heard. 2 In bringing criminal charges against Womack, the director of Manual Enterprises and its subsidiaries, including Guild Press Ltd., postal inspectors were following the postal service’s standard enforcement procedures for U.S. Code Title 18, Section 1461, which provided for fines and imprisonment of anyone who knowingly used the mails to ship obscene materials. This was routine; in 1961 alone, there would be 377 convictions under the law. 3 The legal fight H. Lynn Womack raised against his conviction and the gay media empire he subsequently launched upon winning his case, however, was anything but routine. The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Womack had earned a PhD in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and had taught, beginning in 1953, at universities and colleges in Washington, DC, and Virginia. 4 In 1958, he had begun taking over publication of the magazines TRIM and Grecian Guild Pictorial from their founder, with