BONUS NUMBER 47: THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE LOST-AND-FOUND GAY ARCHIVE
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
The mystery is this: How did a chunk of the International Gay History Archives end up at the New York Public Library as the Sam Staggs Papers?
Initially, there was no case all. The unmysterious mise-en-scène is presented below in the Mandate feature from our issue of February 1983.
At that time, the archive was four years old, intact, and fully controlled by its founders, John Hammond and Bruce Eves. After a meeting with Bruce and John, I began saving everything of interest for the archivists, who came to my office about once a month to collect the haul: gay newspapers and magazines from U.S. states and foreign countries; such ephemera as advertising circulars for every conceivable object, from holiday-themed jock straps to Polaroids sent by not-especially-fetching wannabe models; correspondence; glossy stills from movies, TV shows, and plays with gay characters; and of course the “ten-dollar” magazines produced by our publisher, George Mavety — meaning hard-core of the print kind that was becoming obsolete as VHS captured the XXX market.
When I left Modernismo as editor-in-chief at the end of 1985, I lost track of many contributors, friends, and colleagues, including John and Bruce. I hoped that others at the company would continue to save materials for their archive, but this seems not to have happened.
Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, ca. 2010. Leigh W. Rutledge, a friend and frequent contributor to Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy during my tenure, informed me that while sleuthing online he had discovered the Sam Staggs Papers at the New York Public Library.
I couldn’t have been more astonished if he had named the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, or the Vatican Apostolic Library. The NYPL website answered my basic questions as to content, although not as to provenance. I was curious, of course, to learn exactly what was in the collection and how it got to the library’s magnificent main branch at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. But since I had no crying need for details, I let the matter rest.
Another jump forward, this time to 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic. The boundaries of all lives narrowed, fear kept us inside, and each day brought darker news. Working in my home office was normal for me, but now my workday expanded from seven or eight hours to — well, probably very much like yours. I finished a novel that I had put aside in the 1990s. What next, I wondered. The answer: another project that I had thought about over the years but never really started. That’s how Did You Sleep With the Models? came about.
To backtrack for a moment…in 2018, two years before the pandemic, I had spent several days at NYPL on a double mission. The first was to read a portion of the late Gerold Frank’s papers, which had recently been unsealed. I was at work on Finding Zsa Zsa: The Gabors Behind the Legend (published in 2019), and Gerold Frank was ghostwriter of Zsa Zsa’s 1960 autobiography, My Story. The relevant papers, although unsorted, were crucial to my research.
The second project was to search through my eponymous archive, which, though it bore my name — the Sam Staggs Papers — was largely unknown to me. This was a strange experience…I felt like the ghost, Emily, in Our Town who returns from the dead to relive one day among her survivors, whom she can see but who do not perceive her at all.
I came across documents and manuscripts and correspondence from the 1970s, long before my time at the magazines. Photographs, often sedate and unsexy, used, or at least considered, by previous editors. Promotional circulars from the earliest days of Mandate, long before anyone imagined Honcho or Playguy. And scattered through the entire archive — half a dozen boxes, give or take — reminders of the dead. Roughly one-half of the items were familiar from my own four years as editor-in-chief: hundreds of letters to me and from me; edited manuscripts covered in proofreading marks; memos from me to George Mavety. I recognized some of the ephemera I had saved for Bruce and John, but a fraction only.
I made a few inquiries as to how the archive had come from the home of John Hammond and Bruce Eves, on the Lower East Side, to Midtown Manhattan. No one seemed to know. Staff members of the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts — the classy, uptown name of the library division where so many rarities reside — provided everything I required except the answer to that gnawing question: How did I, in the form of these papers, get here?
Earlier this year, I decided to pursue the matter further. I wrote to the library with this question: “Did the entire International Gay History Archives collection make it to NYPL? I can’t determine from the online information; and of course the library’s collection far exceeds the collection assembled by John Hammond and Bruce Eves. I would like to include in my memoir as detailed a record as possible of their invaluable work, and of its preservation by NYPL.”
A few weeks later, I received a reply (partially quoted below) from Michelle McCarthy-Behler, Manager of Public Services, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books: “We apologize for the delay in response, but I wanted to consult with our curators concerning the accession history of the collection to ensure that you are receiving the most accurate information possible about the acquisiton of this collection.
“Regarding whether the entirety of the International Gay History Archives came to the New York Public Library, this is a difficult question to answer due to the fact that we do not know if the donors, John and Bruce, kept [for themselves] specific files or if NYPL curators at the time of the accession chose not to take certain items. Much of the materials came over to us, however, but we may not be able to determine if there were some left behind without our knowledge.”
I subscribe to Ms. McCarthy-Behler’s suggestion that curators at the time chose not to take certain items. What’s there is rather proper, as though Mrs. Astor herself were peering down at her Reading Room from above, with full finger-wagging veto power over too much exposed flesh; and over words that were confined to backstairs and servants’ quarters when I was a girl.
If Mrs. Astor has me in her sights, I beg forgiveness for suggesting that she was like a frightfully upright character in an Edith Wharton novel. Mrs. Astor was too worldly to fit such a stereotype.
On the other hand, I’m well acquainted with library politics, and if space permitted I could offer a dozen scenarios of wincing librarians and fussy curators who, after a quick peek at Jock Sucker ($10) or French Buttfucker ($11.95), rushed to the ladies’ room or the gents to recover, and to freshen up.
The mystery is unlikely ever to produce an “Elementary, my dear Staggs” from a latter-day Sherlock Holmes of Rare Books and Manuscripts. The NYPL website details many items from John Hammond and Bruce Eves, but only a fraction of what they describe in the Mandate interview. I have learned that John is dead, but I have no further information of Bruce.
Here I put aside my spyglass, with this invitation to anyone with additional evidence: Please come forward…gay history calls.