This essay originally appeared as the critical introduction to the Bear Manor Media book WHEN THE TOPIC IS SEX by Ed Wood Jr., compiled and edited by Bob Blackburn, a collection of non-fiction (though often, quite fictitious) pieces, mostly from the early 1970s, written by Ed Wood for publication in adult magazines. This was a major archival work in Ed Wood studies and also a dizzying read. If you don’t want to read a full-length Wood novel and sexually explicit fiction is not for you, this collection might be the best entry point into Wood’s literary world. I was proud to be associated with this excellent book, and since it’s now been out for a few years, I decided to share my introductory essay online (with the blessing of the book’s editor). Though he is best known for his film-making, Edward D. Wood, Jr. made his living through his writing (don’t forget, he wrote his films–there was a typed screenplay for each one), and my essay deals with Wood the career writer. I hope you find it interesting and worthwhile.
EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.: PROFESSIONAL WRITER by BILL SHUTE
Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s writing career, if we date it from his period in the Marine Corps in World War II (where he seems to have written a lot during his free time) when he wrote the play Casual Company, spanned nearly 35 years, and that’s not counting the 8mm films he wrote and directed as a child and the skits and promotional copy he no doubt wrote for his hillbilly music group The Sunshine Mountaineers (circa 1939-1940).
In the last 15-20 years, the amount of information about Ed Wood’s creative activities has grown by leaps and bounds, and continues to grow with each passing year, because of the tireless efforts of a number of dedicated researchers, combing through old and forgotten newspapers, trade magazines, military files, adult magazines, abandoned film storage warehouses, and 8mm porn loops (and the boxes they came in). What we’ve learned from the findings so far (there is a lot more work to be done) is that from his pre-Marine days in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the early 1940s, up through his passing in 1978 at the age of 54, the man was an incredibly prolific writer. Considering that he wrote or co-wrote most of the films and shorts he directed, we can observe that Ed Wood was always, first and foremost, a writer.
Wood’s filmmaking has gotten the most attention from the public, which makes perfect sense since many of Wood’s novels and non-fiction writings were buried for decades, available only to collectors of late 60s and 1970s porn magazines and adult paperbacks, often hidden behind a variety of pseudonyms.
Ed Wood had something that most writers would kill for: a unique and instantly recognizable style. Read three or four random sentences from, say, Gertrude Stein or Mickey Spillane or William Faulkner or Jack Kerouac or Nick Tosches or Harry Stephen Keeler, and you know who wrote it—you feel the syntax, you recognize the preferred vocabulary, you are carried along by the flow of the torrent of words, and you almost become a stowaway in the writer’s mind. Say what one will about Ed Wood’s writings; they possess that same idiosyncratic quality, that same instantly recognizable style, that same personal set of preferred words and sentence structures and cultural references. Wood also possessed a powerful flow in his writings, and it pulls (some would say “drags”) the reader along, like a powerful undertow below the surface of the text.
Had Ed Wood the writer been 25 years older and served in World War I rather than World War II, entering the publishing industry in the mid-1920s rather than the mid-to-late 1940s, he might have found a place in the pulp western or pulp fantasy or pulp crime world, laboring among what pulp authority Ed Hulse calls “the penny-a-word brigade.” He certainly loved all those genres, as anyone who has seen his films Crossroad Avenger or Bride of the Monster or Jail Bait can attest. Wood possessed the speed, the endless imagination, and the ability to work within publisher-determined parameters that the professional wordsmith on the lower rungs of the publishing industry needed, and those qualities are clearly seen in his fiction for porn magazines, featured in the previous two collections of Edward D. Wood’s magazine work, Blood Spatters Quickly and Angora Fever.
This new collection, though, does not feature short stories, but rather Wood’s non-fiction magazine pieces, or as Joe Blevins has described it, “fictional non-fiction.” The topic of most of the selections is sex (although we’re also offered his thoughts on school busing and politicians, perhaps giving us an idea of the writing he did while under the employ of Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty—Wood comes off as thoughtful, measured, and wanting to consider and respect differing viewpoints), and lots of it, all delivered with Wood’s signature gusto. Clearly, the man had read a lot about sex—as much as was possible in that pre-internet age—and when that book-learning is combined with the same over-heated imagination he brought to horror and crime, you know you are going to be in for a wild ride.
Wood’s approach in these short non-fiction pieces, surely considered “filler” by both the publishers and the readers (who no doubt would be checking out the intimate pictures first, anyway), is somewhat reminiscent of the writers on the lowest-rung of the comic book world who knocked out the two-page filler stories needed for comic books to have the minimum two text-pages to qualify for a second class postage permit for each separate title. My primary areas of interest in vintage comics are western and crime and war, and in those areas the two-page filler texts tend to not be carefully structured “stories” with pacing, characterization, and the rest of the qualities expected in Fiction Writing 101. No, time did not allow for such niceties—writers would save that for better paying “story” rates. The comic book filler prose would often be faux first-person reminiscences (the writing version of an actor improvising “in character”) or the writer (in a western comic) riffing on some subject like barbed-wire or bounty hunters or the homesteading land-rush, until they’d reached the required 1000 words. Then it would all be tied up in a few sentences, the writer would think about what bill would be paid with the small check that would be coming, and the next low-paying project on the to-do list would become priority one.
Ed Wood’s adult non-fiction has many similarities to those writers’ approaches (and Wood himself not only wrote western films, but western magazine articles, under the Pete LaRoche pseudonym), except that the topic was sex, not the old west or police work or the military.
Working for the Bloom family, pioneers in the West Coast porn world of the late 1960s and 1970s, and writing for publications with names like Cunny or Three of a Kind or Gay Girls or Weird Orgy, Ed Wood knew exactly what was needed to satisfy the publisher and the readers, as well as what he could get away with in terms of letting his amazing imagination run free. The short “non-fiction” format allows Wood to basically riff on a theme in a unified way—-it would not be surprising to learn that these pieces were each written in one surge of work, fueled by black coffee and bourbon/vodka. Wood was fortunate in that he was a known and trusted quantity to the people who paid him to write these pieces for porn or fetish or soft-porn magazines, and if the pieces managed to strike certain publisher-requested chords somewhere in them, the rest of the content did not matter, as long as it fit into a generally sleazy or fever-dream-like kind of mood. Though the pay was low, Ed Wood was essentially paid to do what for many would be considered a dream job—to fantasize about sex, and then to use his trusty typewriter to bang out prose that would create for the reader a humid, ripe, and sex-charged atmosphere, something that would be the perfect literary complement to the explicit adult photos on the accompanying page.
And, as you will see over and over in this exciting collection you were shrewd and tasteful enough to purchase, Ed Wood delivered the goods again and again, but then, the man was once labeled the fastest typist in the Marine Corps, and like his short stories, his non-fiction bursts out of the gate with white-hot fury (maybe not when the topic is school busing, but certainly when the topic is sex!).
Fans of Wood’s films will find that a number of the pieces deal with filmmaking, and it’s interesting to get his perspective direct from the grimy trenches of the then-new adult film industry, seen through the lens of a man who’d worked for decades in the B-movie world, a man who counted genre-film greats such as Lyle Talbot and John Agar as his personal friends, a man who remembered (and employed) working actors who’d been stars in the silent era, such as Reed Howes and Tom Tyler and Herbert Rawlinson. Wood views the sex-film world as a few rungs down from the B-minus genre-film world budget-wise, but it’s interesting that he does not put it in some separate category or view it as a pariah industry. For him, sex on screen is simply the most recent development in the transition of film, like widescreen or color or use of profanity or explicit violence. It was a way of reflecting the sexualized world of that day and, at its essence, the financial bottom line, it was a way of getting people into theater seats by giving them something they could not get at home on television. And yes, the Swedish Erotica loops Wood made with star John Holmes for the Bloom family during the period when he was writing some of the pieces here were certainly not available on TV.
Some of this material is extremely politically incorrect by today’s standards, but considering the original target audience, considering that Wood was a member of the World War II generation, and considering that these pieces were never available from any mainstream source and were considered edgy and marginal in their day, it’s to Wood’s credit that they retain their sting and remain edgy and marginal today.
Also, with each passing year Wood will surely come to be seen as more of a pioneer of gender fluidity and an important figure in queer history. After all, this was a man who not only wrote and directed the film Glen or Glenda in 1953 (a film that research into old newspaper ads has shown played for many years and was seen by tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in the 1950s and 1960s, long before there was a Wood cult), but co-starred in it, playing both Glen and Glenda. From the testimonies of his friends and acquaintances, Wood was a relatively “out” person, unafraid to appear in any public environment in his “Shirley” identity. I remember seeing a haunting and beautiful exhibition many years ago at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh devoted to Candy Darling (1944-1974), and part of it documented her struggles as a trans individual attending a working class high school on Long Island, with the bullying, the belittling, the threats, the violence. That was in the 1960s. Can you imagine what Ed/Shirley Wood must have gone through in the 1950s and early 1960s, living his dream, unafraid, proud? Try reading the fascinating prose pieces in this book through that lens. A sexual pioneer writing about sex of all kinds…what’s not to like there!
As Ed Wood himself explains in one of the pieces included herein, “Sex is good for everybody. Just because humans have found that they like it . . . enjoy it . . . and that it doesn’t always have to be for the propagation of the race . . . well . . . once more it must be said here . . . don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Sex is the topic of nearly every issue of every working and relaxing day. It will continue to be so. So open up those ears and let the sound waves in.”
Ed Wood, professional writer who produced millions of words, could have wound up churning out pulp westerns or true crime stories, or writing PR copy and speeches for California politicians, but in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, until his passing in 1978, he wrote about sex—and the world is a more exciting and entertaining place because of it.
—BILL SHUTE, copyright (c) 2020
kendrasteinereditions.wordpress.com
critical introduction to the book EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.: WHEN THE TOPIC IS SEX (Bear Manor Media)
Feel free to link to this essay but please do not republish it elsewhere. Thanks.
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and….if you enjoyed the above essay, be sure to pick up a copy of my newest poetry book…
STATIC STRUT by Bill Shute
KSE #421, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover, $6.95 cover price
published 2 January 2024
available for immediate order in the USA from https://amzn.to/48GeYC5
Kendra Steiner Editions (Bill Shute) 
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