May 15, 2005

When Sex Was Dirty

Welcome to the twilight days of debauchery, when porn was filth and sex was still dirty.

Josh Alan Friedman, author of Tales of Times Square (Feral House), provides face-to-face reporting from licentious New York City of the 1980s--a compelling assortment of pimp laureates, porn starlets, evangelical strippers, bizarre 42nd Street inhabitants, Screw magazine staffers, "the strikeout king," and his stud-like counterpart, "God’s Gift to Women."

Josh Alan Friedman is also the co-author (with Drew Friedman) of Warts and All, co-editor (with Nile Southern) of Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995 (Grove Press), and contributor to It’s a Man’s World: Men’s Adventure Magazines, the Postwar Pulps (Feral House).

"Now follow along with veteran sex reporter Josh Alan Friedman as he revisits 1980s New York City 'when porn was filth and sex was still dirty.' His book When Sex Was Dirty chronicles the freaks of 42nd Street and all the starlets, studs, strippers, and 'strike-out artists' who made the era of getting screwed, screwed over, and screwed up, fascinating. So dirty you'll want to shower afterwards, but so compelling, you'll keep coming back for more."
--- Playgirl

"...(B)rings readers vividly back to the oversexed Manhattan nightclubs of the mid-'80s... 'The Rise and Fall of Al Goldstein'---the collection's most memorable entry---traces with empathy and amazement the arc of the infamous pornographer, for whom Friedman once worked. The book... will interest Friedman's (and the old Times Square's) admirers."
--- Publishers Weekly

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May 5, 2005

Sexuality, Magic and Perversion

Out of print for decades, with copies selling for as much as $300 by antiquarian dealers, Francis King's fascinating Sexuality, Magic and Perversion has been brought back to bookstores by Feral House.

One of the first modern-day books to explore orgasm as part of a supernatural rite to achieve Divine Union, Mr. King investigates the use of sexuality by Western and Eastern religious and occult traditions, from fertility cults, tantricism, black masses, Islamic mysticism, templarism, forms of Crowleyan sex magick, and even the work of Wilhelm Reich.

The late Francis King was also the author of Satan and Swastika, Ritual Magic in England, Magic: The Western Tradition, The Magical World of Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner and Holistic Medicine, and many other books.

"Feral House has reprinted Francis King's entertaining tour of the history of sexual magic and its intersections with various Western esoteric traditions... Sometimes archly, sometimes bemusedly, sometimes with wicked irony, he presents little nuggets such as the founder of Scientology's (L. Ron Hubbard) connection to Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.)... King manages to hold the reader's attention with his many juicy asides, and the occasional excursus into surprising topics... I cannot escape the impression that King himself is part of the data for scholars of religion to study."
--- Nova Religio

"Thank you, Feral House, for making this book available again! Sexuality, Magic & Perversion's cult reputation rests on its status as a fairly innovative and ground-breaking work... Not a scholarly tome but a popular history, and it covers a lot of ground, from the pagan orgies of the ancient Greeks to the sacramental shagging of the Fraturnitas Saturni... A panoply of rare photos and illustrations, as well as lengthy quotations from obscure volumes you and I are unlikely ever to see, increase the worth of theis book to occult researchers."
--- Headpress

"9/10: Fascinating—but definitely not for the prudish."
--- Fortean Times

"A controversial, revelatory, highly recommended volume of original research that investigates sexuality in religions and traditions all over the globe, from fertility cults and tantricism to Islamic mysticism and Crowleyan sex magick. A tantalizing study of the mystical aspect of sex, heavily researched and presenting information about the life and work of outspoken yet little-known figures who distinguished themselves, for good or for bad, in the intersecting fields of sex and religion. This new Feral House edition will admirably serve to introduce a whole new generation to this seminal, ground-breaking work on human sexuality."
--- Midwest Book Review

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Rollerderby

Young Lisa Carver, aka "Lisa Suckdog," writer / editor / publisher of the popular 'zine, Rollerderby, would rather have you forget all about Generation X. She's stumping for "Generation L"—a generation that follows the dictates of Lisa Carver herself. Generation L's love their parents, clean up after themselves, and are not the pathetic, grungy losers epitomized by the media perception of Generation X.

Lisa Carver's take-no-prisoners, explicit, feminist-but-girlie ROLLERDERBY, collected here in book form by Feral House for the first time, has been acknowledged by many critics as one of the most important and interesting 'zines. The Utne Reader named Lisa Carver one of the 100 most influential visionaries of our time.

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Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin, The

A sister to Feral House’s innovative Voluptuous Panic, by Mel Gordon, The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin investigates four aspects of European sexuality before Nazism took hold and devastated a remarkably open-minded culture that occurred four decades prior to America’s sexual revolution.

Author Barbara Ulrich opens her exploration of the period with "Awake In a Dream," in which pagan holidays are celebrated with fashionable masquerades. The "Modern Gift" lays out Berlin’s drug culture, and the exotic debauch specific to each chemical. "Kind Mistress" looks into kinky Weimar-period scholarship and the fetishism of powerful women and masochistic men. The various enclaves of Berlin’s Sapphic culture are revealed in "The Scorpion’s Kiss," which excerpts and illustrates Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s lesbian novel, The Scorpion. The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin culminates with an illustration of the final party before the Nazis came to power and burned the kind of books listed in Ulrich’s bibliography.

Shot through with excerpts of period diaries, memoirs and song lyrics, and illustrated with over 120 paintings, illustrations and photographs, The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin paints an unforgettable picture of a period known to modern audiences through the character of Sally Bowles and the play and movie, Cabaret. Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, Plainclothes Naked and Perv: A Love Story, provides the book’s introduction.

A bi-coastal resident of Manhattan and Berkeley, and documentary filmmaker whose satirical movies include Nuns in Love and I Was Bigfoot’s Love Slave, this is Barbara Ulrich’s first book.


** This title now out of print and unavailable **

"...beguiling... Suffused with a palpable erotic charge, this is a book that screams, or perhaps huskily whispers, 'decadence'. A largely pictorial account of one of the most fascinating periods in Twentieth Century Germany's complex and fragmented history, this is an intoxicating and lurid look at both a city and an epoch that were at once rapidly disintegrating and bursting with desire..."
--- Richard Shepard, Amazon.co.uk Hip Gift Guide

"...a truly impressive and highly readable/viewable book containing precious pieces of queer social history."
--- Darklady, JUST OUT

WEIMAR VIXENS: "Nestled somewhere between the mustard gas of World War I and the genocide of World War II, Berliners of the Weimar Republic succumbed to a pleasure-drunk dementia fueled by cheap drugs and consenting m·dchen. The city was home to fetishists of every stripe. Barbara Ulrich's HOT GIRLS OF WEIMAR BERLIN (Feral House) evokes an era when sexual orientation was a laughing matter and cruel boots were not."
--- Playboy

"Trapped between the two World Wars the decadent Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin indulged in smack-fueled lesbian romps and pagan-inspired orgies. This collection of contemporary material provides a glimpse into their world..."
--- Bizarre

"...paints a beguiling picture of the times... an evocative collection. It certainly made me want to go back in time, take drugs, stay up late and behave very badly indeed... I loved it."
--- Erotic Review

"This is a fascinating book filled with startling images and quotations from writers, artists, scientists and sociologists all reporting on the sexual and chemical revolution which took place in Berlin during the 1920s and '30s. The pictures may be over 70 years old but they are still fresh and sexy. In her book Ulrich follows the liberated adventures of Weimar Berlin in an informative and accessible way. These girls invented the word decadence."
--- G3

"In the twenty years before Hitler's rise to power, Berlin had more gay bars and periodicals than New York. Barbara Ulrich documents the lesbian side of Germany's Roaring Twenties debauchery... Ulrich's extremely explicit collection isn't just good reading; it's valuable documentation of the rich lesbian subculture that existed before WWII."
--- Girlfriends

"Hot on the heels of the critically acclaimed VOLUPTUOUS PANIC comes this glamorous, beautifully illustrated book, containing revelations about Berlin in the Twenties and Thirties. Not that we aren't familiar with all the kinky cabarets, SM clubs, brothels, cheap narcotics, fetishists, lesbian and male TVs in Berlin at this time, but the book is devoted to the Hot Girls who transformed their village fertility rites into the quintessentially modern sex holiday...(T)here is something for everybody in THE HOT GIRLS OF WEIMAR BERLIN... sizzlingly, spankingly hot..."
--- Forum

"Barbara Ulrich orchestrates a lovely collection of drawings, photos, and writing oozing with sex and the awakening shock of a society drenched in newfound inhibitions."
--- Flaunt

"...deftly captures with illustrations, photographs and excerpted text from respected books of the day this heady time in German history —1919 through 1932 —that served as an archetypal era of lesbian chic."
--- Out

"Fascinating snapshots and artworks of the women of that incredible time and place... Delicious, decadent and delightful."
--- Frontiers

"...Ulrich's offering is splendid...tremendous beauty and style...These HOT GIRLS do sizzle. Ulrich has amassed a treasure trove of artwork from when the twenties truly roared in Berlin...[and] culled some illuminating quotes from personal accounts of the time that can't help but resonate within our own economically depressed, terror-stricken souls... [I]f you want to explore the erotic spirit of Weimar and some of the most exquisite, sensational and often comical artwork of the period featuring fantastic females in all states of sensuous debauchery, treat yourself to HOT GIRLS."
--- Dr. Susan Block

** This title now out of print and unavailable **

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