John Preston: Mr. Benson, Leather Writing, and Pornography as a Book

John Preston was born on 11 December 1945 in Medfield, Massachusetts, and died on 28 April 1994 in Portland, Maine, at forty-eight. He wrote gay erotica, edited gay nonfiction, and helped build early gay institutions. He knew the leather community, called his fiction pornography, and argued that this pornography could be read as literature, politics, and community history. He wrote or edited nearly fifty books. His papers are the Preston Archive at Brown University. A writing prize carries his name.

He grew up in Medfield, lived in several major American cities, and settled in Portland in 1979. In Minneapolis he was an early figure in gay rights work. He helped found one of the first gay community centers in the United States, edited newsletters on sexual health, and in 1975 edited The Advocate. Service journalism, sexual health, and institution-building later sat under his defense of erotic writing.

In Portland he wrote news and features for The Portland Chronicle, including a long piece on the local monopoly of the Portland Press Herald, plus food writing and film reviews. He had a column on gay life in Maine, and he wrote “Preston on Publishing” for Lambda Book Report. New England stayed a subject even after the books traveled nationally.

Master/slave fiction

The erotic novels Mr. Benson and I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love are high-protocol Master/slave stories, and they are still on leather reading lists. The work belongs to the 1970s and 1980s push to take gay erotic fiction more seriously as writing. He lectured at Harvard under the title “My Life as a Pornographer.” The lecture later appeared in an essay collection of the same name, including his account of the gay leather community he belonged to.

He edited the Flesh and the Word anthologies and put gay erotica on the shelves of a major press. Besides the Master/slave books he wrote the novel Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, later adapted for the stage, along with The Big Gay Book: A Man’s Survival Guide for the Nineties, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS, and Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong. The nonfiction anthologies on everyday gay and lesbian life won him a Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award.

Adventure fiction and a customs case

Under the names Mike McCray and Preston MacAdam, and the shared pen name Jack Hild, he wrote men’s adventure novels. Under the Alex Kane line he published Sweet Dreams, Golden Years, and Deadly Lies, action plots that take up issues such as the pressures on gay youth. Canadian customs seized gay and lesbian books, including his. Testimony on the literary merit of I Once Had a Master helped Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium in its case and contributed to a partial victory at the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000.

Safe-sex erotica, AIDS work, and the awards

He was among the early writers to treat safe-sex erotica as its own intervention. In 1985 he edited the anthology Hot Living. He helped found the AIDS Project of Southern Maine. He tested HIV-positive in the late 1980s. Late essays and the posthumous collection Winter’s Light follow grief and survival among friends and fellow writers.

On 28 April 1994 he died at home in Portland of complications from AIDS. That same year the National Leather Association International gave him the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work. In 2007 NLA-I set up awards for excellence in SM, fetish, and leather writing. The short-fiction category is the John Preston Award. The fiction, the customs testimony, the safe-sex stories, and the archive are adult erotic writing and community history.