John Preston (11 December 1945, Medfield, Massachusetts – 28 April 1994, Portland, Maine) was an American writer of gay erotica and editor of gay nonfiction—leather-community fluent, unapologetic about calling his fiction pornography, and determined to treat that pornography as literature, politics, and community history. He authored or edited nearly fifty books, helped build early gay institutions, and left an archive and named awards that still mark leather writing culture.
Life, Cities, and Activism
Preston grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, lived in several major US cities, and settled in Portland, Maine in 1979. A pioneer of early gay rights work in Minneapolis, he helped found one of the first gay community centers in the United States, edited newsletters devoted to sexual health, and served as editor of The Advocate in 1975. That mix—service journalism, sexual health, and institutional building—shaped how he later defended erotic writing as socially necessary rather than merely dirty.
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 produced a syndicated column on gay life in Maine and penned “Preston on Publishing” for Lambda Book Report. New England remained a special subject even when the books traveled nationally.
Erotica: Mr. Benson and the Case for Porn as Art
Landmark erotic titles include Mr. Benson and I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love—high-protocol Master/slave fiction that still circulates on leather reading lists. Preston’s porn was part of a 1970s–80s movement toward higher literary quality in gay erotic fiction. He was an outspoken advocate of the artistic and social worth of erotic writing, delivering a lecture at Harvard University titled “My Life as a Pornographer,” later collected in an essay volume of the same name. That collection includes his thoughts on the gay leather community to which he belonged.
He brought gay erotica to mainstream shelves by editing the Flesh and the Word anthologies for a major press—bridging bookstore respectability and dungeon heat. Other notable works include the novel Franny, the Queen of Provincetown (later adapted for stage), 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.
Canadian customs seizures of gay and lesbian books snared his work. Testimony on the literary merit of I Once Had a Master helped Vancouver’s Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium in its long fight, contributing to a partial Supreme Court of Canada victory in 2000. Preston’s name thus sits not only on spines but in the legal history of queer bookstores against the state.
Journalism, Awards, Adventure Fiction
He wrote news articles for Drummer and other gay magazines—placing him inside the classic leather-press ecosystem. Nonfiction anthologies collecting everyday gay and lesbian life won him a Lambda Literary Award and the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award. The double track is characteristic: filthy excellence in M/s fiction, prize-winning editorial work on ordinary queer lives.
As Mike McCray, Preston MacAdam, and Jack Hild (shared house names), he wrote men’s adventure novels. Under his own brand he created the Alex Kane gay adventure books—including Sweet Dreams, Golden Years, and Deadly Lies—mixing action plots with issues such as pressures on gay youth. Genre craft learned in men’s adventure fed character-driven gay thrillers that still treated politics as plot fuel.
Safe Sex, AIDS Work, and Death
Preston was among the first writers to popularize safe-sex erotica as a genre intervention, editing the anthology Hot Living in 1985. He helped found the AIDS Project of Southern Maine. After testing HIV-positive in the late 1980s, late essays in his anthologies and the posthumous collection Winter’s Light tracked grief and survival among friends and fellow writers. He died of AIDS complications on 28 April 1994, aged forty-eight, at home in Portland.
The timeline matters for leather history: the same man who wrote Master/slave fantasy also midwifed erotic pedagogy for a plague generation and built local AIDS infrastructure. Desire and mortality share the bibliography.
Legacy
His papers form the Preston Archive at Brown University—an academic home for a writer who refused to disown the word pornography. In 1994 the National Leather Association International gave him the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work. In 2007 NLA-I inaugurated awards for excellence in SM/fetish/leather writing; categories include the John Preston Award for short fiction. That naming is the scene’s way of saying the standard still runs through him.
For leather readers, Preston is the bridge between filthy excellence and public argument: the man who would say “pornography” in a Harvard hall, fight customs officers with literary merit, edit safe-sex stories, and still demand that a Master/slave tale be read as a book. Mr. Benson remains a touchstone; the essays remain a defense brief; the archive remains open for the next generation arguing the same case under new laws and new platforms.
