McDonald, Boyd (Editor) - Straight to Hell (S.T.H.): The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts: Archives of the American Academy of Men's Sexual Research no. 46

Boyd McDonald (Editor).

Straight to Hell (S.T.H.): The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts: Archives of the American Academy of Men's Sexual Research no. 46.

New York: Straight to Hell, 1980. 
Staple-bound softcover. 
36 pages. 

Very good. 

Light edgewear + soiling to front cover. 

Scarce issue of long-time artsy gay pornography mag featuring steamy photographs, interviews and stories. 

"The precise date of S.T.H.'s founding is unknown; the earliest known issue is #2, dated 1973. Publication is irregular, and early issues were not always dated nor copyrighted. The magazine was founded by Boyd McDonald, who edited the magazine from the early seventies through the mid-eighties. McDonald created S.T.H. as a magazine of reader-submitted male-male sex stories following his experience creating Skinheads, a zine about foreskin fetishism. He claimed to have been inspired to create the magazine after being visited by Gore Vidal's character Myra Breckenridge in a dream.

McDonald edited, typeset, mimeographed, and hand-assembled early issues of S.T.H. from a series of transient furnished rooms on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Printing costs were paid with McDonald's welfare checks, and McDonald once joked that S.T.H. "was the only gay-sex magazine funded by the US government." At its peak, the magazine had a circulation of twenty thousand, which provided McDonald a modest income that he spent on male escorts.

McDonald turned over editorship of S.T.H. to Victor Weaver in the mid-1980s, and began focusing on publishing a series of anthologies that collected stories from the magazine (see Anthologies below); Meat, the first volume in the series, sold over 50,000 copies.

 Weaver was more readily accepting of S.T.H.'s popularity in New York's arts and culture scene, and threw parties for the magazine at venues such as Danceteria and the Pyramid Club. Billy Miller became editor of S.T.H. in 1989, and in 2007 began a project to digitize back issues of the magazine. S.T.H. #68, the most recent issue of the magazine, was published in 2017 and edited by Miller.

S.T.H. consists primarily of readers' submissions of stories of their sexual experiences. Submissions are edited only for length, with spelling and grammar errors intentionally left uncorrected; McDonald stated that "I find men who don't use punctuation are more fun in bed than those who do." McDonald encouraged contributors to read Ernest Hemingway and William S. Burroughs, and emulate their direct and unadorned writing style. He would often correspond with contributors, asking them detailed questions about their sexual habits and printing their answers. Stories were printed under titles that parodied tabloid newspaper headlines and TV listings guides, such as "10 Hawaiian Dongs Unload on Tourist" and "Mechanic’s Asshole Is Clean; Has Fragrance of Gasoline".

The magazine also published pornographic images, both reader-contributed and sourced from studios such as Old Reliable and the Athletic Model Guild. Issues published under McDonald's editorship also contained his commentary on sex, culture, and politics, particularly what he perceived as the hypocrisies of individuals and celebrities who were not fully accepting of their own desires.^"