boychick

I have spent several thousand dollars (and, at this point, probably hours) researching the life of little-known gay author Leo Skir. There are too many reasons for this to name, but one is how enigmatic his life's work is. In his letters, he understood his novel boychick¹ to be the culmination of his literary career, and he imagined the project as setting him apart from his peers. But today, besides a few passing mentions in bibliographies or discussed in relation to his friendship with poet Elise Cowen, the novel is not remembered at all. A far cry, then, from setting him apart from his contemporaries!

But as much as he thought it would give him the big break he needed, he also struggled for years with conceiving of and writing the novel. Although he writes in a letter that he began by 1963, a letter to his literary agent in 1966 paints a more troubling picture of the novel's standing:

It was a lot of fun but it got out of hand. I began shopping for the book, getting it things, etc. as one furnishes a house. Sinc[e] the story in the non-classic expanded form went from 2000 b.c.e. (before the common era) to 2000 c.e. it was more than I could take. Also, with my lack of organization [...] I haven't been able to find most of the novel, which I must have written at some time or o[]ther. Also, I keep picking up pieces of writing which I'm not quite sure is the novel, but might be.

The novel was eventually published—"natch," as Skir called it in a letter to poet John Ciardi at the Saturday Review—by Winter House, Ltd., in 1971. Winter House is a somewhat enigmatic publisher; although it is known that it survived for at least a few years and published a small number of books, its ownership and history have generally eluded me. Similarly, although details about it are scarce in his surviving letters, a second edition of the novel was published by Belmont/Tower the following year.

More can certainly be said about the context in which Skir wrote the novel—the publishing or literary context, certainly, but more interestingly, the personal context in which Skir composed, shopped, and eventually published boychick. As just one example of the interconnectedness of boychick with the larger Beat publishing environment (many of his Beat friends, like Elise Cowen and Allen Ginsberg, are characters in the novel), take his close friendship with Irving Rosenthal, author of the popular, and difficult to understand, novel Sheeper (published with Grove in 1967); Rosenthal, in turn, connected Skir to photographer Peter Neide—perhaps while Neide was in prison for taking lewd photographs of boys, or, since they corresponded extensively while Neide was in prison, just before his arrest.² Neide, for his part, took photographs for Skir's journalistic work in Evergreen magazine and, for the novel's advertisement in the magazine GAY, contributed a photograph of what appears to be a young boy. Small connections between Skir and all manner of arts—photography, music, painting, film, literature—abound in what remains of his letters, and usually, these connections are rather enigmatic. But at the center of many is, in one way or another, boychick.

But as for the novel itself: During the composition of boychick, and even after its appearance in print for the first time—either as the short story "Other Chanukahs" in 1965 or the Winter House edition—he significantly altered its conclusion, especially its final few scenes. There are at least four versions of that coda in existence. These versions are:

• wh: The version as published by Winter House in 1971;
• bt: The version as published by Belmont/Tower in 1972;
• ts: The version as it was edited in his typescript draft; and
• alt: The "alternative" version he proposed in his edited typescript draft.

The rest of this post will be a reproduction of each of these four versions. For the purposes of this collation, I reproduce the text as it appeared on the page, including the page numbering, but minus any text that is irrelevant to the final scene. Text that Skir or his editors crossed out by hand or overtyped is marked with highlighted red strikethrough, text that Skir handwrote is given in highlighted green, and if an editor used a red pen, I represent it in superscripted italic red. Sometimes Skir or his editors circled text and drew an arrow to where it should be placed; I have silently moved it to the intended position. Highlighting is removed and notes to typesetters are ignored.

Notes

1. In his correspondence, Skir generally favored the uncapitalized boychick when referring to the novel, but referred to the character with the capitalized B in Boychick. That is a preference I have preserved here; however, since there is not much surviving evidence regarding the Belmont/Tower publication of the novel, I typically refer to it as Boychick (with a capital B). back
2. Although Skir compulsively kept much of his correspondence, writings from Neide to himself (with a few inclusions from Rosenthal and Skir) are found, instead, in the Irving Rosenthal Papers, M1550, in Stanford University's Department of Special Collections and University Archives. Besides the prison letters and a few references to Neide and Rosenthal in Skir's own papers at the University of Minnesota's Archives and Special Collections, not much is presently known about Neide's own life and career. back

wh: Winter House

bt: Belmont/Tower

ts: Edited typescript

alt: "Alternative" edited typescript

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