This book is nothing less than blasphemy. With Curtis Knight constantly reminding us he was in a band with Jimi Hendrix, he plods on to tell us that Jimi was a believer in UFOs and his life was constantly touched by the paranormal. Find out how Jimi’s life was saved by an “angelic-like being who arrived in a spaceship.” Knight also claims that Hendrix knew about a “race of beings living inside the inner earth,” yawn. The chapter titled “Attempted Ripoff of Jimi Hendrix” (yeah, Curtis) is complete with bimbos and nobody musicians kneeling by Jimi’s star on Hollywood Boulevard and a terrible double-exposure photo of his gravesite with supposedly strange spirit forms lurking nearby (snore). The only possible fact in this book is that they were in a band together at one point. Hilarious fiction. DW

Publisher: Inner Light
Paperback: 112 pages
Illustrated

“I raised the belt high above my head. Just before I brought it down with all my might, I removed the towel from his buttocks. He jumped as the belt landed. ‘God Almighty!’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing?’ For an answer, I gave him another lick of the belt. And another one. He took four of them before he rolled off the mattress and landed on his knees on the floor. He clasped his hands and raised them to me as if he were praying. ‘I’m sorry, ‘ he said, ‘please don’t hit me again.’” True story of a professional black dominatrix, from 1976. GR

Publisher: Holloway House
Paperback: 254 pages

“Now I hate the killer’s guts. I shriek into his face that I want to see him croak like the llama he executed. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs. The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat—that would be too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It’s no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.”
The late Klaus Kinski was an actor possessed of a unique, demonic energy, whether applied to his life, his art, or to comments about Werner Herzog, the film director most closely associated with him. He was fond of saying, “I am like a wild animal born in captivity, in a zoo. But where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent.” Emerging from the dire poverty of pre-war Berlin and serving in the German army during the last year of World War II, he rose to international film stardom. Yet he always carried a personal hell with him as he strove to alleviate an unendurable sense of isolation through his acting or by having sex. His Casanova-like pursuit of sex started as a child with his sister and continued with countless others. In order to maintain his lifestyle, Kinski appeared in over 160 films, ranging from the classics Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Nosferatu and Doctor Zhivago to such schlock as The Creature With the Blue Hand.
An edition of Kinski’s very personal and idiosyncratic memoirs appeared briefly in the United States in 1988. Approximately 55 pages shorter than this edition, it was abruptly withdrawn just prior to its publication. Now available for the first time is unexpurgated Kinski, blisteringly candid and with the charm of a must-see car crash. Includes a thorough cross-section of photographs from Kinski’s life and career. JAT

Publisher: Viking
Hardback: 325 pages
Illustrated

Literally born and raised in Hollywood, Gilmore has delved into the seamy underbelly of Fame in a plethora of guises: as child actor, stage and screen bit-player, screenwriter, journalist, pulp novelist, low-budget film director and true crime writer. With caustic clarity and 20/20 hindsight, Gilmore unstintingly recounts his relationships with the likes of Janis Joplin, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Jean Seberg and Lenny Bruce both on the way up and at the peaks of their notoriety. He describes his illuminating and often haunting first-hand encounters with Hank Williams, Ed Wood, Jr., Brigitte Bardot, Sal Mineo, Eartha Kitt, Charles Manson, Vampira, Mickey Cohen, Steve McQueen and many other denizens of the 20th century’s dubious Pantheon. With hip, vivid prose Gilmore infuses new life into such legend-enshrouded Hollywood haunts as the lunch counter at Schwab’s, the Garden of Allah hotel, and Googie’s on the Sunset Strip. Recognized as a powerful chronicler of the American Nightmare through his gripping examinations of near-mythic Southern California murders (the Black Dahlia in Severed, Tate-La Bianca in The Garbage People), Gilmore now draws upon his personal experiences to turn his sights on our morbid obsession with Celebrity and the ruinous price it exacts from those who would pursue it.

Publisher: Amok
Paperback: 288 pages
Illustrated

This book is an account of prostitution overseas during times of United States military occupation. It is not the words of educated, privileged American intellectuals who like to pat themselves on the back for championing the oppressed, nor is it the angered writings of American women who have suffered mistreatment in the workplace. Instead, these are the words of women enslaved—often at a very early age—into the world’s oldest and often most terrible profession. And their matter-of-fact approach to telling these first-person horror stories creates a terrifying portrait of how American men behave when nobody’s around to punish them for being cruel. While women don’t have it so great in the U.S. of A., at least here, somebody is looking. This is what happens when nobody is looking, and is a jarring portrait of man’s inhumanity to women. Illustrated with lots of pictures, as if the text isn’t enough. Powerful beyond anything that can be said in a short synopsis. SH

Publisher: New Press
Paperback: 352 pages
Illustrated

Written as a series of letters to the junkie father she put in jail, this is the author’s own story of a childhood marred by drugs and abuse. SC

Publisher: Holloway House
Paperback: 219 pages

John Gilmore, the dysfunctional spawn turned actor of an LAPD cop dad, long ago abandoned the fictions of the silver screen to delve into the darker dementia of true-crime writing, authoring books on Charles Schmid (Cold Blooded), Charles Manson and the Family (The Garbage People) and the Black Dahlia Murder (Severed) that have become widely regarded as classics of the genre. Marked by a rare kind of up-close intensity and subjective intimacy that persistently rejected the obvious and easy histrionic vitriol and posturing that is the common province of mass media moralisms in favor of more empathetic, humanistic insights into the savage side of desire, need and compulsion, Gilmore has now focused his tremendous skills as an investigative reporter and acuity as a chronicler of events onto the far more personal topography of his own experiences. The results come in a most startling new volume of recollections on his old friend, the gloriously and gorily deceased teen icon James Dean.
Long tapped as an inside source on Dean’s private life and obsessions by myriad biographers over the years, Gilmore finally reveals the most sordid secrets left for nearly a half-century to the idle speculations of insider gossip. Enriched not only by a keen understanding of the art and personality that made young Jimmie so memorable but a wealth of anecdotal contributions from the various lovers, friends, colleagues and cohorts left in his tragic wake, Live Fast, Die Young paints a full and lurid picture of the actor and the animal thrashing about within that superbly beautiful physique. By understanding Dean’s immense need for greatness and recognition, Gilmore provides a deeper comprehension of the failures and frustrations that engendered his death fixation and ultimately brought about his untimely end.
But the book’s real payoff is the true dirt it delivers on the unimaginably perverse nature of Gilmore and Dean’s association. We find out how they shared the same woman and compared notes, and most amazingly about the ongoing series of eroticized escapades the two of them enjoyed. If you like to hear about how two essentially heterosexual men can have truly unfulfilling bad sex attempts—hey that hurts!—this is definitely the book for you. Hopefully, some Hollywood degenerate will get the movie rights to this most prurient text, if for no other reason than for audiences to see some pretty boys enact the classic scene contained therein where Jimmie has John put on a pair of funky panties he’s recently taken off some anonymous female sweetheart. CM

Publisher: Thunder's Mouth
Hardback: 256 pages
Illustrated

Movies, money, mink, and men, men, men!!! Plus seances with Criswell, catfights with Jayne Mansfield and Raquel Welch, and more than a few regrets (she turned down Sunset Boulevard!). Here’s Mae revealed as a true iconoclast, world class fag-hag, and inventor of the sound bite. MG

Publisher: Birch Lane
Hardback: 424 pages
Illustrated

The time: Mother’s Day, 1973. The place: San Francisco, California. The event: the founding, by former working-girl Margo St. James, of what has become the United States’ premier prostitutes’ rights organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). While decriminalization of prostitution is COYOTE’s main goal, of equal importance has been their claim that “to deny a woman the option to work as a prostitute, under the conditions of her own choosing, is a violation of her civil rights.” In Making It Work, sociologist Valerie Jenness studied COYOTE in order to analyze “the reconstruction of a social problem and the normalization of deviance.” As such, she traces the history of prostitutes’ rights in the U.S. and its relationship to the gay-and-lesbian and women’s rights movements, as well as the effect of the AIDS epidemic upon it. Of particular interest is her chapter positioning COYOTE’s rhetoric within and against the larger discourses of contemporary feminism. While Making It Work is largely academic in nature, lay (ahem!) readers will find Jenness’ account of COYOTE and its flamboyant leader, St. James (who in 1996 missed being elected to a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by only the slimmest of margins), highly informative and entertaining reading. LP

Publisher: Aldine de Gruyter
Paperback: 150 pages

Forget Lydia Lunch, Nick Zed, Henry Rollins, Michael Gira and all those contemporary writers trying to achieve an ultimate expression of sordid nihilism and depravity layer by layer. This is the shit! This book outstrips them all. Superstar diarrhea dribbling into shoes; tampons up the ass to plug the loose anal sphincter; physically damaging excessive enemas; pedophilic consensual cocksucking; prostitution of their very own minors consummated via the feigned naiveté of compliant parents; gross-out greed and paltry pay-offs; a virile, rampant eruption of egomania that makes Hitler’s megalomaniacal ambition a withered stump by comparison—all this pure filth and Macaulay Culkin’s warm, wet lips too! Yippee! Nobody can ever compete. Everyone should at the very least have this book in their toilet for guests as a matter of decadent etiquette. Perfect water-closet reading for the closet cases. Forget the relentless character assassination of Goldman’s Lennon book. Or any Elvis exposé. Here we have achieved a nirvana of the gratuitous. Thank you Victor. Oh, thank you, Victor!
All my life I hoped that a book that proclaimed it told you “the whole unexpurgated, shocking story” would really do it. Fifty years after my birth, here it is. This is the most perfectly fabulous and amoral book about the excess and undeserved privilege accorded the celebrated, successful and rich in America ever to be inked onto dead trees. Everything it claims to contain is contained within its hallowed bowels, and more, and more. Fantastic. I can’t believe that it’s not exposed prominently in every cornershop bodega, supermarket and bookstore chain across America and number one on the best-seller lists everywhere! As the back cover says: “The boy reveals how he got to know Jackson (and sex); trips to foreign countries with Jackson (and sex); what he saw when Jackson got naked in front of him (and sex); the sexual games he played with Jackson (and more sex).” There are snapshots, love notes, depositions, even spindly drawings of Michael’s malodorous and “smelly” penis by the boy; (oh, “the boy,” by the way, is Jordie Chandler, who rather surprisingly is credited with having co-written the screenplay for Robin Hood: Men in Tights with his father at age 10. Go figure!).
It has to be noted, however, that, falling temporarily prey to his integrity, his acute sense of social responsibility and his principles of investigative journalism, Victor Gutierrez does dwell a little too much upon the mundane legal ramifications and maneuverings of all the parties involved for my prurient tastes. Although, I guess, upon reflection, I am forced to concede that it probably is, in the end, important to be led through the opportunist treacle that glues every character forever together in Michael “Willy Wonka” Jackson’s sexual Chocolate Factory. After all, this is a real-life (real?) fairy tale with multiple professedly happy endings. A terminally degraded Michael Jackson gets his man, or rather his boy, and gets away with it. Jordie Chandler gets his man, or rather his pedomorphic superhero and millions of dollars in perpetuity. Daddy Chandler gets his boys, notoriety and access to millions of dollars. Mummy Chandler gets vacations with her endearing superstar, nice gifts of expensive watches and jewelry, and the rewarding parental pleasure of seeing her beloved son taken good care of by the man, or rather boy, Jackson. Victor gets his man, mother and boys, and, I sincerely hope because he deserves to, his own share of dollars.
Yes, sirree, it’s that good old-fashioned American success story once again. This kind of shameless self-corruption is what made America great; and I for one am deeply grateful. There is something calming, and infinitely reassuring about having one’s deepest cynicism about human nature and its innate badness confirmed so rapidly, uproariously and completely. I can sleep better now, safe in the knowledge that the poor scum get banged up, but that the rich and famous scum are, and will always remain, pillars of the community in any truly democratic, and free, society. All hail the American dream. GPO

Publisher: AK
Paperback: 216 pages
Illustrated