Carl Corley

Who is Carl Corley?

Carl V. Corley is an author and illustrator. Beginning in the 1950s, he drew physique art for male beefcake magazines and for sale as posters. In the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote twenty-two novels of gay male pulp fiction. From the 1970s into the early 1990s, Corley continued to write stories for gay pornography magazines. Corley also has written and illustrated non-erotic projects, including Louisiana history and religious books. Gay historian John Howard, who rediscovered Corley's gay pulp novels in the 1990s, argues that Corley's work "complicates queer cultural studies by unsettling its urbanist roots." Corley's texts are not typical stories of gay young men from rural areas finding their ways to sexual liberation in cities, but instead describe "many complex nodes of circulation, not just aggregation".