GLR March-April 2026

mobile gay Manhattanites. His ‘lovely home,’ as he calls it, is packed tight with several bookcases filled to overflowing, a cot covered with an Army blanket, a tiny stove and refrigerator, and his writing table. There are also rows of shopping bags stuffed with the sex letters his contributors send him for publication in his books and in the column he edits for the gay newsweekly, The New York Native .” Some skeptics doubted the letters he pub lished were authentic, but I saw them, and Boyd let me read some of them. (Full dis closure: Boyd included several of my first person accounts in his “true case histories of men’s groins and rear ends.”) Boyd was friendly, talkative, and dryly but outrageously funny. The several hours I spent with him were among the most enjoy able I’ve had with anyone I’ve interviewed. McDonald was also a trenchant and hilari ous political commentator, and, as he told me, his politics were socialist. In addition to his sex books, he wrote film reviews and es says for Christopher Street magazine, which were later anthologized in Cruising theMovies , published by Gay Presses of New York. They were funny and insightful; Mother Jones magazine observed that Mc Donald was “one of the nation’s least appre ciated and most astute film critics.” George De Stefano, Long Island City, NY To the Editor: Thank you for publishing Michael Quinn’s “Cruising with Boyd McDonald.” He notes

sues of TheGuide but also an archive of materials by McDonald (correspondence, photos, files, articles) for the period 1975 to 1993, plus 4,200 copies of his last book, Scum: True Homosexual Experiences (1993). I sorted through the pile and whit tled it down to 44 boxes. The rest was left for recycling. I rented a U-Haul van, packed it, closed the account, and drove off. I had arranged in advance to gift the materials to the Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY. They re ceived the bulk of the material, but I also arranged to send copies of TheGuide to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (now The ArQuives) in Toronto, as well as to Rick Hurlbut’s collection of travel materials at the Pride Library, Western University, London, ON. McDonald’s papers, 14.5 cubic feet in total, are at Cornell, and the finding aid is available online at Cornell’s RMC Library. Donald W. McLeod, Toronto, ON, Canada Correc ti ons In the Nov.-Dec. 2025 issue, a piece by Chase Bryer includes in his bio (p. 13) a ded ication to Beverly Little Thunder, who died on August 24th (not July 18th) of last year. In the May-June 2025 issue, in a feature ti tled “The First Lesbian Image Makers,” the photo from the Elvira Studio was published in the German newspaper DieWoche (not DieWoke ).

that McDonald’s family cleaned out his room after he died in 1993, throwing everything away. This suggests that his papers did not survive, which is not entirely true. In May 2013, I was hired by Pink Trian gle Press (PTP) of Toronto to go to Boston and clean out a storage locker. PTP had pur chased The Guide: Gay Travel, Entertain ment, Politics, & Sex , a grand old queer publication that had published McDonald. The locker was the final clean-up for the purchase, and my instructions were to clear the locker and to place any suitable material in a queer archive. There were 122 dust covered boxes mostly containing back is

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