CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/8/2024

Queer history, science-fiction and the occult in visionary, pulp-age Los Angeles

From time to time we get a book that has it all. All! Published to accompany the pleasingly incendiary PST ART exhibition on view now at USC Fisher Museum of Art, hardcover with gold stamping, gilded edges, a pull-out poster, and exquisitely produced with black-and-white, duotone and tritone printing, Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-nation is such a book. Not only because it’s an object of fascinating materials, and not only because the design—by Omnivore, Inc. and publishers Inventory Press and ONE Archives at the USC Libraries—is so right, but because the subject matter is so perfectly of this moment. The poster alone is a treasure, folding out to index the range of Southern California’s weird-heyday queer, occult and science-fiction communities of the 1930s through the 1960s—from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and the Los Angeles Scottish Rite Freemasonry to artists, writers, occultists and filmmakers including Cameron, Forrest J. Ackerman, Jack Parsons and Kenneth Anger. Editor, author, fantasy-fiction fan and lesbian publisher and musician Tigrina (aka Edythe D. Eyde / Lisa Ben) is quoted, from 1946:
Weary of our dreary world and bored with life, our fancies call us
To imaginary realms. ‘Tis then we turn to you for solace,
You, who with artful skill construct us alien worlds in distant spaces,
Transporting us by space ships and by rockets to weird, wondrous places.
New concepts, customs and traditions styled for life on other spheres
Make us question those that we have followed blindly through the years.
Your skillful pens paint future scenes, or glimpses of a bygone age.
Cold words are changed to living entities across a printed page.
What mighty citadels you build with pen and ink your only tools,
Creating havens for the dreamers, making refuges for fools.
Atomic power, robots, rockets, futuristic innovations,
All these fabulous ideas evolved from your imaginations
May be ridiculed and mocked and deemed impossible by some,
And yet they may be fact, not fiction, in progressive years to come.