 It was an Affairs to remember. 
Above is a cover scan of Victor Jay’s 1964 novel The Affairs of Gloria, a book that is significant because it’s the first from the LGBT author whose real name is Victor J. Banis. He happens to be the person who, writing under Leisure Books’ communal pseudonym Don Holliday, gave the world the mystery series The Man from C.A.M.P., as well as many other books that are classics in the gay pulp genre. Some of those unforgettable and decidedly un-PC titles include Blow the Man Down, Man into Boy, Homo Farm, and Rally Round the Fag. Gloria isn’t what you’d call a gay pulp. Banis hadn’t yet taken that direction with his fiction (which was all short stories up to that point), but he was literarily bi-curious, you could say, so what he did was create a protagonist whose sexual appetite allowed him to experiment with lesbian themes. The book sold well, and despite an obscenity indictment in Sioux City, Iowa, Banis came away from the experience more convinced than ever that an untapped gay market was waiting. In 1966 Greenleaf Classics published Banis’s first gay mystery The Why Not, which resulted in the go-ahead for similar novels. Banis is still churning out books today, and is well reviewed by entities as middle of the road as Publisher’s Weekly, who, according to the author’s website, called him a literary icon who made a difference. All of that began to take shape with his first novel, The Affairs of Gloria. You can read Banis’s own account of writing Gloria and get the skinny on that obscenity trial here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1939—Batman Debuts
In Detective Comics #27, DC Comics publishes its second major superhero, Batman, who becomes one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, and then a popular camp television series starring Adam West, and lastly a multi-million dollar movie franchise starring Michael Keaton, then George Clooney, and finally Christian Bale. 1953—Crick and Watson Publish DNA Results
British scientists James D Watson and Francis Crick publish an article detailing their discovery of the existence and structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, in Nature magazine. Their findings answer one of the oldest and most fundamental questions of biology, that of how living things reproduce themselves. 1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot.
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