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language: English
country: USA
year: 1978
form: novel
genre(s): erotica
dates read: 7.8.22-14.8.22
when I was in Provincetown in 2019 I picked up two vintage gay erotica books, and at long last I’ve gotten around to reading one of them, Bob Hancock’s Coppin’ the Jock, published in 1978 in the Surree Stud Series.
it was — not unpredictably — a mess. in fairness to the book, the title probably should have clued me in that it would be, on some level, copaganda. in my defense, however, neither the cover — which shows two guys in gym shorts in a locker room — nor the foreword, nor the beginning of the first chapter, which I read in the bookstore before buying the book, give any reason to believe it will be anything other than a story about the jock main character realizing he’s not straight and falling in love with his (gay) jock roommate and lifelong best friend.
unfortunately, the process of figuring out that he’s not straight involves Tom getting sexually assaulted by a trucker (although the narration doesn’t exactly interpret it that way) and then picked up by a guy who turns out to be a bisexual (or at least claiming bisexuality, albeit not in so many words and with an apparently strong preference for men) cop who initiates him into the world of consensual gay sex, helps him talk through his emotional turmoil at the discovery that neither he nor his best friend is straight and that he might be in love with his best friend.
the presence of a “good cop” also enabled the narrative to go truly off the rails by introducing a plotline about the main character’s best friend being the first victim in a series of brutal rapes/beatings committed by four bad cops (one of whose badness was first introduced specifically by making him homophobic). much of the second half of the book is devoted to solving this crime, which for some reason — despite eyewitness testimony from six victims who all identified the same cops as the people who kidnapped them from a campus cruising spot — requires Tom to act as bait so the “good cop” can catch them in the act and put an end to their homophobic vigilantism. throughout this whole situation, both Tom and the “good cop” continue to make regular, joking references to rape, even after Tom has himself been violently assaulted as part of the sting; only once, at the very end, while he and his friend are figuring out their situation, does his friend call him on it and say “Don’t talk to me about rape”, but even then Tom (and implicitly the narration) brushes it off.
did I mention this is set in Florida in ca. 1977-1978? the idea that a police department would devote this much time to stopping some of its members from assaulting gay men seems. implausible. the reason I can be so specific about the temporal setting is because of the book’s regular references to Anita Bryant, which was one of the interesting things. she’s referred to exclusively as variations on “that woman” or, depending on the character, “that bitch” (“Since that fuckin’ bitch has started in”, “He’s one of those homosexuals that that woman is talking about”).
the “good cop” also repeatedly threatens Tom, notionally in jest, with arrest for various minor (or less minor) infractions and explicitly admits that
I’ve been sorta confiscating a few things from the department confiscation cage and I’d just as soon him not find out about it, if you know what I mean.
I also did not love the book — whose author I think it’s fair to assume was white — having its one Black character drop the N-word in passing (in a very weird conversation scene in the dorm showers where Tom is mostly focused on assessing the size of his dick). at least Tom didn’t say it, I guess.
what was good about this? well, I don’t know about “good”, but the unhinged foreword that concludes its first paragraph by saying that “[s]ex with woman is for procreation. Sex with men is for pleasure” and this is how it’s always been was a wild ride. the handling of Bryant was interesting, although I do wish they hadn’t turned the sole female character in the book (Tom’s best friend’s mother) into a “near hysteri[cal]” mouthpiece for Bryant’s views”.
some (unintentional) highlights:
as you can see, even the sex writing was not great. he kept describing people’s dicks as “bludgeons” or in one case a “flesh bludgeon”.
moods: dark, horny