The Gay & Lesbian Review

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a diversity of gay male sexual styles. The strip’s megalomania-
cal villains and their nefarious plots reflected actual threats to a
vulnerable gay male community, while the agents of
A.U.N.T.I.E. embodied a sex affirming, muscular, and always
humorous resistance to their would-be oppressors. Every detail
of the strip—the names of spy organizations, the agents, the
plots and locales—was saturated with sexual innuendo and gay
double entendres. Polak and Shapiro took special delight in
winking at the well-known homoerotic valences of hetero-mas-
culine rituals, such as men’s wrestling, physique photography,
military academies, Hollywood westerns, and bodybuilding
contests. Described as a “stripped comic,” everyone in Harry’s
world seemed to have an aversion to clothing, which conve-
niently facilitated his many humorous sex-capades. Like James
Bond, Harry’s adventures always involved plenty of sex, and
the sex was always plenty adventurous.
The strip’s theme was established in the very first storyline
when the “very mean and terribly oversexed” Lewd Leather and
his motorcycle gang from the Maniacal Underworld Control
Korp (M.U.C.K.) “trick-nap” the hunky but virginal Biff Rip-
ples, who has just been crowned “The World’s Most Succulently
Beautiful Male” at the Mr. Planetarium Physique Contest, tak-
ing place in the Grand Ballroom of the Slumhouse YMCA.
After Lewd cuts the power, the all-male audience devolves into
a riot—or is it an orgy?—in the resulting darkness. Agent FU2,
head of the secret A.U.N.T.I.E. organization, alerts “top agent”
Harry Chess, who’s busy “working out” Mickey Muscle at his
NewYork brownstone. The pair heads for the Bloody Basket, a
seedy gay bar, to consult with stubbly-chinned informant,
bouncer, and “Girl Bartender” Big Bennie. They learn that
Biff’s abduction was ordered by the wealthy, monocle-wearing
æsthete Gaylord Dragoff, who wants to add Biff to his private
“piece corps.” Big Bennie directs Harry and Mickey to a gay
bathhouse, where they find Lewd and his boys have absconded
with Dragoff’s $5,000,000 reward—but not before having their
way with a not too unwilling Biff Ripples, left hogtied and
moaning contentedly in the steam room. Dragoff consoles him-
self with the fact that Biff is alive and a natural for “The Steve
Reeves Story,” a future film currently casting in Hollywood.
In subsequent “undercover operations,” Harry and Mickey
encounter villains such as the Scarlet Scumbag, the Groping
Hand, Brownfinger and his sidekick Belowjob, and Mung the
Mean and his Deadly Dildo Death Squad. They foil a plot by the
Pornography Intern Solely for Soviet Hotrocks (or P.I.S.S.H.) to
corner the world’s gay porn market. Next they recover the FBI’s
official “homo-file” and the kidnapped astronaut Hunky Dorie.
Another time they successfully prevent ground glass from being
dumped into the vats of the “Cay-Why” factory. Following the
Bond formula, Harry and Mickey are subjected to wildly in-
ventive and heavily sexualized tortures and enjoy plot-inciden-
tal sex with a variety of gorgeous guys, with names like Tooshie
Supreme and Gary R. Pigeon.
HARRY PRO AND CON: SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The strip’s explicit sexual references and raunchy humor were
a magnet for criticism, reflecting larger factional divisions in-
side the era’s homophile organizations and the wider gay com-
munity. Clearly favoring a politics of conformity and
respectability of the kind that Polak detested, Richard Inman,
then president of the nascent Mattachine Society of Florida,
wrote to Janus Society member Barbara Horowitz in April
1965: “Look at your champ Harry Chess. Frankly I think the
whole idea is SICK. ... What is the sense of trying to see how
MUCH you can get away with? What is the sense of such un-
necessary defiance? ... Does it reflect what the homophile
movement stands for? ... HELL NO IT DOESN’T and the only result
could be one of damage to the movement.”
At the time, printed matter that depicted or discussed ho-
mosexuality was a favorite target of censorship campaigns by
crusading politicians using anti-obscenity laws. Physique mag-
azines and homophile publications were regularly seized by
local police, the FBI, and the Postmaster General’s office. Polak
and Shapiro anticipated the threat of censorship when writing
Harry Chess. As Polak put it, “our greatest single problem is
attempting to predict which of our quips we can use without
ending in jail on an obscenity rap.” Understandably, full-frontal
nudity was not depicted in Harry Chess while the strip appeared
in Drum, even after the 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in
MANual Enterprises v. Day, which held that physique maga-
zines with nude models were not inherently obscene.
Despite these precautions, Harry Chess appears to have
sharply polarized Drum readers. A letter from Toronto in the
September 1965 issue begged that Harry not be dropped, while
a reader from Santa Monica cautioned: “Harry Chess is your
Henry Miller. Squeamish souls had better look elsewhere. Of
course you may be banned eventually (by jealous witches).” In
the November 1965 issue editor Polak reported, in answer to a
reader’s query about the popularity of the previous issue, that
March–April 2014 23
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