John Preston (December 11, 1945, Medfield, Massachusetts – April 28,
1994, Portland, Maine) was an author of gay erotica and an editor of gay
nonfiction anthologies.

This is the sixty-ninth post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was, during an important time of
history.

Life and works
He grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, later living in a number of major
American cities before settling in Portland, Maine in 1979. A writer of
fiction and nonfiction, dealing mostly with issues in gay life, he was a
pioneer in the early gay rights movement in Minneapolis. He helped
found one of the earliest gay community centers in the United States,
edited two newsletters devoted to sexual health, and served as editor of
The Advocate in 1975.

He
was the author or editor of nearly fifty books, including such erotic
landmarks as Mr. Benson and I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of
Erotic Love. Other works include Franny, the Queen of Provincetown
(first a novel, then adapted for stage), The Big Gay Book: A Man's
Survival Guide for the Nineties, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront
AIDS, and Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong.

Preston's writing (which he described as pornography) was part of a
movement in the 1970s and 1980s toward higher literary quality in gay
erotic fiction. Preston was an outspoken advocate of the artistic and
social worth of erotic writings, delivering a lecture at Harvard
University entitled My Life as a Pornographer. The lecture was later
published in an essay collection with the same name. The collection
includes Preston's thoughts about the gay leather community, to which he
belonged.

His writings caused controversy when he
was one of several gay and lesbian authors to have their books
confiscated at the border by Canada Customs. Testimony regarding the
literary merit of his novel I Once Had a Master helped a Vancouver LGBT
bookstore, Little Sister's Book and Art Emporium, to partially win a
case against Canada Customs in the Canadian Supreme Court in 2000.
Preston also brought gay erotic fiction to mainstream readers by editing the Flesh and the Word anthologies for a major press.
Preston served as a journalist and essayist throughout his life. He
wrote news articles for Drummer and other gay magazines, produced a
syndicated column on gay life in Maine, and penned a column for Lambda
Book Report called "Preston on Publishing." His nonfiction anthologies,
which collected essays by himself and others on everyday aspects of gay
and lesbian life, won him the Lambda Literary Award and the American
Library Association's Stonewall Book Award. He was especially noted for
his writings on New England.

In addition, Preston wrote men's adventure novels under the pseudonyms
of Mike McCray, Preston MacAdam, and Jack Hilt (pen names that he shared
with other authors). Taking what he had learned from authoring those
books, he wrote the "Alex Kane" adventure novels about gay characters.
Preston was among the first writers to popularize the genre of safe sex
stories, editing a safe sex anthology entitled Hot Living in 1985. He
helped to found the AIDS Project of Southern Maine. In the late 1980s,
he discovered that he himself was HIV positive.
Some of his last essays, found in his nonfiction anthologies and in his
posthumous collection Winter's Light, describe his struggle to come
emotionally to terms with a disease that had already killed many of his
friends and fellow writers.

He died of AIDS complications on April
28, 1994, aged 48, at his home in Portland. His papers are held in the
Preston Archive at Brown University.