Sex, sin, and sand: straight authors of "beach books" were never afraid to throw in gay or lesbian love scenes to spice things up--here are some tawdry titles to tan by. (Cool Summer Books).

It's 1984, and you're packing your beach bag--Bain de Soleil, Wayfarers, Little Playmate cooler (containing Bartles & Jaymes, Fresca, and Yoplait), boom box (with Bananarama, Corey Hart, and Kajagoogoo cassingles), and a can of Paul Mitchell mousse for the cool new hairstyle that will tragically come to be known as a mullet. But what are you going to read? A big fat juicy novel packed with cheap thrills and homoerotic titillation, of course.

But it's 1984! No one's heard of James Robert Baker yet. California Screaming won't be written for almost 15 years. And the author of Glamourpuss and Sex Toys of the Gods is barely out of diapers. Well, there's always Gordon Merrick. Your local B. Dalton's bound to have a dog-eared, broken-spined copy of The Lord Won't Mind that some closet queen hid behind the James Michener. Or you could hit your mom's bookshelf for a bestselling trash epic with some gay nuggets hidden deep within.

[Editor's disclaimer. You'll have to pick up the books themselves for the really juicy stuff. There are some places The Advocate just can't go.]

Valley of the Dolls (1966)--Jacqueline Susann invented the modern beach novel with this brilliant saga of three young starlets chewed up and spit out by the voracious jaws of showbiz. But despite its hip dialogue references to "fags" (not to mention spawning a film version that can best be described as the Showgirls of the '60s), the book shies away from any in-depth depiction of gay boys in favor of some very groundbreaking pop lesbianism.

Susann's own sapphic soft spot (her girlfriends reportedly included Ethel Merman and doomed blond sexpot Carole Landis) led her to draw a sympathetic portrait of doomed blond sexpot Jennifer North's relationship with Maria, "the glacial Spanish beauty" she meets in Swiss boarding school. Maria knows just what to say to her curious classmate to remove "any taint of abnormality," Susann writes. "`We like one another. I want to make you know about sex, to feel thrilling climaxes--not let you learn about it by being mauled by some brutal man. We are doing nothing wrong. We are not Lesbians like those awful freaks who cut their hair and wear mannish clothes. We are two women who adore one another and who know about being gentle and affectionate.'"

Is it any wonder that, soon after, "Jennifer began to feel a sensation of excitement--her body began to vibrate"? Unfortunately, Jennifer's stunning decolletage brings her into contact with lots of brutal, mauling, emotionally unavailable men, and she ends up a suicidal fallen nudie star.

Harold Robbins wove an unhappy married homo into the dysfunctional tapestry of his automobile-dynasty potboiler The Betsy; the character's wife has an affair with his father, and he later commits suicide because of a blackmail plot. But Robbins waited until The Lonely Lady (1976) to really go gay. Not only does he give heroine JeriLee Randall a queer best friend (How trendy! How 1999!) who encourages her to sleep her way to the top of the screenwriting business, but Robbins also exposes the lesbian interludes that all writers know are a must when climbing the Hollywood ladder.

In the marvelous Pia Zadora film version, JeriLee feels so dirty after dallying with an Italian diva to help sell her screenplay that she showers fully dressed and promptly suffers a nervous breakdown. Not so in the novel: "Much to my surprise, I even began to enjoy it. I never dreamed that a woman's touch could be so delicate and so exciting." JeriLee subsequently plunges into relationships with a soap actress and a sassy self-made black music mogul named Licia: "`I never had sex like that,' [Licia] said. `I never wanted to stop.'" Licia then launches into a hilariously graphic description of just what makes JeriLee so good--unfortunately, it can't be reprinted in a family magazine. "`You better stop talkin' like that,' JeriLee laughed. `You're turning me on again.'" No, honey, you're turning me on!

Most other mass-market male writers are much less comfortable with homosexuality, but occasionally something fruity will slip in, usually (and thankfully) in a dark, depraved, utterly scummy context. Arthur Hailey's pulse-pounder The Moneychangers (1975) treated Literary Guild members to a prison gang rape after hotshot young hetero banking cutie Miles Eastin is sent up the river for embezzling.

Later, in order to save himself from future molestation, Miles reluctantly agrees to set up housekeeping with big black bruiser Karl. And then the real mental anguish begins: "He was beginning to enjoy what was occurring between himself and Karl. Furthermore, Miles was regarding his protector with new feelings ... Affection? Yes ... Love? Not He dared not ... the realizations shattered him. Yet he followed new suggestions which Karl made, even when these caused Miles's homosexual role to become more positive."

What "suggestions" would those be? Chemical enhancements, latex devices, rodents? Arthur's not telling. "After each occasion questions haunted him. Was he a man any longer? ... Had he become perverted totally? Was this a way it happened? Could there ever be a turnabout, a reversion to normalcy later, canceling out the tasting, savoring here and now? If not, was life worth living? He doubted it."

Stephen King is a brilliant storyteller, but his attitude about gays has always been a little suspect. With one notable exception, he pretty much ignored us until The Talisman (1984), coauthored with Peter Straub, in which any possible gay component to the friendship between the two adolescent male leads, Jack and Wolf, is handily denied by the inclusion of real faggots like the L.A. retail clerk who offers to perform oral sex on 12-year-old Jack while he's trying on new school clothes.

King graduated to gay stock characters like Silly Tragic Flamer Who Gets Bashed in It and Lonely but Helpful Asexual Oldster in Insomnia. But by far the most memorable homo moment in King history occurred way back in Firestarter (1980). In this runaway hit thriller about Charlie, a pyrokinetic tot, and her warmhearted left-wing dad on the run from the government, King makes the classic mistake of confusing transvestism with homosexuality, personified here in "slightly effeminate" scientist Dr. Herman Pynchot, who had in his youth "liked to dress up in women's clothes because he thought they made him look ... well, very pretty."

One night in college some pals discovered Herm en travesti then proceeded to toss garbage and compost all over the frat house kitchen and forced Herm "dressed only in ladies' panties, stockings and garter belt, and a bra stuffed with toilet paper, to clean it all up.... He had dropped out of the frat, horrified and disgusted with himself--most of all because he had found the entire incident somehow exciting." We are winkingly assured that Herm "had never `cross-dressed' since that time. He was not gay. He had a lovely wife and two fine children and that proved he was not gay...." Hilarity ensues when Charlie's dad uses his psychic mind-controlling abilities to stir up Herm's repressed memories:

"His eyes were dark and trancelike ... Pynchot carefully hooked one of his wife's bras behind his back. It hung limply on his narrow chest. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought he looked ... well, very pretty.... He stood by the sink and looked down into the maw of the newly installed Waste-King disposer." And before he knows it, he's being compelled to stick his hand into the activated disposer and bleed to death in his wife's undies.

Before Anne Rice became the Barbra Streisand of goth, she wrote Cry to Heaven (1982), her version of a historical romance. The result is as far removed from your typical bodice-ripper as it is from typical Anne Rice. No vampires, no leaden plotting, no brain-numbingly baroque prose, just deliciously overheated melodrama about hot-blooded castrati wreaking bi-sexy havoc in 18th-century Italy. If you thought choirboys lost their sexual urges postcastration, you haven't met hunky neutered hero Tonio: "Tonio would rip away the lace shirt, the breeches. He would run his hands over Domenico's skin that had the resilience and perfection of a baby's. Then he would slap Domenico if he chose....

"And finally after much persistence, Domenico lured him into the most delicious play beforehand." How delicious? Let's just say it's sort of consensual and not very reciprocal: "It puzzled Tonio that Domenico did not need more, demand more. But Domenico was always satisfied afterwards." That makes two of us, Annie!

Hollywood Wives (1983)--If any megapopular straight author should have big chunks of gay dotting their literary landscape, it's Jackie Collins. Her heroines are tough, sexy hotties who favor torrid sex with well-hung studs, and according to her pal Heidi Fleiss, female convicts have been known to get into brawls over copies of Collins's books in the prison library. But although Collins enhances her casts of characters with a variety of gays and lesbians, she is disappointingly prudish when it comes to actual same-sex shtupping. Hollywood Wives remains Jackie's masterpiece, an epic miniseries in prose form that sucks you into a perfectly constructed web of betrayal, bed-hopping, and backstabbing while juggling about 20 major characters who each get exactly what they deserve in one of the most nerve-frying climaxes in the history of the genre.

The lead hunk, an aspiring actor named Buddy, has a sleazy queer-bait past that dances agonizingly close to the kind of man-on-man action many Collins fans hunger for. In a flashback, 14-year-old Buddy and a cute male chum wind up at a San Diego boy party where they meet "a short butterball of a man in a bright-orange kaftan." Unfortunately, at this point Jackie cops out--high on booze and pot, Buddy passes out in the garden, and he wakes up to discover that Tony has been sexually abused and murdered. Afterward, Buddy's overprotective mother "questioned him constantly. `Did those men try to put their things near you?' `Did they undress you?' `You know it's not normal--two men together.' How dumb did she think he was? He knew it wasn't normal. In fact, he knew what was normal. He was beginning to eye the girls in class, and getting [shall we say, aroused] just thinking about what he would like to do to them."

Mom turns out to be a tad on the abnormal side herself; by page 52, she's seduced her own son. Buddy humps his way up the Hollywood ladder by escorting lonely rich women and unavoidably arousing the interest of leering gay pimps, like Jason: "And what did he know about Buddy Hudson? And then there was a wife involved. Probably some Hollywood tramp. One of these days Buddy would wake up to the fact that boys have more fun. And wouldn't it be simply gorgeous if it was he, Jason Swankle, who could convince him?" Sorry, Swankie, it ain't gonna happen.

Which brings us to Judith Gould. Gould makes it happen. A notoriously reclusive East Coaster, for 20 years she has been cranking out hits with titles like Dazzle, Forever, and Too Damn Rich. Gould mates the power-chick-high-end-shopping-as-religion aesthetic of Judith Krantz with the globe- and decade-spanning scope of Sidney Sheldon at his most dire and then proceeds to blow them out of Lake Como with massive luxury overdoses of passionate ill-fated romance, diabolical plots for world domination, and scads of explicit sex, rendered in almost clinical detail.

Her magnum opus is Never Too Rich (1990), in which a feisty street urchin becomes a supermodel against a backdrop of Manhattan society whores and Brian De Palma-esque serial slashings. On page 24 we're introduced to snotty fashion designer Antonio de Riscal, "standing on the corner of Thirty-sixth Street and Seventh Avenue, ogling the crotches and buttocks of the black and Puerto Rican boys pushing the hanging garment racks laden with coats and dresses." Antonio gets peeved when one of these racks almost runs him over. Then he catches sight of the dishy dude pushing it:

"Sweet mother of mercy. How old could he be? Eighteen? All of nineteen? And with practically no hips to speak of. But, thick, muscular thighs--oh, yes, he had those. And under the thick, quilted jacket--more muscles, surely. And he strutted so cocksure, with those washed-out, torn Levi's so tight that [his most formidable assets] were blatantly displayed for all the world to see."

He offers the kid 300 bucks for a quick boink, and by page 41 they're back in his office, with Antonio getting more than his money's worth. "An animal! Antonio thought as he spun out of reality's orbit. The kid is a dirty, low-class animal. A sex machine!"

Yeah, he's definitely that. If only I could say just how dirty and low-class. But I can't. Suffice it to say that Ms. Gould wins our little sweepstakes.

Have a super summer!

McLaughlin is the creator of the MTV soap Spyder Games.