To the best of my knowledge, this book was not really written by Ed Wood the filmmaker, nor is the gentleman featured on the cover a gay black. My guess is that “Ed Wood” was chosen at the time as a nom-de-plume by the author back in the days when Ed Wood was still something of a cultural obscurity. But I could be wrong. I do know for a fact, though, that the photograph on the cover is not supposed to represent Charlene, the hero/heroine of the book who escapes a tortured youth as a sharecropper to go an become a cross-dressing bitch for a series of con men and thieves.
This little example of vintage “erotica” turned up in a yard sale in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, one day. I really got a kick out of seeing how dirty stories were written back in the good ol’ days of the year I was born. I almost feel a pang of regret that contemporary smut has lost that sense of the hero being really deviant and indiscrete: it seems a lot more thrilling than than the explicit, happy rainbow crap that gets churned out these days.