John Dagion – Gay Icon
The Subversive Cynic
Who Knew Everything
6 December 1935 – 8 November 2020
John Dagion aka “Jim Dugan” aka “J. D.,” novelist and journalist and publisher, was the enduring homosexual author of more than twenty subversively erotic books including ten novels and a dozen anthologies, as well as thousands of pages published during the five-decade run of his own three magazines, The Way Out Scene, 18 Wheeler, and T.R.A.S.H: Strange Relations and True Happenings.
Under his legal name, John Dagion wrote a series of books with titles such as Trucker, Trash, Sex Stop, Rough Trade, and Headstops, with each subtitled True Revelations and Strange Happenings from 18 Wheeler and T.R.A.S.H. As “J. D.,” he authored the novels The Coney Island Knights (1991) and The Return of the Coney Island Knights (1992), together about 350 pages on 8.5-by-11 paper with ten point type. As “Jim Dugan,” he wrote books such as the novel, The S&M Brothers (1981).
Not all gay men are liberals. Since the 1960s, Dagion’s radical work read by thousands of like-minded reactionary fans has remained subversively popular in the ultra-conservative sexual underground that pulses within the diverse heart of gay culture.“After forty years of publishing thousands of pages, he told me of the existential responsibility of his contrarian vocation as a gay Devil’s Advocate: “I’m bored, but I’ll go on as long as anyone’s interested.” He was the cynical gay uncle at Thanksgiving who knows everything.
We first met and bonded at the moment AIDS hit the headlines in July 1981, when publisher Dagion from New Jersey sponsored a bespoke gay publishing and gay arts conference in San Francisco at Off the Levee bar and restaurant at 527 Bryant later called the 527 Club and Chez Mollet, He had invited videographer David “Old Reliable” Hurles and me as Drummer editor to address the attendees whom we entertained with shop talk and a multi-media show of homomasculine imagery created by my husband, Mark Hemry, the publisher of MAN2MAN zine (1980-1982), and the co-founder of Palm Drive Video whose titles J.D. often reviewed and sold through mail-order to finance his publishing.
John Dagion told me he was born December 6, 1935, 3:01 PM, in the Hudson Valley near West Point Military Academy, New York. His maternal family roots trace to the 1540s in Gestin Thorpe, England. The family came to America in the 1600s—missing the Mayflower, Dagion said, by one year—and became part of the Milford Puritan Colony (Robert Treat) that had escaped from the Bay Colony to Milford, Connecticut. They moved to the Catskills in the 1680s to work in the lumber business where they intermarried with the Native American Seneca tribe. His paternal family were railroad Italians from Paterson, NJ; his divorced grandfather, who was a brawler working in Olean NY, a railroad center, married a prim girl from the Island of Jersey, England, named Shelley, a relative of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. The family of laborers lived in South New York State working on the railroad.
In interview, Dagion who could be quite charming described his boyhood “self” from 1949 to 1952 as “a cute 42nd Street chicken whore, age fourteen to seventeen,” tricking his way through the movie palaces, dive bars, and jammed subway cars and toilets of New York City. He lived in Brooklyn (1959-1962), the Bronx (1963-1967), and thereafter on Grove Street in East Rutherford, NJ, where he ran his D&W Enterprises publishing company, before retiring to Florida.
He is important in gay literature for being an intensely opinionated homosexual writer who, voicing the discontent of thousands of non-urban gay men, refused to be part of the genteel gay literary mainstream. That grassroots point of view alone made him interesting and important in any gay profile. He scorned politically-correct gay life, queer studies, and the Marxists who rode in on their high horses vowing to destroy what they could not change. He wrote me on November 29, 2007:
The dumbest people are the ones with a diploma on the wall…. Universities are hotbeds of Marxism and so far left now that I hear the desks need seat belts to keep the students from falling out of their chairs. I’ve been in several universities in NJ and Rice university in Houston and was amazed what went on. Foreign students are the only ones studying and the rest are there to prolong the need to get a job.
The psychological dynamic of his stories suited his masochistic and predatory readers. He was an aggressively rough-textured brutalist bent on impugning gay culture. He wrote like the venomous love child of a filthy Walt Whitman and a scatalogical Jonathan Swift, whose godfather is John Waters. His shocking prose was intended to scare the horses. Eschewing gay baths and bars as cliches, he glorified the intensely masculine underbelly of an almost taboo and masochistic kind of Kerouac on-the-road gay lifestyle. His “true confession” narratives are typified by a passive-aggressive, almost combative, pursuit of blue-collar straight men in order to experience verbal abuse and sexual humiliation from them that teeters on the edge of rough-trade homophobic violence from which the narrator usually escapes, wiping his lips, triumphant as a hunter who has bagged his prey. Like Catholics receiving the Body of Christ, he was an essentialist. By eating the seed of blue-collar men, he became one of them, taking on their attitudes and politics.
His risky experiences while hustling and cruising dangerous strangers who never darken the doors of of gay clubs and bars are the source of his best first-person erotic stories. From the age of fourteen when he began writing, his sex life animated his first-person tales with all the passion and intensity of an eyewitness reporter. He told me his luckiest movie palace was the Montauk Theater in Passaic, a grand old 3000-seat movie house that became a porn palace in 1974; his luckiest balcony in any movie theater was the Variety Theater in Manhattan from 1963 to its closing in the 1990s; and his luckiest porn store for tricking with truckers was the Video Room at Exit 2, Truck Stop, I-70, Pennsylvania.
In the late 1950s after hustling Times Square, he detoured his cruising down to the Bowery in his hunt to service authentic blue-collar trade in bum bars. With no education, he began work as a truck driver, and toiled in a mine, before taking up a trade as a printer running a cold type Linotype machine, make up and press, on a giant Kelly press. He also worked in Manhattan inside the jewelry business in a print house that did jobs for pawnshops, major jewelry manufacturing companies, and the police department. He relocated to a union print shop in New Jersey doing newspaper work. He was also, before he changed into a conservative reactionary, an editorial writer and political writer for Hudson County Democratic Party.
After a Union buyout of the Linotype printing business, he retired in 1977 at age forty-eight, and invested in his own New Jersey tattoo parlor which he ran for five years. With the same sex motive as the legendary gay author Sam Steward who ran his own tattoo parlor in Chicago in the 1960s, Dagion ran his parlor in Hoboken to get hands-on access to young, drunk, broke, straight customers who thought it cool to get a free tattoo in trade for a free blow job. After moving to Florida in the late 1990s, he continued as an itinerant tattooist servicing carnival men and Mexican migrants wintering in nearby camps. He wrote me from Orlando in in 2007: “Thank God, we have our wild and delightful orgy spots. The gay RV park and the wonderful saloon in Borelando with the outdoor orgy garden. I should have moved here thirty years ago.”
When in the late 1960s he discovered Boyd MacDonald’s legendary zine Straight to Hell: The New York Review of Cocksucking, he submitted such robust narratives of his underground sex adventures that the iconic Macdonald not only published his work, he advised him to begin his own magazine. Luckily, his day job as a printer eased him into creating and publishing in succession three underground and hand-collated zines, The Way Out Scene for the “Up Your Ass Motorcycle Club” (whose club insignia he designed), followed by 18 Wheeler, and then by his small-format magazine T.R.A.S.H.: True Revelations and Strange Happenings which he began publishing in 1976.
He had earlier created his own publishing company, D&W Enterprises, to keep editorial control of his own magazines and books during that first decade after Stonewall when gay culture was inventing all its identities. In The Way Out Scene, Volume 1, Issue 8 (September 1975), he wrote that the little folio was a thousand copies per issue “printed on a silk-screen mimeo made by Gestetner of Yonkers, NY.”
The anti-establishment Dagion made T.R.A.S.H., which he published till his death, famous for its erotic mix of sleazy sexcapades with his wild politically incorrect opinions and vocal scorn of bourgeois gay culture’s sex, race, and gender politics. Eating the cum of straight blue-collar men to swallow and digest their animating numen, he grew to loathe garden-variety queers who obeyed the bourgeois diktats of The Advocate, the Village Voice, and the leather magazine Drummer. In the mid-1980s, former Catholic priest Winston Leyland, the owner of Gay Sunshine Press and Leyland Publications, had successfully published a series of anthologies edited by Boyd MacDonald with titles such as CUM: True Homosexual Experiences from STH Writers.
Encouraged by MacDonald in New York, Leyland in San Francisco contracted Dagion to edit a series of gritty books based on both new material and past material from T.R.A.S.H. Gifted with a storyteller’s talent to write with the dirty ring of truth that turns readers on, Dagion filled T.R.A.S.H. and his anthologies with his own pseudonymous work alongside autobiographical fan fiction and erotic letters of fact sent to him by his subscribers. Like his zines, all his books and anthologies are a hot broil of his own solipsistic sex fevers, sarcastic humor, social criticism, and often radically right-wing political rants, threaded through ostensibly true tales of sex on the American road with straight truckers, construction workers, and ethnically diverse working-class men.
His rough-trade writing has been illustrated by many artists and photographers whose erotic images match his words. Prime among them are the trucker-painter Billy Buttner; the pointillist artist Rex whose biography Dagion was constantly writing; photographer David Hurles of Old Reliable Studio; the British artist Bill Ward who was the most published artist in Drummer magazine; and the rough-trade artist Domino aka Don Merrick.
In his novel, The West Side Highway Story (1981), Dagion, writing as “J. D.,” featured a Domino drawing of my lover, the Mapplethorpe model and championship bodybuilder, Jim Enger, on page 12. Dagion was executor of the Domino estate and in 1988 loaned me all the surviving Domino originals so I could direct and shoot the images into an organic flow for my Palm Drive Video company. The DVD feature is The Domino Video Gallery: Men Who Will Fuck You Up, with editing and sound design composed by Mark Hemry, sixty-five minutes.
The extremely reclusive and mysterious leather artist Rex whose personality was exactly like Dagion’s chose J.D. as his designated press agent and biographer. In May 1996, he told me in our recorded interview:
JD’s written more about what I’ve done and where I’ve been in life than anyone, and nobody actually sees it. He knows everything. I really think the man is a saint in a way. His porn is the best and I don’t think he is appreciated that much and I know he is sensitive to that so I try to support him. When you’re sisty-five like he is, you’re shaking anyway by just growing old. That’s an age when it’s hard to make new friends. Especially if you’re in the sex business. He’s basically retired. When I see him, I realize he’s an old man. When you’re growing old, you’ve got to take chances. We’re all isolated.
With the dawn of the new century, and after his move to a certain conservative haven in Clermont, Florida, Dagion’s work grew ever more problematic. On June 8, 2008, he denied he was ever a Republican; in 2018, I found him listed in Lake County, Florida, as having “no political party affiliation,” Over the years, his once amusing satire and innocuous invective have increasingly turned into unrepentant codger rants about race, class, and homosexuality, rife with anti-religion, anti-Clinton, and anti-Obama invective.
On November 11, 2007, he wrote in his unique voice:
The Humanists (Ethical Culture Society, Unitarians) actually teach their children ethics and morality as a way of life without the threat of a spook hanging over their head that will punish them if they aren’t moral, honest and ethical. Unlike various religious cults that teach through superstition, fear, and ritualistic mumbo jumbo including how to hate others in other cults. That’s what 95% of wars have been about throughout history. And now the Muslin cult is at war against the Christians cult and the Jews’ cult. None of them have any real basis other than “my invisible spook is the REAL invisible spook and if you don’t accept my spook I’ll kill you.” These people identify a cult as any group that doesn’t believe the same spookery that your own cult believes. They are cults and yours is a religion. The Humanist groups are greatly disliked by the “do as I say, not as I do crowd.”
When Dagion died November 8, 2020, Rex wrote:
JD was one of a kind; a rabid Rex fan and longtime supporter of my work for fifty years—from the very get-go! In our youth, we moved in the same circles in New York in the 1960s. Although we never interacted directly, we shared mutual friends and sex partners. His 18 Wheeler (and later T.R.A.S.H) were legendary underground zines for hardcore aficionados of smut—inspired by Boyd McDonald’s original Straight to Hell zine, but on steroids.
In later life he, David Hurles, and I formed a mutual admiration society and David and I contributed work to T.R.A.S.H that we offered to no other publication. We were JD’s devoted fans and T.R.A.S.H was ‘the’ Bible that set the high-water mark in defining the real raw essence of homosexual attraction warts and all; no punches pulled. He was a terrific porno-writer—the best of my generation when all is said and done…. He would take one of my drawings at random and write very hot stories inspired by them.
I spent a weekend with JD during my late New York period [early 1990s] at his home in New Jersey where he took me around to truck stops and diners and where after thirty years we finally got to know each other in serious conversations about our lives. His lover was very conservative in a bank-teller sort of way and totally unlike JD: opposites attract.
He was blunt speaking, even in the extreme, even strident and offensive. and basically we held opposing views politically, and on nearly every other issue. He was very racist and old school in a rather endearing old-fashioned way, but he always presented his prejudices with a wonderful earthy sense of humor and keen intelligence to counter-balance his bigotry.
He was well-read, politically astute, and rather conservative in his squeaky-clean daily life…. And like me, he was appalled at when gay liberation took all the fun and mystique out of homosexuality, with its suffocating political correctness. A great, great loss to erotica. They broke the mold when they made JD. May he forever find peace in that big truck stop in the sky.
After Mr Trash died, friends planted a memorial tree at a truck stop on Interstate 95 in his honor.