Carl Vernon Corley
(1921 - living) U.S.A.
Writer and physique artist
Corley born in Florence, Mississippi, grew up on a farm in Rankin County. He served in the Pacific as a Marine during World War II, then returned home and took a job as a draftsman with the Mississippi Highway Department in Jackson. Hr was emloyed there for almost fifteeen years.
Early in the morning and at night after work, Corley sketched and painted human figures, many in futuristic settings. He built upon a childhood fascination with Flash Gordon to write and illustrate his own science fiction - both short stories and novels. Though he initially failed to interest publishers, his artwork circulated in the burgeoning realm of soft-core homoerotica.
  
In the late 1950s Sir Prise of Chicago sold copies of Corley's illustrations by mail. At least ten were reproduced as posters, signalling the raising popularity of distinctive gay archetypes: farm hands, college boys, sailors and hunters, as well as ancient and mythological figures such as princes, gladiators and gods.In 1960 Pad Library of Agora Hills, California, published his first pulp novel, A Chosen World, and over the next six years he published more than twenty other novels.
At a time when gay plitical forums were insufficient, Corley used his art and particularly his storytelling as a means to celebrate homosexuality and to argue for equal rights. He writes stories also with the pseudonym Vince Water and Richard Amory.
Source: excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Contemporary Gay and Lesbian History, from WWII to Present Day, Routledge, London, 2001
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