‘Paranoia may raise its ugly head when one has taken too many drugs that do not go together,’ warned Clark Henley’s 1982 instructional, The Butch Manual: The Current Drag and How to Do It. ‘Ideally, the weekend should be spent partying continuously, and the drugs consumed must balance one another out. If Butch takes too many downs, he will pass out. An up will rebalance his metabolism. On the other hand, too many ups will produce hysteria, which hopefully can be doused with alcohol. Too many drugs from either the up or down families will produce excessive paranoia. Study the following graph and observe how drugs can counterbalance each other to keep Butch in the paranoia-free zone,’ Henley advised, providing the promised graph.
Henley’s tongue-in-cheek manual was immediately popular upon its release. Aping the style of a chatty, helpful women’s magazine, and complete with fictional agony aunt ‘Gertrude Stein’, The Butch Manual advised gay men on how to seem more masculine, with San Francisco-born Henley (1950-88) modelling his satirical tips throughout.
