H. Lynn Womack

Herman Lynn Womack (1923–1985) was an American publisher, and the founder of Guild Press, a Washington, D.C. publishing house that catered almost exclusively to a gay male audience and played a major role in expanding the legal protections for gay publications against obscenity laws in the United States.

Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi in 1923 to tenant farmers, Womack began school at the University of Mississippi, but transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. to complete his degree and to pursue graduate studies. Womack was a heavyset man and an albino.

By 1946, Womack came to terms with his homosexuality and ended his marriage to his second wife. This coincided with the collapse of one of his business ventures, the Howell Academy, a private boarding school at which Womack reportedly was rarely present. After the closing of the Howell Academy, Womack enrolled in a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, receiving his doctorate in 1955. After completing his Ph.D., he became a professor of Philosophy at the George Washington University.

An investment that he had made earlier in his life paid off and resulted in his becoming the owner of a small printing plant. With this printing press, he developed MANual Enterprises, an earlier incarnation of Guild Press.

By 1960, Guild Press became a profitable publishing enterprise under Womack's leadership as publisher and sole proprietor and was printing physique and art magazines and providing a national mail order business.

In 1962, the United States Postal Service tried to shut down the distribution of three of the Guild Press's publications: Manual, Trim, and Grecian Guild Pictorial. Womack responded by taking the U.S. Postal Service to court in MANual Enterprises v. Day (1962), which was one of the First Amendment cases that determined that erotica intended for gay males was "not obscene as a matter of law". He ultimately won the case on appeal in the United States Supreme Court, thereby carving out greater freedoms for gay publications throughout the United States.

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