Victor Jerome Banis (May 25, 1937 – February 22, 2019) was an American author, often associated with the first wave of West Coast gay writing.

As a small child, Banis moved with his family to Eaton, Ohio, where he lived on a farm and finished high school in 1955.

[5] On his own, he lived for a brief time in Birmingham, Alabama, before moving to Dayton, Ohio, where he worked in sales and floral design.

[7] Banis's first published work was a short story, "Broken Record," that appeared in the Swiss gay publication Der Kreis in 1963.

[9] He continued to write both straight and bisexual novels for Brandon House, but incensed by government censorship, he was increasingly drawn to depicting the struggling gay scene that was yet barely chronicled in American literature.

It was the first gay mystery series, already five in number before George Baxt could follow up on his success with A Queer Kind of Death (also 1966), and the C.A.M.P.

novels depicted what is probably the first openly out and joyfully unrestrained gay hero in American letters, the indomitable undercover agent Jackie Holmes.

Their number included Hubert C. Kennedy, Michael Bronski, Susan Stryker, Fabio Cleto, and Drewey Wayne Gunn.

Come This Way, a collection of new and some old stories along with excerpts from earlier novels, was published by Regal Crest Enterprises in 2007 with an homage from Drewey Wayne Gunn.