The release of The Kinsey Report and the groundbreaking sex research of Masters and Johnson in the ’50s and ’60s inspired a new trend in publishing: entirely fabricated or otherwise compromised “sociological studies” of human sexuality penned by pulp authors pretending to be doctors who possessed a peculiar obsession with intense erotic descriptions of sex acts. Obviously the homosexuals were a huge focus of this hugely popular genre because we are perverted maniacs! According to lesbian author Jaye Zimet, “many risqué books were able to evade the threat of government censorship by couching lesbian eroticism in medical terminology and including “introductions and testimonials by alleged psychiatrists and M.D.s.” So many alleged doctors with such interest in the down and dirty details of what turns ladies into lady-loving-ladies!
9 Books About Lesbian Sex By Men Pretending To Be Doctors
1. 1962 – The Lesbian in Society
W.D. Sprague, described in his bio as the Associate Director of the (non-existent) Psychoanalytical Assistance Foundation, also took some time to pen the equally obnoxious The Sensuous Hooker, Sexual Behavior of American Nurses, Sex Behavior of the American Housewife and Sex and the Secretary. W.D Sprague is the pseudonym of pulp author Bela W. von Block.
2. 1963 – A New Look at The Lesbian
“Scott O’Neill” is also responsible for such classics as Campus Call Girl and Profile of a Pervert Volume 2. The back of the book promises “hard-core facts” such as “Every woman is a latent lesbian!” and asks Intriguing Questions such as “Is our “Race for the Moon” triggered by Lesbianism?”
3. 1963 – The Lesbian
Ah, Dr. Benjamin Morse, you wily genius! Our dear friend Benjamin Morse was a pseudonym employed by pulp author Lawrence Block, and this particular book has been best described as “collections of short stories linked by a fake sexologist.” The book presented a series of alleged case studies inventing different “types” of lesbians: the college girl, the office girl, the career gal, the prostitute, the matron, the man-hater, the bohemian, the frigid wife, the dull dyke and the unsuccessful heterosexual.
4. 1963 – Twilight Women
Another prolific composer of imaginary sexual case histories was Robert Silverberg, who wrote as L.T. Woodward, M.D.. Other titles include Teenage Thrill Killers and Sex and the Armed Services, which warned of “the service woman who becomes the multiple mistress of many men — or goes lesbian.”
5. 1964 – The Grapevine
Jess Stearn was a journalist and author who made his living writing “sensationalist speculative non-fiction” about outsiders including prostitutes and drug addicts. Later in life he went on to focus on spirituality, reincarnation and yoga. Before publishing The Grapevine, he wrote The Sixth Man: A Startling Investigation of the Spread of Homosexuality in America.
To write Grapevine, he attended the Daughters of Bilitis convention, discussed the ’causes of lesbianism’ with a psychologist and allegedly spoke with lesbians from across the USA including married lesbians. He digs deep for descriptions of “butch and femme” and outs some Hollywood celebrities! According to A Book Flog, “the book reads like the ‘cony-catching’ or rogue pamphlets of the 1550s-1600s, the author-investigator leading the reader into the dark recesses of a secret underworld, explaining in-group terms and conventions, feigning occasional moral disapproval while delivering to the titillated reader enticing details.”
6. 1964 – Sex Behavior of the Lesbian
Steiner is also the author of The Petting Generation, a meditation on “the fine art of petting,” and Sex Behavior of the Homosexual.
7. 1965 – The Lesbian in America
Donald Webster Cory is the pen name of professor Edward Sagarin, best known for The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, which was published in 1951 and was “the first widely read non-fiction book in the United States to present knowledgeably and sympathetically the plight of the homosexual as told from the inside rather than the outside.” He is credited as the first to consider gays a “minority” suffering from the slings and arrows of public ignorance and he spoke with compassion about what homosexuals faced in society. However, he did believe homosexuality was a sickness, and criticized the Homophile movement (of which he was a member) for claiming otherwise. He was an outspoken opponent of the progressive gay liberation movement and eventually would claim that Lesbians and gay men were “frequently borderline psychotics.” The Lesbian in America is described as “highly sensational but relatively sympathetic.”
Scholar John D’Emilio notes that “though Cory remained wedded to a view of homosexuality as psychopathology, this book contained three-dimensional character sketches, took for granted that gay women were victims of unjust discrimination and deserved civil rights, and had fine words of praise for the Daughters of Bilitis. In between, one could find a host of hastily composed accounts in which consistency, logic, or evidence played second fiddle to sensationalism.”
8. 1965 – The Homosexual Generation
via bilerco
Ken Worthy was a pseudonym for Carlson Wade, a prolific author of defamatory literature. Other titles include Confessions of a Transvestite, She-Male: The Amazing True-Life Story of Coccinelle, Sexual Behavior of the Lesbian, Diary of a Homosexual and The Queer Path. It appears that he went on to become a respected author of books on homeopathy and nutrition, with 44 titles to his name.
9. 1966 – The Lesbian Handbook
Dale Brittenham, it will not surprise you to learn, did not actually have an MA, and he usually wrote under the name Dale Koby, penning such groundbreaking works as Campus Sexpot and Appointment by Sex, which investigated the phenomenon of “supermarket cashiers doubling as lesbian prostitutes who meet the needs of shopping housewives neglected by their husbands.”
Koby taught English at Sonoroa High School prior to pursuing his career as a writer, where he would reward the best male students with his erotic stories and told everyone he was an amateur photographer who often enticed his young female students into posing for him. He eventually was accused of molesting high school students and “run out of town” and writer David Carkeet found out that Koby actually had two affairs with students at a different high school before getting hired at Sonoroa. The 1961 publication of Campus Sexpot, about an affair between an English teacher and her student, “rocked” Sonoroa High with its truthiness. Isn’t this exactly the kind of guy you’d trust to boldly reveal female homosexuality!?
Koby founded The Magazine of Modern Sex in 1964, which contained articles on topics like group sex, fetishes, nudism and aphrodisiacs. It shuttered in 1965.
via vintage sleeze
You heard it here first, people. Lesbians: We Put a Man on the Moon (to Get Him the Hell Away from Us).
However, I do deeply identify with the term “unsuccessful heterosexual.”
Yes.
When, “oh math is hard**” [in a fictional barbie voice] I say, “Being straight is hard!!!!”
**Because smart graduate studies women at NYU are really attractive, SERIOUSLY, hey girl, hey.**
Oh sweet lesbian black baby jesus, I’m single and want somebody to love…..
Does this mean that if the conspiracy theorists are right about the fake moon landing shit, then it’s a MASSIVE LESBIAN CONSPIRACY?
Wow this is the best list ever written! Thanks riese! I think I am going to have to track a few of these titles down to add to my obscure book collection, just as soon as I work out what Dewey decimal number “entirely fabricated or otherwise compromised “sociological studies” of human sexuality” should be sorted into.
At this point in time and space, I sort my books based off of George Michael songs….don’t judge!
Careless Whisper:
Silver Kiss
Hunger Games
Faith:
I know why the caged bird sings
Chicken Soup for the teenage soul
Wake me up before you Go-Go:
Baby-sitters Club series
I could go on all day…
That is kinda brilliant! I certainly hope you use/have used this as a pick up line!
may I sort you under Somebody to Love?
My girlfriend read a lot of old-timey ‘scientific’ articles about lesbians when she was working on her thesis, and apparently there are DOCUMENTED cases (yes, more than one case) of lesbians giving birth to turtles! The stuff these guys came up with in trying to ‘explain’ lesbianism is just mind-boggling.
Turtles? Like Squirt? Squirtle?
Hey girl!
That’s one TMNT origin story I’ve never heard. Cowabunga!
HA!! Can someone write this story? Please.
I’m laughing so hard I’m gonna pee my pants!
Cool! We get credited with space exploration. Ironic though that space-ship type crews have only one female …
the best book on lesbianism by two guys takes the prize.
I kind of want to know more about these Elaborately Planned Orgies we are having?
(also ‘unsuccessful heterosexual’ is not entirely wrong, really. gpoy, etc.)
Well, it’s not so elaborate.
1. Find a bunch of sexy people.
2. Ask them if they want to have an orgy.
3. Wash linens.
I want to find all of these books, and read them for laughs.
You and me both Eva! I’m hitting the used bookstores! This is just awesome! The REAL secret behind putting a man on the moon!
you know what they say, if you can’t beat ’em and don’t wanna join ’em, send ’em to the moon
Great compilation of largely unknown books and history. I have re-posted this on my Vintage Book Fairy blog
http://vintagebookfairy.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/shameful-vintage-books-about-homosexuality/
Take care — Colleen
Oh how I miss the days when “lesbian” was a proper noun. Just looks so official all capitalized and everything.
just noticed the cover of “a new look at the lesbian” claims to “make all other books on the subject as out-of-date as a bustle”
BUSTLE you guys
I know, right? BUSTLE. I want a bustle.
This is AMAZING.
“Can a confirmed lesbian be cured?”
Whadafuh is a confirmed lesbian?
A confirmed lesbian is a position of honor within the Church of the Eternal Lesbian. They’re the ones who blessed all the girlscout cookies and made them gay.
woah!! I am surprised by how many books there actually were. Why are men so obsessed with lesbians?
Actually, there were hundreds of lesbian pulp books, mostly by and for straight men! I find lesbian pulp fascinating.
These people are sick. My proof? How often they use exclamation points.
“Some Hard-Core Facts!”
“Some Intriguing Questions!”
“Every Word is the Scalding Truth!”
“The shadow world of female homosexuality revealed in clear, uncompromising terms!”
Man, I’m tired just reading that and I haven’t even had the sex yet today.
It’s interesting how the author’s of these books all wrote under pseudonyms. If they had so much to say about lesbianism, why didn’t they the cajones to write these books using their real names?
Okay, but the caption on #7: “This is by far the most creative book on lesbianism I have ever read…”
I’m sorry, HOW many books dis the average doctor in the sixties read on lesbianism?!
This is great I would love to describe myself college girl, career bohemian dyke.
Thanks Dr. Morse.
“Emotional perversions” litmus test: whether or not a person identifies heavily with Jenny Schecter circa Season 4 of The L Word.
Mostly just on the dog front, mind…
This list has gotten me intrigued about the relationship between pulp authors pretending to be doctors and saying ridiculous shit about sexuality 50 years ago and REAL DOCTORS saying ridiculous shit about sexuality 50 years ago. Book #7 is by an actual professor and has a quote from Albert Ellis on the cover! Albert Ellis was an extremely famous and legitimate psychologist. (My understanding is that he and his field had some fucked up views on sexuality at the time, but eventually came around to more reasonable viewpoints.)
This list is hilarious when it’s pervy hacks writing, but #7 shows that ideas like this were put forward by people with real power too, which is scary.
When I was a wee anarchist, I did a book drive in my neighborhood to bring to a homeless shelter I was volunteering at. All the ppl I babysat for gave me books, and you would NOT BELIEVE how many 1960s-70s sex manuals and other erotic non-fiction they gave me, even though, I was like, 16? I had “The Sensuous Man,” several copies of “The Happy Hooker,” the “Penthouse College Files,” Masters and Johnson, etc etc etc. Luckily, (surprisingly?) I did not obtain any copies of these books; they would have made me sad and confused about the role of space travel in my emerging sexuality. I just had three copies of Our Bodies, Our Selves from three different decades to keep by my bedside table.
One book I read that DID lie about lesbians was The Second Sex. The chapter on lesbians made me worry that I might really be gay because if so I would need to start wearing “felt hats” all the time.
You could just as easily have gotten that same worry from reading Effing Dykes:
http://effingdykes.blogspot.com/2010/07/dyke-style-update.html
I like that the scandalously unclad back of the girl on the cover of #1 has been scribbled over. Someone needs to preserve common decency.
Lesbian-powered rockets for the win.
And “supermarket cashiers doubling as lesbian prostitutes who meet the needs of shopping housewives neglected by their husbands.”?!?!! sounds the like a top ranking search term in pornhub
Those books and many more were on drug store wire racks in 1960.
What was surprising was to see Robert Silverberg listed as the writer of “Twilight Women”. Today he is an award-winning science fiction writer. Back then he must have been pumping out anything he could sell for much needed money.
Okay I know I’m hella late but like I just love the idea that we are somehow behind the space race