Which Lesbian Pulp Book Cover Are You?

Forbidden love, twisted passions, strange sisters, sin girls—these are just some of the many salacious ways lesbians and lesbianism were described on the bawdy, block-lettered covers of lesbian pulp novels in the mid-20th century. And now you can find out here right here with this very quiz which supposed damnation most accurately speaks to you. Cheers to being scandalous!

No Adam for Eve: The Quiet History of Lesbian Pulp Fiction

Co-published in cooperation with Neotext

When the world is good and normal, one of my not-so-guilty pleasures is the pulp fiction bin at my local comic shop. Located in the literal basement of a building owned by a jazzercise studio, what more could you possibly ask for when it comes to a location for finding cheap books and trashy stories? The real joy, however, is when my guy gets a stack of old erotica. I’m not talking about the Fabio romance covers from the 1990s where there’s a bit of side-boob and a hunky himbo embracing her in a very, “yeah, we’re gonna definitely do straight sex stuff” way. I’m not even really talking about the types of books you’d probably find in your grandpa’s boxes tucked way back in the basement with true gems of cover lines like “She rode high, wide and wicked on a merry-go-round of sex” (an actual tagline courtesy of Any Man Will Do by Greg Hamilton, 1963. I can’t make this up).

No, I’m talking about the pulp erotica that swung in the literal opposite direction for a change, and gave sapphic pulp fans — the majority of whom were likely still woefully in the closet — a chance to explore a side of themselves that was otherwise deemed lurid and distasteful. But, with so many of the novels ending in women realizing that they just hadn’t found the right man or were just indulging in a silly, shameful flight of fancy, it begs the question of what truly represents what we now know as lesbian pulp erotica.      

The roots of lesbian pulp are pretty deep, digging down to the bare bones of publishing of cheap fictions that really took hold in the mid-19th century. In the early 1800s, cheap tabloids called “penny presses” began publishing fiction pieces, including serialized stories, that had readers begging for more. Paper isn’t cheap though — especially when you’re providing a one-stop imagination rag to a bunch of stuffy “manifest destiny” believers — and by the end of the Civil War, production costs got to the point where “story papers” were just too much to handle.

With the quick development of groundwood paper some few decades down the line — produced by reducing logs into wood fibers that could be refined, mixed with water, and pressed into paper — the mass market paperback took off like a rocket. It seems only reasonable then that the publication of paperback fiction would continue moving forward in the form of pulp magazines (and later pulp novels) as well; clearly stealing its name from its cheap manufacturing method. And when the target audience of “adolescents, soldiers, laborers, and even factory girls” can get over one hundred pages of genre fiction (science fiction, horror, western, romance, or mystery) for a nickel, a dime, or a quarter, then you know that you’re in the right place.

Cheap pulp paperbacks become a staple of many readers’ and soldiers pockets through the Second World War featuring “dirty” topics such as murder, gangs, drug use, and male homosexuality, but outwardly and specifically lesbian fiction wasn’t introduced to America until the early 1950s — something that prompted a sharp spike in sales figures from their respective publishing houses according to contemporary records. Author Tereska Torrés came on the scene in 1950 with Women’s Barracks — one of the first, if not *the* first, paperback novels featuring obviously lesbian characters and based loosely on her own experiences fighting with the Free French Forces in WWII. With a description touting the illicit affairs of butch military officers and their femme subordinates, it’s not surprise that it was placed inside the top 250 best-selling novels in the U.S. for a full quarter century after its release. In the world of a writer in the New York Times in 1965, “readers get two immoral women for the price of one!” Again — who could resist that kind of deal, I ask you.

It’s no coincidence that, around the time that Dr. Alfred Kinsey — the famed biologist whose extensive research into sexual behavior, gender, and reproduction changed how many Americans viewed non-heterosexual relationships at the time — had published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and, in quick succession, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, a whole new nationwide, public interest picked up significantly in… well… what exactly these gays were up to when they were getting busy. Especially women.

For many women in the 1950’s and 60’s whose curiosities leaned towards the sapphic nature, even the trashiest or most offensive novels by today’s reading standards, were a glimpse into a life of knowing that they weren’t alone despite the main audience. Especially when so many women — including famed pulp author Ann Bannon — were unable to come out of the closet as lesbian or bisexual, instead opting to remain in heterosexual marriages and hide their curiosities and desires under a gauze of heterosexual normatively. And who could blame them? Despite being an otherworldly-level cultural phenomenon that challenged the idea of queer women as immoral, and femininity as something of a spectrum rather than nothing but high heels and domesticity, the themes often pandered to the straight narrative — even when written by lesbian authors later in the era — to sell to their biggest customer: straight men. Nevertheless, lining up at the drugstore or magazine rack to pull a 35 cent book with two women in compromising scenarios on the cover became a liberating experience for many curious women, who could use being seen holding such a story as a form of “coming out” publicly, without the repercussions of publicly and audibly announcing their queerness that existed in the era: institutionalization, lobotomy, shock therapy — you know, the standard.

Unfortunately for those burgeoning lesbians and bisexuals hoping to be affirmed that they weren’t alone in their desires — affirmation only really available in the early publishing of lesbian stories— the United States Congress actually moved to ban lesbian themes from fiction shortly thereafter, citing that publishers must adhere to stricter moral standards. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, however, and publishers were quick to find loopholes in the morality ruling. With these creative solutions, though, came the awful price of having to compromise the happiness — and often the safety — of the characters that they were selling the stories of. In order to escape the idea of characters fully portraying the “lesbian experience” (see also: “proselytizing homosexuality”), the so-called “straying women” would often meet a grim fate at the end of the novel, or instead find herself the right man who would whisk her away from her sinful thoughts, giving way to the still unfortunately popular “Bury your gays” (previously known as the “Dead Lesbian Syndrome”) trope — in which queer character must either die or receive an unhappy ending because of their sexuality — in LGBTQIA+ inclusive fiction.

One of the most well-known of these compromised books is Spring Fire published by Gold Medal Books and written by the comparable Marijane Meaker (published under the pseudonym Vin Packer), which marks the first true lesbian paperback novel involving two female main characters. Despite telling the story of two college girls whose love leads to a lesbian affair, the book ends with them being caught by their sorority sisters, a drunken car crash, and a mental breakdown that is obviously caused by the overwhelming madness of lesbian love.

Obviously.

Ann Bannon — remember her? — however, refused to give her characters their expected tragic endings in any of the six Beebo Brinker Chronicles books she wrote between 1957 and 1962, with Beebo later becoming the prime archetype for butch lesbians. Ending happily and with lesbian or bisexual women being portrayed as average rather than the stereotypical view of queer women being frigid, psychotic, and immature, Bannon paved the way for not only lesbian authorship in erotica past the pulp fiction era, but for the societal view of lesbian and bisexual relationships for women as a whole.

A good of example of this is one Bannon’s Beebo Brinker novel Odd Girl Out  — rated “objectionable” by the National Organization for Decent Literature, I might add — where Bannon has sorority girl Laura falling in love with her suite mate Beth, and ultimately finds herself caught in a bisexual love triangle with Beth and a boy named Charlie. The problems of heterosexual love are balanced between the new idea of what homosexual love can be, and both are present in equal measure despite the story ending with one of the girls in a straight relationship. But! A glimpse of light — the other remains a lesbian and still gets to live. (What a treat!)

While it can be argued that in retrospective, Bannon had a penchant for pandering to the overwhelmingly heterosexual audience, the idea of a surviving queer character at the end of a story was something that carried enough weight to be called “survival literature”. Lesbian author, activist, and historian Joan Nestle said it best, calling the books as such and explaining that, “In whatever town or cities these books were read, they were spreading the information that meant a new hope for trapped and isolated women”.

Though Bannon was one of the many lesbian authors who succeeded in bringing a sympathetic voice to the white lesbian experience of the time, her take on the subject was something extraordinarily taboo, and extremely rare; preceded only by Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt in 1952. In fact, for the most part the majority of these pulp novels were written by cisgender, straight men with only 40-50 of the overall lesbian publishing between 1950 and 1960 being written by queer women. The line between the two is one that gets pretty skewed to the average reader, however, because while many of the more wholesome lesbian novels written boy lesbian authors during that period are still staple in the formation of many a white queer woman’s identity,  they were still not necessarily written for the women who needed them most.

Books like Sorority Sin by author E.S. Seeley or Lesbos Jungle by Peter Willow are great examples of this, in which the books act as saucy soft-core erotica involving two women who don’t end up with one another and a butch/femme girl gang force a straight man into doing things he would never do in a weird “Cinemax does West Side Story” sort of scenario. In both cases, lesbianism is either treated like a sexual treat for a woman to explore (not even making mention of the frequent “love triangle” theme that is woefully common among the stories from male authors), or like a threat to masculinity and the “natural” way of American life.

Several novels even pushed that boundary further, using lesbianism and the “insatiable insanity of their minds” as an excuse for women to be raped by other women, or to be raped by a female sibling; not only for taboo kinks held by probable male readers, but for claiming that sexual assault and incest are the only true ways a woman would “give herself” to another woman. Novels like Rebel Woman by Harry Whittington — as well as Seeley’s Sorority Sin mentioned above — went so far as to make sure that the relationship has a bisexual element that allows a straight men to “reform” the poor, warped mind of  the young woman with lesbian curiosities. This is, let’s be honest, the 1960s equivalent of the “you just haven’t tried the right penis yet” line we hear from men today and is somehow just as exhausting.

An often overlooked, and unfortunate, truth of lesbian pulp from this era is that it was written and marketed primarily to white queer women. As is the case for much of queer history, pre-Stonewall pulp was about as diverse as a 2020 Trump rally, with most persons of color (most often Black women) used as props for the experiementing white lesbian. Even the exceptions to the rule such as Rea Michaels’ How Dark My Love — which openly acknowledges and supports the civil rights movement and the pain of its Black characters — end on a note of making sure it’s clear that interracial relationships are a thing of immorality, maybe even moreso than homosexuality. For young women of color of this era, the solace of being seen was likely something even further of a dream than it was for the white queer women who made up the assumed majority pulp audience.

At the end of all of this discussion, it’s still fairly easy to ask, “What is lesbian pulp”? By one definition, we can look at queer historians who are happy to tell us that it’s any book published between the 1950s and the mid 1960s with clearly identified lesbian characters or subject matter, and a book cover that consists of a sensationalisted image allowing readers to recognize it as lesbian fiction. Sure, yes, we can definitely roll with that.

More importantly, though — despite many people’s attempts to thwart it from being the case — I think that lesbian pulp can be any book in that period that made the queer women feel seen. Sure, the covers are great ,and yes we as queer readers can look back and go “oh my god this is so trashy” for shits and giggles. Even the sleaziest, most cautionary, most demeaning, and most misogynistic story was something treasured that many queer women kept stashed in the back of their sock drawer, however, knowing that it was a piece of them in the world, and that was at least a really good start.

10 Hilarious And Historical Sex Scenes From Lesbian Pulp Fiction

Lesbian pulp novels were around in the 1950s and ’60s and were notorious for featuring suggestive covers, tragedy and tons of smut. Sold in train stations, drugstores and newsstands or mailed out like magazines and named for the low quality of the paper they were printed on, these novels depicted the possibility of queer relationships, but also suggested that if anyone pursued such a relationship she would in many cases end up institutionalized, hospitalized or really heterosexual all along.

However, lesbian pulp fiction also suggested the possibility of queer sex. Specifically, hilarious queer sex. With discussions of the “silken pliancy of her thighs,” euphemisms and lots of music-related metaphors, the following excerpts from sex scenes show why critics complained about these novels and why readers were eager to open them.

Women’s Barracks by Tereska Torres (1950)

Ursula felt herself very small, tiny against Claude, and at last she felt warm. She placed her cheek on Claude’s breast. Her heart beat violently, but she didn’t feel afraid. She didn’t understand what was happening to her. Claude was not a man; then what was she doing to her? What strange movements! What could they mean? Claude unbuttoned the jacket of her pajamas, and enclosed one of Ursula’s little breasts in her hand, and then gently, very gently, her hand began to caress all of Ursula’s body, her throat, her shoulders, and her belly. Ursula remembered a novel that she had read that said of a woman, who was making love, “Her body vibrated like a violin.” Ursula had been highly pleased by this phrase, and now her body recalled the expression and it too began to vibrate. She was stretched out with her eyes closed, motionless, not daring to make the slightest gesture, indeed not knowing what she should do. And Claude kissed her gently, and caressed her.

Spring Fire by Vin Packer (1952)

“Just stand still,” she said. “Just let me take everything off and look at you. I want to look at you.”

The skirt fell to the floor, and the blouse. Mitch stepped out of her shoes and stood before Leda.

“I want to love you,” Leda said. Her hands stroked Mitch’s body gently. She leaned over to kiss her lips and her forehead and the closed eyelids. She said her name and held her, feeling the fast beat in her pulse and knowing that she had almost lost her.

The blood beat furiously in Mitch’s throat and she could feel a mounting strength in her legs and arms. With the arrogance of a master, Mitch’s nails dug into Leda’s flesh as she began to pull the sweater and the thin blouse from her shoulders. She let her teeth sink into Leda’s neck.

“No, faster!” Leda cried. “Faster, Mitch!”

Leda’s gasp was one of pleasure and desire and it moved Mitch to more violence, pinning Leda’s wrists behind her back and jerking at her skirt.

Neither of them heard the door open.

Appointment In Paris by Fay Adams (1952)

Her hand curled and uncurled against Marcelle’s bare breast. Marcelle drew her closer. Marcelle’s hand began that tender exploratory creeping down Havoc’s spine. The shuddering began — Havoc’s and this time Marcelle’s, too. It was a curious sort of desperate rhythm that they played together like musicians toward some crashing finale. Havoc had no clear idea of what was happening. It was all a great rhythmic tenderness. There was no shock, no brutality. There was no part of her body that Marcelle did not explore and come to know. It was so skillful that there was no shame. Shame was a little word, it was Aunt Julia’s word. This was a wonderful delight, far beyond shame.

The Third Sex by Artemis Smith (1959)

It turned into more than a kiss and they both lay back on the bed, each caressing the other simultaneously, lost in a hunger both had for the body of a woman. Joan felt that this wasn’t the same as it had been with Gig. Kim was more her type, was even a potential lover, and so there was more than animal passion here, there was a beginning, a beginning of a good, clean feeling, a beginning of love. And Joan felt very butch. She forgot Jay, forgot about everything except making love to Kim.

Joan’s lips and hands seemed to be electric with awareness as she gently opened Kim’s blouse and slipped off her bra; and then she let Kim undo her own blouse and bra. They were both half naked on the bed and they paused for a word or two in order to establish some feeling of contact on another plane. They were both embarrassed at having skipped the preliminaries of love.

These Curious Pleasures by Sloan Britain (1961)

Marilyn was coaxing the nightgown up over my body and off me. She took off her pyjamas. Now I could feel her lovely smooth skin. No rough hair and muscles like a man would have.

Her long slim fingers traveled all over my body. I was trembling and nearly delirious with pleasure. Then she trailed her mouth down my neck and chest. Shocks of pleasure went through my entire body.

Then she bit. Not too hard but hard enough to hurt with a pain that was more pleasure. I gasped.

Marilyn moved. Her lips were everywhere. Her soft cheek caressed my thighs.

Deep within me the joy spread. Violent spasms shook my body. As my whole being convulsed in ecstasy I could feel Marilyn sharing my miracle.

Twilight Girl by Della Martin (1961)

They faced each other for what may have been an eon or perhaps only a grace note in time. And then the coil-spring that had lain wound and waited freed itself inside Lon. With a cry that culminated all the cries suppressed within her, that echoed the muffled sobs of lonely nights when the softness was only a pillow, she grasped at the proffered body. Her sudden movement threw them to the couch, Violet squealing her delight. And Lon’s kisses were the repeated, thirsty gulps of a body parched, a spirit long dehydrated. Kisses prodded into frenzied repetition by the tinny, ecstatic sound that reached her ears: “Oh, Jeez, Lon! Oh, Christ, you’re ketchin’ on-” Violet voicing her approval, the beer-numbness shutting out Lon’s fear of venturing to where Violet’s approval became an inarticulate sound, like the moaning of wind.

The Strange Women by Miriam Gardner (1962)

Her hands, instinctively seeking softnesses, seemed to have a life of their own. She pressed Jill’s head to her breast, feeling the soft lips close over the hardening nipple with strangely pleasant pain. And then she lost track of separate sensations, conscious only of softness, of sweetness, of wave after wave of spreading small shivers that carried her along on their crest.

Through it all she was conscious of immense surprise, of growing tenderness like a counterbass chord pattern to the singing in her nerves. As the diffuse patterns swept to their summit, she heard her own cry, hardly more than a whisper, like a final, explosive cadence; then silence.

Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon (1962)

It was no longer a question of proceeding with caution, of “learning how.” The whole night passed like an ecstatic dream, punctuated with a few dead-asleep time-outs, when they were both too exhausted to move, even to make themselves comfortable.

Beebo had only a vague idea of what she was doing, beyond the overwhelming fact that she was making ardent love to Paula. She seemed to have no mind at all, or need of one. She was aware only that Paula was beautiful, she was gay, she was warmly loving, and she was there in Beebo’s arms: fragrant and soft and auburn-topped as a bouquet of tiger lilies.

Beebo couldn’t let her go. And when fatigue forced her to stop she would pull Paula close and stroke her, her heavy breath stirring Paula’s glowing hair, and think about all the girls she had wanted and been denied. She was making up, this night, for every last one of them.

Summer Camp by Anne Herbert (1963)

Peggy thrust her forearms under Beth’s armpits, cupped the big breasts. She wrestled the nurse into a supine position, then threw herself upon her.

Wildly, the girls locked to each other. Their bodies were gleaming now with sweat. Lip to lip, breast to breast, thigh to slippery thigh, they heaved and gyrated, ecstasy rising like a lava wave. Eyes rolled, fingers clutched, light hair mingled with darker. Skin slithered slickly and long legs kicked. Murmuring endearments, panting like beasts, the counsellor and the nurse felt the white-hot wave engulf them, drown them in fiery exaltation while their very guts shook and convulsed.

The Third Street by Joan Ellis (1964)

Karen lay breathlessly, waiting, savoring. Fingers roamed about her body, building the desire Karen knew was there, that Stan could only kill. Pat’s tongue withdrew from hers, but brought fresh heat to the white mounds of panting satin. Finding a delicate pink nipple, she teasing it into flame. A low sound of excitement escaped Karen and she moved beneath Pat.

“Easy, darling,” Pat said, and Karen sensed her pleasure.

And then they both forgot to be easy because Pat’s mouth was loving her, building her to a wild impassioned crescendo that was vocal in its demands. Pat’s hands caressed and teased, everywhere that desire soared. Pat, so gentle, so sure. Pat’s fingers brushing her thighs, Pat’s mouth finding the core of her. Oh, God, Karen thought, she couldn’t bear it! She couldn’t bear this another moment!

Some of these excerpts (and many more, both sexy and unsexy) were found in from novel excerpts in Katherine V. Forrest’s Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965. Strange Sisters is an excellent compendium of lesbian pulp covers and is the source of some of the covers in this post.

Read A F*cking Book: “Stranger On Lesbos” Reminds Us How Far We’ve Come and What Hasn’t Changed

click for other “the way we were” posts

June was LGBT Pride Month, so we decided to extend our pride all summer long by feeding babies to lions! Just kidding, we’re talking about lesbian history, loosely defined as anything that happened in the 20th century or earlier, ’cause shit changes fast in these parts. We’re calling it The Way We Were, and we think you’re gonna like it. For a full index of all “The Way We Were” posts, click that graphic to the right there.

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I was excited to review Stranger On Lesbos, a re-released pulp fiction novel by Valeria Taylor coming to the entire world in 2012 via the Feminist Press. The Femmes Fatales effort they conduct brings generous amounts of retro women’s writing back into our hands, thus allowing us to fondly and not-so-fondly remember the days of yore.

Strangers is the first of a small and short series of books by Taylor focusing around the same central crew of characters.

In Stranger, we become well-acquainted with Francis, a woman suffering from Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name.” Her husband, Bob, has finally hit great success in his sales career, which has resulted in presumed affairs and a new sense of isolation for her in the wake of his heavy workload and recent relocation to Chicago. Her only son, Bill, is reaching adulthood and has a sense of independence making her feel purposeless, uneeded, and worse — bored and unhappy. She is completely unsatisfied; as a temporary solution she seeks out collegiate courses nearby to stimulate her mind and give her something to busy herself with.

What she finds is a new friend — Bake, a butch woman who wears lipstick and sits near her in an english class. They spark up a friendship over drinks, which is a typical recipe for lesbian disaster, and mere chapters later confess their love for one another in front of Bake’s fireplace.

Even as her romance with a woman unfolds, Francis (now called Frankie, of course) struggles with what that means in a culture where people of her variety seemingly do not exist. What you notice off the bat are the familiar faces in her new second life: the emotionally unstable lesbian and her endlessly loving caretaker, the subtle and sexy ex-girlfriend, the formerly-married lesbian head-over-heels with a hot mess, and Bake — the heavy drinking, intensely passionate, emotionally insulated, and tenderly manipulative love of her life.

Throughout a good portion of the book, Francis finds herself completely willing to sacrifice the past in an effort to seek out a new future. That is to say, one of picnics and long afternoons, a job and a new sense of independence and a stream of gay bars that she doesn’t care for but trudges along to in order to get Bake home safely. What she lacks, however, is the ability to formulate “the right time.” When, for example, does one announce to her husband and adult child, who by this point is at the brink of engagement, that she is surrendering her former title as Trophy Wife for the new title of Femme Trophy Partner? Bake is impatient and insecure about Francis’s inability to come right out and say it, pack up and leave, and move in to her apartment, and Francis finds that Bob makes her queasy and Bill makes her sad. And yet she doesn’t make the move.

The sense of isolation Francis had once felt in her home begins to transfer to her second life as she finds herself outside of normalcy and outside of the realm of understanding of most people. Her husband is inquisitive about her behavior; she has taken up drinking for the first time in her adulthood and often sleeps away. She is in one way protected by the ignorance of the times: unless she is in a gay bar or at some sort of lesbian party, she appears to be with “girlfriends” in the grandmother sense and not in the gay marriage sense — nobody assumes she is sexually or romantically interested in women when they see her on the street because it simply isn’t a possibility in the full expansions of their minds and the minds of an entire culture. But it is also the widespread lack of community, and lack of awareness and affirmation available to her that ultimately challenges her to hesitate, to pause, to ponder endlessly her ability to even embark on such a life full-time. Being queer is Francis’s second life, but her first life is one in which she has a rule book, role models and options. Throwing that away is hard and has tangible consequences for her family and herself.

Throughout Stranger, I found myself in-between the present and the past. There were times where I took big breaths and stared out the bus window and thought, “thank fucking god it is now and not then.” Times when Francis was told bluntly that her lifestyle was a freak choice, an alcohol-induced mistake, an embarrassment to her family. Times when she lacked the ability to seek refuge in any way, or had no one — absolutely no one — to talk to about what was happening in her heart and in her ever-more-lonely life. There were no allies and there was no community. There was simply Francis and her lush lesbian friends who were dating and fucking one another without regard for each other because there was nobody else to love.

In many ways, my revisit to fiction of the 1950’s made me realize even moreso why the movement is important, why our voices are important, why our existence is important. How far we have come.

But in many ways, people haven’t changed. The sun is still rising on hungover butches and their lipstick-stained cigarettes, and on unhappy closeted wives spending their time fidgeting their hands and pondering their next steps. There are too many of us worried still about how our families will feel, how our neighborhoods will react, how our leaders will proceed. As if any of that matters, as if how we feel and how easy it is to somehow disregard or fictionalize or mythologize it makes it any different to try to survive in this world as a weirdo queer.

Ultimately what I felt for Francis was a desire and need for a community, for understanding and for love. Francis is unique in that not many women with “the problem that has no name” turned to other women for their ultimate fulfillment from that problem, or at least not many that we heard of. Francis is unique because she exists in a time when she wasn’t supposed to exist, in a time which we commonly paint as being absent of people like us. But in the end she is exactly like us — shaped by circumstance, torn between what is safe and what is honest, melting with one touch and clinging to each meaningful moment to carry her through the imperfect and painful ones.

I am glad to be here with you in 2012. But I am glad someone was there in 1950.

Valerie Taylor’s work was deeply personal and her journey to writing it was her own life. The Feminist Press website states that with “the $500 proceeds of her first novel, Hired Girl (1953), Taylor bought a pair of shoes, two dresses, and hired a divorce lawyer.” That was just the beginning of a life and a legacy, and in many ways Francis embodied in Stranger Taylor’s own experiences as she grappled with her sexuality within her marriage and eventually made the decision Francis cannot make — the decision to fall endlessly, to plunge into something unknown and unstudied, to subscribe to something admonished and seemingly absent. To believe.

Ann Bannon, Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Autostraddle Interview

click for other “the way we were” posts

June is LGBT Pride Month, so we’re celebrating all of our pride by feeding babies to lions! Just kidding, we’re talking about lesbian history, loosely defined as anything that happened in the 20th century or earlier, ’cause shit changes fast in these parts. We’re calling it The Way We Were, and we think you’re gonna like it. For a full index of all “The Way We Were” posts, click that graphic to the right there.

Previously:

1. Call For Submissions, by The Editors
2. Portraits of Lesbian Writers, 1987-1989, by Riese
3. The Way We Were Spotlight: Vita Sackville-West, by Sawyer
4. The Unaccountable Life of Charlie Brown, by Jemima
5. Read a F*cking Book: “Odd Girls & Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America”, by Riese
6. Before “The L Word,” There Was Lesbian Pulp Fiction, by Brittani
7. 20 Lesbian Slang Terms You’ve Never Heard Before, by Riese
8. Grrls Grrls Grrls: What I Learned From Riot, by Katrina
9. In 1973, Pamela Learned That Posing in Drag With A Topless Woman Is Forever, by Gabrielle
10. Trials and Titillation in Toronto: A Virtual Tour of the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archives, by Chandra
11. Ann Bannon, Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Autostraddle Interview, by Carolyn

Ann Bannon in 1982 / photo by Tee Corinne

Lesbian pulp fiction was at its peak in the 1950s and 60s, and author Ann Bannon is one of the reasons.

At a time when gender binaries were rigid and queer representations difficult to find, lesbian pulp fiction revealed the possibility of a less mainstream life (read Brittani’s discussion for more details). The books — called pulp because of the low quality of the paper they were printed on — were mailed out like magazines and available in corner stores and bus stops, and to avoid being classified as pornography, many early books had suddenly tragic endings tacked on in the last paragraphs. Though not filled with unicorns and rainbows, Bannon escaped such a fate. Her books — Odd Girl Out, I am a Woman, Women in the Shadows, Journey to a Woman, and Beebo Brinker — are still in print and have earned critical recognition and a place on modern bookshelves.

I spoke to Ann Bannon about lesbian pulp fiction, writing, and being unconventional in the 50s and 60s.*

What distinguishes lesbian pulp fiction from other types of pulp fiction, besides the lesbians?

I guess that would have to be it. I think we were writing in the same era and with the same assumptions that the people who were writing westerns and detective stories and science fiction and romance were writing. There were certain conventions — they weren’t laid down as rules, but you knew that this was supposed to be ephemeral literature. […]

There were a lot of men who were writing those books, and they would write them mainly for a male audience and mainly as an excuse for sex between women, which has always been fascinating to men. But when the women writers — and there weren’t very many of us, fifteen or twenty were active during that period — when we wrote the books, it was of far more interest to us to explore the characters themselves, the feelings and the emotions and the interconnectedness and the struggle to communicate without offending. There were a lot of things that had to go into those stories to retain the realism of the time, and the difficulty, but at the same time to communicate the humour and the joy of finding someone. All of that I think played a much bigger role than just simply plotting. If you were writing westerns, it was going to be in all likelihood an adventure story and there would be the ranchers against the farmers, or it would be the cowboys and the Indians; if it was a science fiction story it was all about inventing an intricate different world with a different culture and different rules and exploring space; in the police novels it was about plotting and making things happen in quick succession. In the lesbian pulps, it was adventurous in its own way but it was more about the characters and personality and people being able to find each other in such a hostile environment. And that was a critical component.

Who were they meant to appeal to?

Women who were writing wrote them for women. But the authors generally — if you threw in the great many men who tried to make money in this genre, there is no question that we had an enormous crossover audience of men. […] It was inevitable I think that men would express interest and find those books and read them, and for all the complaining about that, it’s probably what make the lesbian pulp genre a viable one. It gave a financial security that wouldn’t otherwise have been attainable if the books had been pitched exclusively to women. That doesn’t excuse the excesses of the male writers, and the total lack of sensitivity in their approach, but it does explain the financial success and the reason why editors and publishers promoted the books the way they did. Word got out to an enormous nation-wide audience that became an international audience. It put them on the shelves in the bookstores and the newsstands and the bus stops, right alongside all the other genres, and allowed us to find a much larger audience and to make a success of the books. Lesbian pulps might have died if that hadn’t been the case. But you do have to distinguish between the approach the male writers took and the approach the women themselves took.

When they came out, how much did they sell for?

Some were sold for 25 cents but I think my first one was 35 cents […] It sounds like a very small amount of money, and it was, even for those times, though you could buy a lot more with 50 cents then, but it got them out to a mass audience, and that was live or die for the paperbacks. […] [Publishers] paid you upfront, a flat fee, whether the book sold well or not. It was something like $2,500, which was a lot of money back then. And then royalties were 15 per cent […] but you sold millions of them. You actually could make a living writing paperback novels.

You’ve been called “The Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction.” How did you get your start?

I was a newlywed and I was living in Philadelphia while my husband was working, and I sat down at the dining room table and started writing the story that became Odd Girl Out. It was a rather long manuscript and little bit clumsy but there were some good things in it. I had begun a correspondence with the first really successful lesbian pulp writer — her pen name was Vin Packer and her real name was Marijane Meaker. (Marijane is still living and still writing.) And I wrote to her because she was the only one I could find who was doing this kind of work. It turned out she was living in New York, and was working on a lot of other books at the time, still really successful, and she said, “Well, if you can get up to New York, I will invite you to meet my editor, and you can bring your manuscript and we’ll see if he likes it.”

I was just extremely lucky that she took an interest and I bamboozled my husband to let me go up to New York by myself and I met Marijane Meaker and we hit it off very well, and she took me over to the Gold Medal Books offices and introduced me to the editor in chief there, who was her publisher. We had a good talk. And in fact within two days he had read the book, and he sent me home with instructions. He said, “It’s gotta be half the length it is, and you need to tell the story of the two young women.” And this was hard for me to hear because I thought I tucked the two young women away in a corner where they wouldn’t be noticed, and he said, “No, that’s your story.” I went back to Philadelphia on the train with my manuscript, I sat down, and I began to trim. It was rather hard for me to do, to bring the two girls to the fore. I had a hard time thinking of how I was going to tell my mother about this. I was really a little tentative about the whole thing, but on the other hand I wanted to get published, and my heart really was in those stories, so I did it. I shortened the manuscript, I told the story of Beth and Laura […] and so I took it back, and the editor, whose name was Dick Carroll, read it, and by the time I got home there was a note in the mail saying, “We’re going to publish it.” And they didn’t change a word. It was kind of an amazing piece of luck that I had established a correspondence with Marijane Meaker; that she and I kind of enjoyed the correspondence, and that she was willing to give me that entry.

Are any elements of the books autobiographical?

“I think a lot more young women today are a lot more self-confident about stepping out into the world on their own. They expect to work, expect to find a place in the world outside the domestic sphere. And in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, it was not that way. You were expected to conform. And a great many of us did.”

Well, yes. The first book is set in a college sorority, and when you’re very young, you write about what you know. I had just come out of that life within the year prior to writing the book, and so it’s not that I was Beth or I was Laura, but I think there were a lot of elements of both of those characters in me and in the life I was living then, and I also had the opportunity to observe, of course, as all writers do. You’re participating in life, but you’re sort of taking mental notes all the time simultaneously. I suppose in ways I would be more like Beth, because she was the one who held back, she was the one who when the crises came chose to marry a young man and live a more conventional life, at least initially. And so while I would have loved to have done what Laura did, to go to New York and try to find myself, I did the more conventional thing, and I think I was not alone in that. There were a great many of my age-mates who, under the pressure of conventional thinking at the time, knuckled-under to that. For a lot of young women in your teens and your twenties, the pressures from your family and your friends and your colleagues all around were so heavy on you to get married and have children that a lot of us found that hard to resist. It seemed as if that was all we could do and that everything would turn out OK. Society was sending the message that even if you have doubts, the doubts would all be resolved if you followed this mainstream path which sort of laid out a blue print for you, and if you’re rebellious about this, your life will fall apart, you’ll have a lot of trouble, you’ll never settle down — you just got that from all sides. From the medical establishment to college professors to religious leaders of the time to the federal government, everyone was telling you, “Live a normal life and everything will turn out OK.” So a lot of us did. And I can’t regret some aspects of it — I am certainly delighted to have my two lovely daughters and my grandchildren, so there were some rewards, but I don’t think today I would have done that. I think a lot more young women today are a lot more self-confident about stepping out into the world on their own. They expect to work, expect to find a place in the world outside the domestic sphere. And in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, it was not that way. You were expected to conform. And a great many of us did.

Do you have a favourite pulp fiction novel?

I still have some affection for Marijane Meaker’s book Spring Fire; that was the first of the lesbian pulp novels and she really does get credit for that, although that book had a very bad ending. It was published in 1952, and she was required by the publisher at the time to end the book in such a way that it would not suggest happiness as a possibility. In other words, you couldn’t have a lesbian story in which the two women end up happy in one another’s arms. So to her great distress and embarrassment, she wrote a love story, and practically on the last page, one of the girls goes crazy and the other one says, “Well, I wasn’t serious.” It was very strange. But the reason was the books were distributed just like magazines by the US post office. They weren’t shipped in trucks from warehouses by publishers, they were distributed like newspapers and magazines. And the US post office said, “We will not deliver your books to your markets if they have happy endings,” and the reason they wouldn’t do it was that Congress had passed various laws that restricted the dissemination of what they thought was pornography. Their concern was that in reading about happy gay and lesbian lives, children would be persuaded to become gay or lesbian. So you had to show them that if you had those feelings, they had to be smothered, otherwise your life would be a tragedy and you could never be happy or normal or stable. So the restrictions were very severe. Five years later, when Odd Girl Out was published, things had begun to loosed just a little bit and I did not have to do that. I did send Beth into the arms of Charlie, but normally I would have had to throw Laura under the train. Instead, I put her on the train and sent her from the college town to New York city to make a new start in life, and somehow we got away with it, and the book sold very well.

It’s very hard to pick a favourite novel. There was Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith, published as Claire Morgan, and Patience and Sarah, Valerie Taylor was writing, and Paula Christian. Many intelligent and thoughtful women were doing good work, but I guess since it was the book that suddenly crystallized for me what I would like to write, I would have to pick Spring Fire.

Do you have any plans to write anything else?

I have started a memoir, because people have been interested in how I lived my life, but I don’t think I would do another novel. I actually did write one in the late 80s and early 90s and I don’t think it was what I would have liked it to be, so I’m very dubious about doing that again. I think the time for that came and went. There was a tremendous swell of interest in lesbian pulps, and their era was really the 50s and 60s, and then there began to be other outlets. The feminist movement came up and electrified everybody. People continued to write but it was in a different vein. Bit by bit, television and film began to do a lot more adventurous work. The role that lesbian pulps had played in educating women and serving as sort of travel guides and providing insight into life as it could be lived as a lesbian — that role was diminished and taken over by theatre and film and popular magazines that really replaced the need for the lesbian pulps. I don’t think I would try to write another book in that vein, it wouldn’t be appropriate, but if I ever get back to my desk, I might get the memoir finished. […] It’s a little difficult with six grandchildren and other people in my life who would have a hard time dealing with this, so I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass.

*This interview actually happened October 14, 2010, but has not been published until now.

Before “The L Word,” There Was Lesbian Pulp Fiction

click for other "the way we were" posts

June is LGBT Pride Month, so we’re celebrating all of our pride by feeding babies to lions! Just kidding, we’re talking about lesbian history, loosely defined as anything that happened in the 20th century or earlier, ’cause shit changes fast in these parts. We’re calling it The Way We Were, and we think you’re gonna like it. For a full index of all “The Way We Were” posts, click that graphic to the right there.

Previously:

1. Call For Submissions, by The Editors
2. Portraits of Lesbian Writers, 1987-1989, by Riese
3. The Way We Were Spotlight: Vita Sackville-West, by Sawyer
4. The Unaccountable Life of Charlie Brown, by Jemima
5. Before “The L Word,” There Was Lesbian Pulp Fiction, by Brittani

For the most part, “now” is usually better than “then.” As down as we may get and as mean as people sometimes are, being a homo in America is as easy as it’s ever been and not yet as easy as it will be. Past struggles have created a lot of different things. Things that come from sadness, triumph and experience. Often times they are beautiful. At times they are depressing. And other times, they are lesbian pulp fiction. In Post WWII America, the sexual posture and gender roles of women in America became increasingly important. Gender binaries reemerged with alacrity in an attempt to undo the “damage” done during wartime.

Clearly not interested in the heteronormativity prescribed to all women, queer women began to form their own identities in anticipation of liberation. To aid in this venture, lesbian pulp fiction entered the realm of paperbacks (accompanying mystery, westerns, and other subgenres). The paperback books sold in drugstores, gas stations, magazine stands, and transportation terminals. Available at a low cost and easy to hide, the paperbacks soon rose in popularity being consumed by straight men and queer or questioning women alike.

These sensational fictions helped create a community (albeit in a problematic way) for queer women while perpetuating internalized homophobia and saw some of the earliest invocations of the double standards of acceptance straight men often have for lesbians. Queer women were desperate for images of themselves in popular media. The 1934 Hays Film Code banned homosexual depictions in movies until 1962 and standards prevented such scenes from occurring on television shows. This lack of media and cultural representation led to a surprising avarice for the pulp fiction novels that were readily available in most large towns or cities.

It’s unclear how this material, certainly unaligned with American mores of the time and around the time of the Lavender Scare, initially went under the radar but many attribute it to the lack of respect for paperback publishers. With no attention paid to literary merit, the stories were of little concern. Once the genre became a hit, there were too many to police. It was impossible to tell the true content of the book from its cover because many books began to mimic the covers of lesbian pulp fiction in order to deceive consumers. It’s kind of like how movies with similar titles and plots will come out on DVD at the same time as something that was a hit in theaters in hopes that people will mistake the knock off for the popular title.

The covers did not only lure the reader in with images, it assured male readers the story was safe. The blurb on Twilight Girl said the book was meant for anyone who wanted to curb the “hidden lesbian contagion.” Third Sex marketed itself as a “study of society’s greatest curse: homosexuality.” Though lesbian in action, the women on the cover did not show any of the telltale signs the heterosexual male readership assumed of lesbians of the time. If you think the scope of what people expect of lesbians now is slim, imagine how limited it was then. Even though a woman was giving serious bedroom eyes to another lady, it was ok because she didn’t “look” like a lesbian.

Another reason the books evaded censorship was because the lesbian characters often returned to heterosexuality, committed suicide, or went insane. These books were Lost and Delirious before Lost and Delirious. If homosexuality was reprimanded, then supposedly the readers were not threatened or influenced. Of the books that ended in this way, many involved gratuitous sex scenes. It’s the give and the take, I guess. Since the books gave the idea that lesbians could be corrected, straight men went to bars looking for femmes to sleep with. The threat to their manhood came from masculine presenting women and as their supposed sexual competition, some straight men made it a point to “steal” their partners.

The novels complicated the stereotypes of the women being referred to as gender inverts. Abiding strictly by the stereotypes would have made the books less palatable. In this concession, the characters showed some diversity that actual lesbian communities had yet to embrace during this time of the harsh butch/femme dichotomy. The return of gender divided labor and feminine domesticity (which was accompanied by sexual ideologies) did not only affect the heterosexual world. Post WWII lesbians were less willing to present themselves differently with their families and coworkers versus with fellow lesbians. This unwillingness to live double lives enhanced the role-defining behavior. Since the pulp characters did not fall strictly along the butch/femme lines, it helped queer women open their eyes to different types of presentation.

As much as they stirred internal homophobia, they caused many women to confront the stereotypes as something that they did not identify with or believe. The stories listed many reasons for women straying from the heterosexual path and ways to spot a lesbian: athleticism, bad relationship with parents, no parents, sexually abused, depression, short hair, alcoholism, ugly, victim of incest, and having a unisex name. Often overlooked are the way the books treated bisexuality (poorly of course). Questioning or bisexual women were painted as lascivious and oversexed. Also, most of the heterosexual relationships involved hateful, physically abusive, or sexually abusive men. These books kind of made everyone look like assholes, to be honest.

Lesbian pulp fiction complicated the butch/femme history of the era, challenged the rampant stereotypes of lesbians, and provided representation for questioning and queer women who could not access the bar life of queer communities. The unfair and negative aspects of the plot lines and characters were accepted by queer women because the fact that publishers were willing to print stories about them gave many women the courage they needed to build the communities the characters lacked. It also encouraged women to decide what should be true and false about their communities. So let these books be a reminder to you. These shitty stepping stones are sometimes necessary to reach positive representations. Our 50s and 60s will someday be someone else’s 50s and 60s, ya know. Often times there’s a disconnect between representations and reality and though I don’t think shows like The Real L Word will later be reclaimed by lesbians and feminists like these books have been, I have faith that they will lead to something better.

You Probably Want to Read Some Lesbian Pulp Fiction

The best part of reading lesbian pulp fiction is the tone, and the worst part is that everyone turns out straight, because the publishers had to get the books past censors somehow and the best way to do that was to portray the girls who went gay as either a. going back to boys in the end, b. drowning in their own misery or c. actually drowning or dying in some other way that was supposed to be cleansing/cathartic for everyone else in the cast, but especially the dudes and straight ladies who might have felt threatened by the bout of alternative lifestyle going around.

Titles not on this list include Her Raging Needs, Mama Dyke, Governed by Lust, Madame Butch, Another Kind of Love, In the Shadows, These Curious Pleasures, The Third Street, Her Lesbian Half, 21 Gay Street, Maid Service, Babes Behind Bars, Suburban Sexpots, Bisexual Beds, Midnight Orgy, Return to Lesbos, and The Beds of Lesbos. And those are just the ones I could find in five minutes on the Internet.

Women’s Barracks, by Tereska Torres (1950)

Women’s Barracks was published in 1950 and was the very first pulp with lesbians. It was also a fictionalized version of Torres’ own military history in WWII and was marketed as “the frank autobiography of a French girl soldier.” Also: the original cover featured partially naked girls in bustiers.

As a novel, completely separate from any of its historical or lesbian-pulp-fictional significance, Women’s Barracks falls on the rougher end of the five star spectrum. The first person narration is a little too Carrie Bradshaw voiceoveresque, and there is very little actual action, either of the plot-moving kind or the in-your-pants kind. But it was still one of the very first lesbian pulps, and what it says about the genre is far more interesting than what it says about military non-scandal.

Spring Fire, by Vin Packer (1953)

Spring Fire is widely recognized as the first real lesbian pulp fiction book, which basically just means it’s smuttier than Women’s Barracks (and also: was the first original paperback with all-lesbian content). It was only re-released in 2004 because the author (whose real name is Marijane Meaker) didn’t like the very tragic ending she was forced to give it — because the book had to be sent in the mail, positive portrayals of gay lifestyles would mean it wouldn’t pass the censors — and withheld the rights for years.

The story is based on Meaker’s actual experience. Mitch, whose main personality trait is “awkward,” is in her first year of college and meets Leda, a girl in her sorority who she becomes roommates with. They have an affair, and it does not end well.

Odd Girl Out, by Ann Bannon (1957)

Laura is just starting university when she meets Beth, who is outgoing, attractive, and in a sorority, which she convinces Laura to join. Here’s a hint about how this will end: Bannon was heavily influenced by Meaker, who she wrote to when she was trying to get published. And altering content so it could get through the post was very much still a thing.

The predecessor to I Am a Woman (and several of Bannon’s other novels), this novel introduces Laura and chronicles the love affair that drives her from college. Beth takes sorority sister Laura as her roommate-and more-then betrays Laura with a man. Laura ultimately thanks Beth for showing her “who she really is.”

Three Women, by March Hastings (1958)

Paula is beautiful but broke, and is planning to marry Phil, who is both wealthy and an excuse for her to escape her alcoholic father. Phil, who has had some thoughts in an entrepreneurial direction, goes to visit his aunt Byrne, who is incidentally a smokin’ hot ‘spinster,’ in the hopes that she will spot him a downpayment. Of course he brings Paula along. After Paula meets Bryne, who is stunning, silk-shirt-wearing, and oozing charm like it’s her job, she starts to stalk her and eventually they fall in love. Of course, Bryne has a dark secret from her past that threatens to destroy everything, which is pretty standard, as these books go.

There are actually two versions of Three Women: the original from 1958, and a slightly different one from the late 80s, in which Hastings rewrote part of the ending so it was less depressing.

Girls in 3-B, by Valerie Taylor (1959)

The Girls in 3-B is especially fun because rather than starting off with emotions and insecurities, it skips right to the deep personal struggles and drug hallucinations.

After graduating high school, Pat, Annice, and Barby move to Chicago, move in to an apartment (and, if the cover is any indication, spend a lot of the time in said apartment undressing in front of each other), and deal with narratives of sexism in the workplace, the emphasis on masculinity in alternative culture, and being a lesbian. Analysis of culture: this book has it. There are affairs, there is work place drama, at least one person gets knocked up. The only thing you’d need to turn this book into Mad Men is a few more shots of whisky and a reference to Lucky Strike. While there is less focus on the lesbian story line than elsewhere, the emphasis on watching characters subvert gender norms regardless of how they do it is what makes this book so great. Best of all, the lesbian story line is far less depressing than in, for instance, Spring Fire (though also, most lesbian story lines are less depressing than they are in Spring Fire).

Another Kind of Love, by Paula Christian (1961)

In Another Kind of Love, magazine writer Laura Garraway falls in love with the young starlet Ginny Adams. They kiss and it is magical and stays that way until Laura realizes Ginny will never leave her lover, Saundra, because Saundra can help her be more famous and Laura can’t. Heartbroken, Laura moves to New York, discovers the Village, and, in a pretty surprising twist, gets a happy ending.

Happy endings basically never happen in these books, so this is pretty awesome/uplifting.

… Comparatively.

Lesbo Lodge, by Harry Barstead (1963)

Lesbo Lodge, which is a title that I am not making up, is even worse than a lot of other lesbian pulp because it is, if possible, even trasher. The front cover reads, “A gripping story that sheds brutal light on the passions of unnatural love.” The back cover reads:

It was night…
They were alone…
She found herself beckoning urging her to calm the angry fires of her tortured soul.

Something happened to women when they came to love camp, the secluded summer resort with a sordid reputation.

The rest of it involves the idea that lesbians just need to have affairs with men, because it was the early 60s, which means this book is still pretty depressing. But also: hilarious.

Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher, by Monica Nolan (2010)

“This past summer it seemed like wedding invitations or engagement announcements arrived almost weekly from the girls Bobby had gotten especially friendly with at Elliott College. Sometimes she got a panicky feeling that the supply of young, nubile girls, which had seemed inexhaustible during her college days when a fresh batch arrived every fall, was inexplicably drying up.”

Published last year, Bobby Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher has all of the drama and most of the charm of the original pulps, with a lot more puns about which team everyone’s playing for.

After an injury forces her to leave the pro-field hockey world, Bobby gets at job at a girls’ boarding school and enters a world of drama, angst, and more love triangles than season two of The L Word. Plus, who doesn’t want to read about posture, married art mistresses, math teachers with natural eyes for figures, widowed housekeepers, murder investigations, or promising athletes interspersed with make out scenes and more campy references to the books above than I can reasonably reference? (Answer: no one). That said, satire works best when you know what it’s making fun of, so Bobby Blanchard probably shouldn’t be first on your list (Nolan has written two other books in this series and has at least one more coming, so it shouldn’t be last either).