THE COVERS ARE what draw you in first, just as they were designed to do. They promise sex but, more strikingly, they promise shock — the jolt of the taboo, the sinful. They’re illustrations of women, usually two, sometimes more, often half-dressed or undressing, in slips and bras, a strap provocatively sliding down the curve of a shoulder. A knee is raised as a nylon stocking is tugged off. They generally seem to show dusky rooms; if a window is visible, it’s curtained because what has been happening inside is not for decent eyes to witness.
The women might be lounging on a couch or, more daringly, on a bed with disarranged sheets. In those poses, they have much in common with their counterparts on the covers of any cheap paperback — a mystery, a thriller, a Southern saga — of the 1950s or early ’60s. Up to a point, that is. Because these women aren’t looking longingly at a man, or teasingly out toward a male reader. Their interest is only in one another. Often their expressions are hard, cool, ungiving or, if not, then lost, downcast, imprisoned in a secret sorrow. The dynamic playing out among them is almost unsustainably charged. And if the art doesn’t sell it, the cover slogan will: “The novel of a love society forbids”; “Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world. …”; “She Fought — She Struggled — She Even Married a Man! But in the End Ann Surrendered to Tortured Women Like Herself … !” As advertising, the covers couldn’t have been more effective. Seventy years ago, women saw them and bought those books by the millions. So did men.
In some ways, we’ve reached a moment in which those disreputable old novels, and the lonely, yearning culture that spawned them, are ripe for rediscovery. (Or more accurately, re-rediscovery: Some of the small lesbian and feminist publishers like Naiad Press, which first dusted off and reissued these books decades ago, are now themselves gone and in need of reclamation missions.) After being all but obliterated by the internet, queer-owned and -themed brick-and-mortar bookstores are starting to re-emerge, now accompanied by online versions. Bookstores bind us to literary history — at least, good ones do — and it feels like an apt time to revisit a not-so-distant past in which it was an act of risk and daring (not to mention of sheer hunger) for a woman who loved women to walk into a shop and purchase a story meant to speak to her or about her. And in a yesterday’s trash is today’s treasure arc that speaks to how many elements of gay pop culture history evolve from degraded discards to camp objets to worthy subjects of academic study (see also: “The Golden Girls”; Tom of Finland), collections of the novels have now found their way into various gay and lesbian archives and even into the Smithsonian Institution.
But exploring the lesbian pulp genre requires suspending any sentimental preconceptions about one’s ancestors. It arrived on the scene before gay pride, whether with a capital “P” or a lowercase one, was a notion; before the existence of “L.G.B.T.,” or of the unity of purpose that those jammed-together letters now purport to represent; before anything like a national gay rights movement had started to take shape. Whenever a piece of antique queer pop culture is unearthed, especially if it’s from the pre-Stonewall era, we tend to try to fit it into one of two categories. Either it’s problematic, a relic replete with attitudes and stereotypes of which we disapprove that can only be understood as regrettable elements of a less enlightened time, or it’s pioneering, a daring, prescient and hitherto unappreciated leap toward a future that nobody back then could have predicted was on the near horizon. Yet the phenomenon of the lesbian pulp paperback — and it was a phenomenon, both culturally and financially — resists any such attempts at pigeonholing. It was both problematic and pioneering, although neither word adequately describes something that was at once a cynical business proposition and a burgeoning art form, a reinforcer of negative stereotypes and an act of breathtaking liberatory outreach, one that connected with countless women who had nowhere else to go, either in art or in life, if they longed to discover stories about people even remotely like themselves. Was lesbian pulp good for the gays or bad for the gays? The only accurate answer is yes.
It was also, even within the then-rarefied context of queer pop culture, an exception to the rule: In a history that has so often marginalized or minimized lesbian tastes, interests and contributions, here was a vibrant category of popular art centered entirely on female desire. In the very limited public discourse about homosexuality in the early 1950s (and for a long time after that), it was gay men who were in the spotlight, reviled as a menace, a grotesquerie, a threat to national security, to the safety of parks and neighborhoods and schools and children. Lesbians, in that discussion, were often an afterthought … if they were thought of at all. Though the threat to their safety and employment during the so-called Lavender Scare of the early 1950s was very real, they weren’t so much the target of male revulsion as of disappointment, indifference and unspoken erotic curiosity; women who preferred women were viewed less as public threats than as damaged goods, scarcely worth considering.
So it’s all the more remarkable that in the realm of American publishing, lesbian fiction became a booming enterprise at a time when its gay male counterpart could scarcely find a toehold. Part of the reason was a built-in difference in tastes — the women who purchased and read lesbian pulp wanted narratives, which those paperbacks could provide; gay men wanted erotica, nudity and porn, which, at a time governed by a web of postal, state and local anti-obscenity laws, wasn’t an over-the-counter option.
But lesbian pulp fiction also thrived because, through more than 500 paperback novels in the category’s roughly decade-plus run (it emerged in 1950 and was all but gone by 1965), it evolved from shame to something approaching self-determination. The genre may have been invented largely by publishers and marketers who knew how to make sure that the books were insulated from prosecutorial eyes by locating the gray zone in which prurience met disapproval. But as the genre developed, its path was shaped by its writers — many of them (but not all) lesbians, almost all writing pseudonymously — who found ways to tell stories that eventually stopped being primarily about punishment and started focusing on possibilities.
THE NOVEL THAT launched the genre was, strangely, an anomaly — a book written by a straight married Frenchwoman who was encouraged by her husband, the novelist Meyer Levin, to write about her experience serving in the Free French forces during the Second World War. When Tereska Torrès’s “Women’s Barracks” was published by Fawcett in 1950, paperback originals, let alone lesbian pulp, barely existed as a category; Fawcett had just launched its Gold Medal label to see if readers might be willing to pay 30 or 35 cents for something other than reprints of hardcover best sellers. They were: “Women’s Barracks” sold 200,000 copies in a blink. Five years later, it had sold two million. The cover helped; the illustration of a woman in nothing but underwear and a bra changing in front of other ladies, some scantily dressed and one smoking a cigarette and clearly giving her a good, hard once-over, was so provocative that it helped spur the creation of an anti-porn congressional committee composed of members who thought that kind of art might drive men to rape.
Torrès wasn’t especially interested in telling a story about or for men. She wrote the novel in the voice of a young recruit who joins an all-female volunteer auxiliary in World War II and experiences several different kinds of awakening, starting with the medical entrance exam in which she notices that a young woman near her is “seemingly quite at ease in her nudity.” Soon enough, one of the volunteers, Ursula, is being seduced by a brassy, glamorous older woman named Claude who is unhappily married (“He drinks too much, and he’s a fairy, damn him!”) but alive to both new opportunities and easy prey. As Ursula is undressed by Claude, “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?” Once the clothes come off, you can almost hear the music swell; Ursula starts to feel that “all at once, her insignificant and monotonous life [has] become full, rich and marvelous.”
The sex scenes in “Women’s Barracks,” and in the first wave of lesbian pulp that followed its success, don’t get particularly explicit; although there’s some gentle cupping of breasts and ecstatic arching of backs, nothing that unfolds couldn’t be quoted in The Times. But in 1950 — an era in which the Motion Picture Production Code, the set of de facto censorship rules by which studios regulated the content of their movies, forbade even a mention or textual implication of homosexuality in Hollywood movies — any such passages were revelatory, not to mention hot. What they were not was what we’d now call positive representation. For gay people, neither the term nor the concept existed at the dawn of the genre, which came five full years before the formation in San Francisco of the first lesbian rights group in the United States, Daughters of Bilitis. The tropes in the first wave of lesbian pulp were often fairly grim: An intense, cynical, somewhat predatory older woman — a career lesbian, if you will — would enter the world of someone younger and confused, whose experience of men had been either limited or abusive, and they would begin an affair. It would eventually founder, often because, for one woman, lesbianism would prove to be just a side trip on the way to happy heterosexuality, but equally often because of the manipulation or neediness or instability of the “real” lesbian, who, in the most extreme narratives, would end up dead, suicidal or institutionalized.
This wasn’t just a storytelling preference but a necessity. When the lesbian writer Marijane Meaker, jumping off the success of “Women’s Barracks,” proposed “Spring Fire,” the novel that really got the genre rolling, in 1952, she wanted to set the story in a girls’ boarding school. Her (male) editor told her to age the characters up to college, and added, “Make sure these girls turn away from homosexuality because it is immoral — don’t just have them talk about it being a hard life. We have to pass postal inspection.” Meaker, then in her early 20s, closeted and dating men, would soon become a lover of the writer Patricia Highsmith’s, and a giant of the genre. She wrote under at least five names. The gender-ambiguous Vin Packer, the kind of sturdy-sounding moniker that might help to attract male readers, was her nom de plume for lesbian pulp.
“Spring Fire,” which sold 1.5 million copies, is a campus romance between a 17-year-old athletic Midwesterner, Susan Mitchell (“Most folks call me Mitch”), and her older roommate, Leda Taylor. Their connection must be secret (“It’s ours, Mitch. Keep it ours and never tell it”), but it’s real and heartfelt: “She was not separate from Leda, but individual and one. She was wanted and she wanted, and it was not a want striped with fear and hurt.” Their affair sends Mitch racing to the school library, where a scary volume informs her that “the female homosexual, the lesbian, often preys on girls who are not true homosexuals. Such girls may enjoy men, and be capable of normal heterosexual life if they do not become involved with a genuine lesbian type, whose technique is often more skillful than that of many of her young men suitors.” Their love is doomed; they’re caught in the act by other girls and, at the conclusion of the novel, in the literary equivalent of an ending mandated by Hollywood censors, Mitch moves on after Leda crashes her car and is hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. “As Mitch walked … she thought of Leda — hazily, as though she were someone she had known a long, long time ago. … She didn’t hate her at all, and she knew then that she had never really loved her.” Roll credits.
THESE BOOKS WERE, over the next decade, published at a staggering rate. Sometimes, as was the case with Highsmith’s pseudonymous 1952 lesbian romance, “The Price of Salt” (the basis for the 2015 movie “Carol”), a hardcover literary novel published by a mainstream house would be repackaged a year later as a pulp paperback. But the vast majority of the books were paperback originals. Some writers could churn out a completed manuscript in 10 to 14 days. Several of them were men — both Lesley Evans, the author of “Strange Are the Ways of Love” (1959), and Jill Emerson, who wrote “Warm and Willing” (1964), were actually the crime novelist Lawrence Block.
The novels had to be presented carefully; even in the largest American cities, gay bookstores didn’t yet exist, so the covers, the titles and the stories all had to meet standards that would allow them to be credibly intermingled with run-of-the-mill paperbacks in a mainstream bookshop, or in a stationery store or pharmacy stocked by someone who was either sympathetic, opportunistic or both. Code words quickly developed. Since terms like “lesbian” and “homosexual” couldn’t then appear on covers without embarrassing potential purchasers and possibly risking police attention, readers learned to look for certain cues in the slogans — “frank” and “shocking” were both good indicators — or words in the title that assumed fluency in a shared but unacknowledged language. “Whisper” became a reliable signifier of what, and who, resided in those pages, as did any reference to “strange” or “twilight” love.
While the creation of the books proceeded with something approaching factory efficiency, it was not free of conflict. Some lesbian authors, though they were powerless to change their publishers’ minds, constantly pushed back against the come-on art that sold the books. And by the late 1950s, a semiprivate argument about the novels was blazing through the pages of the monthly, discreetly distributed Daughters of Bilitis newsletter The Ladder, whose correspondents frequently complained about what they saw as hostile and unflattering stereotypes in the books.
Because almost all of the genre’s writers used pseudonyms and because of the vagaries of book distribution, it was hard for individual writers to develop a fan base, and equally hard for readers to know who they were reading. A sensitive novel by a lesbian writer who was trying to move pulp an inch or two forward might reside on the rack next to a lubricious sex fantasy written by a man who’d never even met a lesbian. The cover art for each might blur the distinction so completely that readers had little idea what they were getting; it wasn’t as if the novels were reviewed anywhere or even acknowledged in the press, except as a symptom of a grave social ill.
Nobody was doing demographic studies of readers, let alone of queer ones, in the 1950s, but the mail that the authors received made it clear that young lesbians were devouring the books, including some who, inspired by what they read, would shortly become writers themselves and reshape the genre with their work. “Readers tended to enjoy them furtively,” the author Ann Weldy explains in a 2001 introduction to a reissue of one of her novels. “It took guts just to buy those books and confront the smirk on the face of the clerk at the cash register. People tried to disguise them in a pile of sundries they probably didn’t even need, but bought anyway to distract attention from those eye-popping covers. I know — I was buying them, too.” Weldy was in her early 20s when she read Meaker’s 1955 “We Walk Alone” (credited to Ann Aldrich), a nonfiction account of lesbianism that, to her, offered the value of “a veritable Michelin Guide.” She says in the introduction, “ Aldrich told you what it was like to come out (joyful prospect!). She told you where lesbians in the know gathered … what these women wore, how they talked, how they coped. … You were amazed to discover that there were different lifestyles within the nascent lesbian community: high and low, butch and femme, uptown and low-down. … The effect on women was electric.”
Within a couple of years, Weldy, as A. Bannon (later Ann Bannon), would write “Odd Girl Out,” the first of a series of six novels about a brash, confident young butch lesbian and her circle of friends that are now known as “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles”; they were published between 1957 and 1962 and revolutionized the category, in which butches had previously been treated mostly as villainous or embarrassing. The books were still required to provide a quota of mental collapses, acts of self-destructiveness, bitterly regretful women and sham marriages. (Weldy herself had a husband and could only occasionally get away for research in New York’s Greenwich Village.) But somehow, she made room for at least a couple of characters to come to terms with their lesbianism and, crucially, survive the last page and be developed further in subsequent novels. The “Beebo Brinker” books constituted the first successful lesbian series in genre fiction. But even more significantly, they were the first novels to suggest to lesbian readers across the country the possibility of finding community in a city where, no matter what type you were, you could meet others who were like you. As they did with Meaker’s books, Weldy’s audience wrote in by the hundreds, describing what they enjoyed reading and what they didn’t, asking for more, bursting with questions, pleading for advice.
Other writers quickly joined in; the novels got bolder and, by millimeters, more hopeful. In the early 1960s, the titles could be blunter — “Counterfeit Lesbian,” “Flying Lesbian,” “I Prefer Girls” — and the cover slogans (the one for “I Am a Lesbian” reads “Her kind of love was different — but was it wrong?”) hinted at the possibility of a conversation rather than a rush to judgment. The genre’s low-end books, which proliferated in a now slightly more legally permissive climate, got raunchier; the cover of the unfortunately titled “Dance-Hall Dyke” (1964), set in “the vicious jungle of lesbian lures,” shows a steely lesbian grabbing the butt of a half-dressed redhead.
ONE MIGHT IMAGINE that, in a decade of increased activism leading toward the Stonewall uprising in the summer of 1969, lesbian pulp would have continued to progress in both candor and popularity, with ever more forthright assertions of identity and of a chance of living happily. Instead it dwindled and, quite quickly, died. In part, the books were a victim of changing mores in both publishing and reader tastes. The arrival of Mary McCarthy’s blockbuster “The Group” in 1963 meant that a novel with a central lesbian character could be argued about in Time and Newsweek and at book-club luncheons; nobody who wanted to read it or early ’60s lesbian-focused literary novels like Jane Rule’s “Desert of the Heart” or May Sarton’s “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing” had to worry about dodging the disapproving glance of a cashier. And although, under a now somewhat relaxed Production Code, some of the first overt depictions of lesbians in Hollywood movies like “The Children’s Hour” (1961) and “Walk on the Wild Side” (1962) were either tragic or savage, once stars like Shirley MacLaine and Barbara Stanwyck could play lesbians, cheap novels no longer claimed a monopoly on the thrill of the forbidden unless they resorted to sexual explicitness — which isn’t, it turned out, what their core audience wanted. Publishers walked away from the genre as abruptly as they had stumbled upon it. (Gay male pulp, which was less romantic and ranged from campy spoofs to outdoor adventures to 19th-century enslavement fantasies and moved rapidly toward hard-core sex, only started to emerge in the mid-60s and was done by the early ’70s, when actual porn obliterated the need to go to the trouble of reading.)
Lesbian pulp novels went into eclipse for a while, but they aren’t lost — they never have been. The first surge of appreciative reprints and reassessments came in the 1980s; another followed in the early 2000s, this time from independent presses. Still, to encounter the books now, especially in high-quality editions uncoupled from any suggestive cover art, can be disorienting. The texts represent not so much an earlier point on the gay liberation timeline as one at which such a timeline had not yet been imagined. Lesbians and gay men had barely considered making common cause — if they could identify the cause at all. And many of those who would have most benefited from greater civil rights, including those who were unknowingly paving the way for them with their work, had profoundly mixed feelings about their own place in the world. How could they not, in a society that discussed them only as criminals, deviants and mental cases? In one of her early novels, Meaker sneers at “organized queers … with their earrings and their dyed hair and their ‘Darlings!’” And Yvonne MacManus, the author of the popular 1959 pulp novel “Edge of Twilight” (one of several she wrote as Paula Christian) about the relationship between two air hostesses, one a lesbian and one not sure, explored her own uncertainties with evident distress in a 1961 essay in The Ladder. “I confess I am not a dedicated lesbian … ,” she wrote, “nor one who wishes to make the world safe for the next generation of homosexuals. I would prefer it if psychiatry could learn enough about the subject to help those of us who do not believe homosexuality is the best of all possible worlds.”
It’s startling and saddening to see those words now, especially from a novelist whose characters were among the first in lesbian pulp to own their desires and identities. “Don’t say ‘queers,’” Toni tells her lover Val in “Edge of Twilight.” “It’s offensive. We’re ‘gay,’ or lesbians or homosexuals, and sometimes ‘twilight people,’ but not ‘queers’!” MacManus lived until 2002, long enough to see the reclamation of even that word. And her work, and that of her colleagues, lives on today — written by women whose every step, no matter how tentative, took them deeper into the unknown.
The post How Did Lesbian Pulp Fiction Thrive in the 1950s and ’60s? appeared first on New York Times.
