Lesbian Pulp Fiction. Katherine V. Forrest
intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman’s shoulders.
Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air.
The book was Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon. I found it when I was eighteen years old. It opened the door to my soul and told me who I was. It led me to other books that told me who some of us were, and how some of us lived.
Finding this book back then, and what it meant to me, is my touchstone to our literature, to its value and meaning. Yet no matter how many times I try to write or talk about that day in Detroit, I cannot convey the power of what it was like. You had to be there. I write my books out of the profound wish that no one will ever have to be there again.
Having lived through this era, in all these years afterward I was certain that I knew in general outline an early literature so very close to me. What I understood of the paucity and the aridity of lesbian literature was the impetus for my own first novel, Curious Wine. Yet in compiling this collection, I discovered the range of our early books and some wonderful, revealing, ongoing scholarship about them. We had more books than I knew, better books than I had thought, and some of them were by writers of international reputation.
I grew up in the post-war 1950s, an idyllic world if you were a straight white male or if you were naïve enough to believe TV’s idealistic “Leave It to Beaver” image of the average American family. It was 1960 when I discovered the seedy lesbian bars of Detroit, when I found my community and came of age. The birth control pill had just been introduced into the United States; it was a mere nine years after our first lesbian and gay organization, the Mattachine Society, had begun in Los Angeles; and five years after Daughters of Bilitis, our first national lesbian organization, had formed in San Francisco. According to the American Psychological Society, I was sick. According to the law, I was a criminal.
From the beginning of the ’50s, popular fiction increasingly reflected the hypocrisy of the times. Tereska Torres’s Women’s Barracks was released in 1950 by Fawcett Gold Medal Books, one of the first books to be published in the brand new paperback format. A publishing sensation, it ushered in what is today termed the golden age of pulp fiction, an era of books so inexpensively produced and priced so low that, as Ann Bannon has said, “You could read them on the bus and leave them on the seat.”
The enormous sales of Torres’s novel ignited an unprecedented boom in lesbian-themed publishing never since duplicated, and the lurid suggestiveness of the three women on its cover became the template for lesbian pulp fiction. Women’s Barracks was the book that led Gold Medal Books pulp fiction editor Dick Carroll to seek out Vin Packer to write Spring Fire, and to advise the young Ann Bannon to rewrite her first novel so that the lesbian subplot would become the central story.
With “morality” seemingly pervasive in the land, lurid covers of paperbacks screamed sex from every retail bookshelf and Americans gobbled up the books by the millions. A new breed of publisher emerged to reap huge pro fits. For lesbian books, cover copy proclaimed our evil in order to meet morality requirements while the come-hither illustrations beckoned the reader into their pages and promised lascivious details. Publishers were not the only ones who profited; popular paperback writers of the time made more money than their hardcover-published counterparts, Vin Packer’s Spring Fire, for example, selling a million and a half copies its first year of publication.
Virtually all writers of homosexual material in those days used pseudonyms, and the men often used female ones—e.g., Lawrence Block, who penned several quite good lesbian novels under the name Jill Emerson: Enough of Sorrow is excerpted here. A considerable number of male writers authored lesbian fiction in the ’50s and ’60s, either from prurient interest or, more likely, to cash in on a publishing boom; their books outnumbered the women’s perhaps five to one. For pre-1970 male-authored works with lesbian content I refer interested readers to Barbara Grier’s invaluable compilation, The Lesbian in Literature and will mention here only a few notable authors: Lawrence Durrell (Clea from The Alexandria Quartet, 1960), D. H. Lawrence (The Fox, 1923), John D. MacDonald (All These Condemned, 1954), John O’Hara (Lovey Childs, 1969; plus numerous short stories), Theodore Sturgeon (Venus Plus Ten, 1960), and John Wyndham (Consider Her Ways, 1957).
Such scant personal information exists about many of the authors that I cannot guarantee the gender of everyone I’ve included. Of necessity, given the times, with one or two exceptions such as March Hastings and Valerie Taylor, the pulp fiction lesbian writers were deeply closeted, and some have dissolved into the mists of history like Cheshire cats, leaving only their printed words behind. Others settled into another kind of invisibility. Marion Zimmer Bradley, who achieved international fame as a prolific fantasy writer (The Mists of Avalon; the Darkover novels), married and had three children, divorced, and began her writing career in the ’60s, writing her lesbian novels under the names Miriam Gardner, Lee Chapman, and Morgan Ives. In later years she refused to acknowledge this work or to discuss any of this aspect of her life.
In the past three decades Valerie Taylor (Velma Young), Ann Bannon (Ann Weldy), and Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker) have emerged to discover our warm welcome, indeed our celebration of them. Valerie Taylor (now deceased) was perhaps the first of our pulp writers to be relatively open and visible, leaving her marriage and conventional life to live in the gay area of Chicago. Militantly active in the gay liberation movement, in 1974 she formed the Lesbian Writers Conference and delivered its keynote address.
Prolific Marijane Meaker (pseudonyms in addition to Vin Packer: Ann Aldrich, M. E. Kerr) reveals in her fascinating memoir, Highsmith (Cleis Press, 2003) that she was a presence amid the Greenwich Village bar scene where she met and became involved with the more famous Patricia Highsmith. Spring Fire (Vin Packer, 1952) owns the distinction of being our first original paperback novel with purely lesbian content. In subsequent years, writing as M. E. Kerr, Meaker has become, according to The New York Times, “One of the grand masters of young adult fiction.”
Ann Bannon, who married early and had two children, held her conventional marriage together while spending weekends in Greenwich Village and portraying in her books the lesbian life she saw, imagined, and longed to live. Her eloquent introductions to the reissued I Am a Woman (Cleis Press, 2002) and Journey to a Woman (Cleis Press, 2002) provide rich reading about how her novels came into being, as does Marijane Meaker in her introduction to the reissue of Spring Fire (Cleis Press, 2004). We will soon learn much more about these writers and their times; both Meaker and Bannon have memoirs in the offing.
Joan Ellis (Julie Ellis), like Ann Bannon, married and had children, and like Meaker, continues a flourishing writing career to this day. A playwright and extraordinarily prolific novelist, she’s written dozens of novels in the family saga, contemporary, and suspense fields for major publishers.
Paula Christian, one of the best known and most popular of all the pulp writers, died in 2002. She did see some of her work return to print; Another Kind of Love, Twilight Girls (a compilation of the novellas Edge of Twilight and This Side of Love), and The Other Side of Desire are today available from Kensington Books.
Sloane Britain (Elaine Williams), the author of These Curious Pleasures (1961) was an editor at Midwood Tower, one of the top pulp fiction publishers; she committed suicide many years ago.
March Hastings (Sally Singer) was sitting in a restaurant across the street from the Stonewall Inn the night the riots began in 1969. She has lived as a lesbian all her life, and for a time was partnered with Randy Salem (Pat Pardee), whose novel Chris (1959) is excerpted.
Tereska Torres is so interesting a figure in the history of the lesbian pulps, her contribution so singular, that she deserves additional mention. After her family fled Europe during World War II, Torres joined De Gaulle’s Free French Forces headquartered in London and for five years came into contact with young women of widely varied backgrounds and sexual proclivities. This experience formed the basis for Women’s Barracks, a fictionalized account of