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Chapter Three: Lesbian Pulp in Black and White
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
• T H R E E • Lesbian Pulp in Black and White Like the unforgettable SPRING FIRE, here is an urgent young first novel of emotions running wild—beyond the pale into the dark country of love that should never have been. —Cover blurb, Odd Girl Out Though Strange Brother was one of many gay-themed novels to appear during the early 1930s, it was not until the mid-1950s that the exploding paperback industry made lesbian novels available to a large number of readers. Cover blurbs for titles such as Twilight Lovers (1964), Stranger on Lesbos (1960), and Women’s Barracks (1950), announced stories of strange lusts, unnatural love, and perverse relationships in worlds of women without men. Much of this fiction was male-authored and as part of a larger market for erotic paperbacks, its aim was to titillate. A handful of lesbian writers, including Ann Bannon, Paula Christian , Vin Packer, and Valerie Taylor tried to treat lesbianism sympathetically . But the majority of these novels were homophobic in the extreme, and for many readers looking at the covers, it was difficult to tell which novels were written by lesbians and for lesbians and which were written for a male heterosexual audience. It was in the context of this sensationalized genre that the feminine lesbian achieved real “literary” visibility for the first time. With butch and femme “roles” an established part of lesbian subculture by the 1950s, the femme was a staple character in pulp. Her presence in the bar, the school room, and the dressing room, and her frank sexual initiative with other women lent her more substance than she had in The Well of Loneliness and in 103 much lesbian fiction of the 1930s and 1940s. Given the homophobic social climate of the 1950s, it is not surprising that increased visibility did virtually nothing to correct prevailing stereotypes of the feminine lesbian. Pulp novels typically depict the femme as manipulative, tyrannical, and predatory, or clinging , desperate, and weak, and she often fails the test of social pressure to direct her attentions toward men. In an era when publication standards practically guaranteed that lesbianism would end in separation, alcoholism, or death, the femme was likely to be instrumental in causing one or more of these tragedies. But as Joan Nestle, a self-identified “fifties femme,” recalls , purchasing and reading lesbian pulp was an act of courage for women with little other access to public representation of lesbian lives. Pulp fiction was recognized as an important element of lesbian literary history at least as early as 1957, when Barbara Grier, a librarian and collector of lesbian fiction from a young age, began annual surveys of lesbian literature that appeared in The Ladder under the pseudonym Gene Damon. These surveys expanded into Grier’s later publications of The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography. The changing content of Grier’s bibliographies reveals growing judgments about pulp’s literary and cultural value, especially as other kinds of lesbian fiction became available. The first edition of The Lesbian in Literature, published in 1967, contains over three thousand titles marked “T” for “trash” that compilers of the third edition subsequently eliminated. Most of these entries were pulp novels of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. As Grier explains in the introduction to the 1981 edition of the bibliography, they were deleted not only to make room for new, presumably better titles, but also to “acknowledge the changing consciousness of the world” about what counted for quality lesbian reading material.1 For the most part, these books are now unavailable, except in lesbian and gay archives that collect pulp. But recent books and archives-sponsored shows on pulp cover art demonstrate a resur104 • Lesbian Pulp in Black and White [3.84.7.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:12 GMT) gence of popular and scholarly interest in pulp fiction. Several academic essays have been written on the work of Ann Bannon, whose novels became the most accessible of the vintage pulp titles when Naiad Press reprinted the Beebo Brinker series in the 1980s.2 Focusing on how the novels navigate sexual ideology in the conservative social climate of the 1950s, these essays seek to revaluate pulp fiction by arguing that in spite of the genre’s limitations , lesbian writers such as Bannon are able to complicate stereotyped representations of lesbianism. So far little work has been done on lesbian identity in pulp fiction that includes a consideration of racial as well as sexual ideologies...