until I began to get hundreds of letters from them, begging for reassurance and information." I was too naive, too young and dumb, to give much thought to the effect I was having on my women readers. I reread my own work and shudder at some of the unexamined assumptions. Ann Bannon, author of the often reprinted Beebo Brinker series, speaks of the sense of responsibility she grew to feel for the many lesbians who read her books and reached out to her for guidance and advice: "e were vulnerable to the prejudices of the period, just like our readers. Through passages such as this one, it becomes apparent that at least some of these pulps, particularly those written by women, were more subversive than perverse, hiding in plain sight and propagating covert messages to the real "Twilight" girls. I, square and unworldly Karen Winslow, am in love with a girl. I do not think it is wrong or evil or awful or dirty. And incredibly enough I am not bothered by it. In "Enough of Sorrow" by Jill Emerson, published in the later part of the pulp period, the protagonist's closing narrative demonstrates that a strong, positive and unapologetic lesbian identity is beginning to take root: "I am in love with a girl, she thought. Beyond that, some were chosen for their pioneering efforts within the genre, others for their (often surprising) eroticism, and others for their ability to depict lesbianism and attitudes toward it within the period of the book's writing.įinally, Forrest sought out happy endings, which were not, despite what one might think, all that hard to find. Forrest's selection criteria demanded that the book be written by a female author from 1950 to 1965 (the so-called golden age of pulps) and published in paperback only. The remainder of the book is selections from nearly 20 lesbian pulps published over a 15-year period. It's hard to think of many writers who could have so easily and gracefully combined the two forms. It's an impressive piece of personal testimony-cum-literary analysis, extremely readable and as moving as it is intellectually stimulating. She points out the achievements many of them enjoyed in other genres and attributes her own successful writing career to the awakening these books stirred within her as a young woman.
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Forrest approaches the pulps as literature and demonstrates that it is the quality of the storytelling that has made them a part of lesbian culture and consciousness for so long. But in "Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965," editor Katherine V.
Much has been written about the books' camp appeal, their celebration of "queerness" and their value as artifacts of a repressive era. In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in the pulps and a return to print of many "classics," thanks to a more diversity-tolerant climate among lesbians. What these social critics failed to see was that the heroines of the pulps, with their economic and social independence and ownership of their own sexuality, were the original sexual outlaws, unconsciously feminist, who debauched innocent straight women not only with their prowess in the bedroom but also with their promise of freedom. Read, often surreptitiously, and valued by lesbians for providing faint comfort that they were not alone, the pulps were later scorned by lesbian feminists and derided for the butch and femme characters they often depicted and their adherence to mainstream mores. Valerie Taylor's The Girls in Three-B and Randy Salem's Man Among Women: these books I would savor alone, heart pounding from both lust and terror of discovery, poised to plunge the tainted tome into hiding." Their ludicrous and blatantly sensational cover copy were both my signals and my shame. "egular vigilance turned up books I was petrified to take to the cashier. In "Cruising the Libraries," an influential essay on the task of unearthing obscure images of lesbians in mid-20th century literature, Lesbian pulps have captured attention in a way that has far outlived their cheap bindings and resulted in more seriously considered opinions than early authors and publishers of the genre could have possibly foretold.