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Lesbian Pulp Novels (from the original 1950's PBOs to modern incarnations)

A friend of mine sent me a link to a review from Entertainment Weekly for a new book, _Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary_ <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20048273,00.html> that's a take on a genre that was very popular in the 1950s and '60s: the lesbian paperback original (PBO) or pulp novel (named for the craptastic pulpy paper on which they were printed).  So, I thought I'd post info about it here.  

If anyone's read it, what's the verdict?

I haven't managed to pick up a copy yet, but I know there's been alot of academic interest in the original PBOs (anthologies and retrospectives by Jaye Zimet, Susan Stryker, and Katherine Forrest, and Canadian documentary "Forbidden Love: Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives", for example) as well as reprints of some of the 50's classics penned by Ann Bannon, Mary Jane Meaker, and Valerie Taylor.  Cleis Press has an entire series with period style covers, including a list of Ann Bannon titles <http://www.cleispress.com/series_index.php?series=Ann,Bannon>. You can still find many of the original titles for sale on Ebay if you want to own a little piece of lesbian herstory and more than one university library has a collection of these books. 

For any PBO fans out there, who's your fav writer and title?
‹ Recommendations hack/slash ›
Submitted by
Dawn Quixotic (29 posts)
on August 30, 2007 - 3:10pm.
TAGS :: 
lesbianlife's picture

Lesbian Pulps

Submitted by
lesbianlife (1 post)
on August 31, 2007 - 3:20pm.
Hey ! I have a collection of more than 100 lesbian pulp novels.  My favorites are Ann Bannon, Paula Christan and Valerie Taylor.  I have a photo alum of the covers http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/pulpcovers/a/PulpCovers1.htm.The covers are works of art themselves.
Rebeccartist's picture

Wow, thank you!

Submitted by
Rebecca (11 posts)
on September 11, 2007 - 11:46pm.

I started a collection of pulp (lesbian and gay male) because I'm doing some research for a book I'm working on, and I absolutely fell in love with them. What great fun reading, and surprisingly (to me anyway) I found myself emotionally involved in the writing, even if some of it is over the top. Great stuff.

Thank you for the link to pics of your collection! Yes, the cover art is fantastic, and worth the price. It's hard to gather titles and authors to search for**, so aside from the lovely cover art, I'll be able to cull info from your collection, too. So, thank you!

**I do alot of used-book buying at Alibris.com, and many of the sellers do not categorize their pulp books for sale as such. "Lesbian" is a category, but even that doesn't pick up the true pulp books, in their original printings. And, I confess, I find it very rewarding to buy an original, whenever possible.

 

Luckycharm808's picture

Oh yeah!

Submitted by
Luckycharm808 (145 posts)
on August 31, 2007 - 4:13pm.

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary i just got it but i havent got to read it yet.

j aime le rouge's picture

 Ann Bannon - I'm a

Submitted by
j aime le rouge (9 posts)
on September 3, 2007 - 11:25am.

 Ann Bannon - I'm a woman

March Hastings -Three women

grrlzone's picture

Holy smutfest, Pulpgrrl!

Submitted by
Dawn Quixotic (29 posts)
on September 3, 2007 - 9:46pm.
Yay for ephemera!  I love Ann Bannon, but my first smut-love was Joan Ellis.  I also love Sloane Brittain, and what a sad, short life she led.  And who can help but love the many faces of M.E. Kerr.  I always thought Vin Packer was such a gay-mo name. 

See: http://lynnmunroe.tripod.com/midwood.htm for some amusing info about some of the more famous (primarily male) authors of the age who wrote under female pseudomyns.  There was a whole lot of plegiarism, uh, I mean "recycling" at those old publishing houses.  I have a whole sub-collection of queer PBOs that have covers, backcovers, jacket text or whole passages "recycled" from other titles and writers. 

Still, the democratic element of pulp appeals to me.  I mean, it's sort of like blogging or fan-fic communities-- all these random folks (some of whom turned out to be critically-acclaimed writers, like Patricia Highsmith and Marion Zimmer Bradley) sending manuscripts to publishing houses with the hope of seeing what they'd created find a receptive audience.  Many of those books were generated by unknowns and others were cranked out by formula, just like their slicker, Fabio-festooned grandneices and nephlets.  

And, like lesbianlife says in the 2nd post, "the covers are works of art themselves."  I've collected Raders, McGinnes, McGuire and some of the other famous illustrators, but mostly I've tried to collect the stories with happy endings or really hot women.  No surprises here.  I like everything about pulp novels, even the basementy smell. The writers are interesting; the times and the stories are interesting (even when they are bad, and many of them are very bad)-- it's all good, clean 50's era, PG-13 fun.  

Mostly I like imagining small groups of lesbian PBO-writers meeting each other for coffee in some greasy spoon and tossing out manuscript ideas (Ann: "Sorority sisters again, Mary?  That's sooo last year.")  Wouldn't that make for a cool TV show?  Like "Madmen" but with smutastic girl-on-girl vignettes instead of ads?  (Aside:  I really like "Madmen"; I hope it does well in the ratings so that we have more period shows on TV. Shameless plug for "Madmen"!)

I'd watch that, heck I'd even TiVO it of I could figure out how to do that.
Rebeccartist's picture

A few of my favorites, so far

Submitted by
Rebecca (11 posts)
on September 12, 2007 - 12:13am.

Ann Bannon (almost goes without saying ;-) )

Torchlight to Valhalla by Kate Wilhelm -- actually from 1938, and not the 50s though Naiad published a reprint in the 80s, I think. The book's format is a little odd: there are no quote marks during the dialog, which is how the writer wanted it originally, if I remember that right. But the story is very moving, about a woman who lives an isolated life, who meets a woman and falls rather completely in love. "Luminous prose" is the quote on the back. I agree.

The Girls in 3-B by Valerie Taylor. Not quite typical pulp -- the lesbian is happy she is one. About young women who move to Chicago from the cornfields.

Spring Fire by Vin Packer. Typical pulp, about love and heartbreak and prejudice, but I thought it was interesting since I had never been in a sorority, and didn't fully understand that entire scene. Vin Packer was really Marijane Meaker, lover of Patricia Highsmith, and writer of many other books. It's considered a ground-breaking novel.

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith is not a favorite, but maybe you'll like it. I have yet to make it through this one, and mainly because the prose is a little too convoluted for my taste, but, again, considered ground-breaking and worthy of a read, and I believe it doesn't end badly, either ;-), but I don't really know since I haven't finished it!

One that I really want to read is Women's Barracks by Tereska Torres. It's next on my list to track down.

What I'm also looking for, and have yet to find, is any mainstream fiction from the 40s & 50s that featured lesbian characters, either as main protagonists or even side characters. I've been reading some really good gay male mainstream fiction (Quatrefoil, The World in the Evening, Sam, Better Angel, Giovanni's Room), and loving it all, but wish, wish, wish that there was the same kind of thing with women. Something where the women don't die, or leave Her for Him, that kind of thing. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

wildeny's picture

Price of Salt

Submitted by
wildeny (391 posts)
on October 9, 2007 - 11:34pm.
The Price of Salt is one of my favorite books. It's not a pulp fiction in my definition. It's still worth reading. The new edition has the introduction by Emma Donoghue.
grrlzone's picture

Strangers on a Train

Submitted by
Dawn Quixotic (29 posts)
on September 12, 2007 - 2:09pm.
I found _Women's Barracks_ to be a romp.  I blew through it one afternoon and thought, "That's it?  This is the book that launched a U.S. Congressional investigation?  This was the book considered too obscene to quote into the official record?"  The lesbian story line lasts for five minutes and it's all in the context of a morality play where bad girls get their due.  I prefer when bad girls do, but that's just me.

Meaker had bunches of pseudonyms, but imagine my surprise one summer when I found one of her contemporary kid novels, _Deliver Us from Evie_ (as M.E. Kerr) in this sketchy boathouse that some friends and I rented one summer break during grad school.  That was great fun!  I wasn't a fan of her recent book about Highsmith, tho.  I found it dull.

I think that you're going to be hard pressed to find mainstream fiction from that era that feature any leading queer women characters, unless you go earlier with Collette's set, Radcliffe Hall (unless you read Hall, as I do, as T not L), Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, or Gertrude Stein and read well between the lines.  

Styrker (I seem to remember) offered a theory of why there aren't many lesbian characters in mainstream novels is in her book, _Queer Pulp_.  I'm paraphrasing here, but I think her point was that Baldwin, Capote (_Other Voices, Other Rooms_), and even (gasp) Gore Vidal (City & the Pillar) were considered "real" writers of "literature" and pulps were a different critter entirely.  "Real literature" is published as hardback and then remarketted, in some cases, as pulp.  As a collector, I can typically find lots of hardbacks written by and about gay men in the 50's and rather limited pulp (until '65ish) compared with lots of lesbian pulp and very few hardbacks.  

That's sexism/classism/homophobia for ya.
Evchen's picture

I'm way late to the thread but

Submitted by
Blauermontag (45 posts)
on May 2, 2008 - 6:41am.

hell yay to the wonderful phenomenon that is the lesbian pulp novel! I used to roll my eyes at my straight friends who dive into Cecilia Ahern or Nicholas Sparks but ever since I came across Katherine Forrester's anthology a few months ago (recommended at After Ellen, of course), I discovered that I'm as soppy as they are and just needed my special kind of soppy (so-bad-it's -good writing, lots of liquor, a predatory older woman seducing the IYSYG, "Innocent Yet Susceptible Young Girl" (Terry Castle)) ... le sigh! Some (but not enough) are even translated to German, e.g. Miriam Gardner's "The strange women". I just ordered an antiquarian copy of Sloane Britain's "These Curious Pleasures" from a comic book store (!) in Canada, because the excerpt in Forrester is hilariously whedonesque, and I hopefully hope it arrives safe and sound and soon.

 

 

 

shakespeherianrag's picture

Am I the only one who

Submitted by
Layla (100 posts)
on May 10, 2008 - 5:08pm.

Am I the only one who really likes the "bad" lesbian novels -- that is, not Bannon, not Vin Packer, not Paula Christian? While I've read those -- and enjoyed them -- I'm really interested in the terrible ones in which the lesbian characters aren't offered any sort of redemption and are, by and large, castigated or magically changed into heterosexual women through the power of male lovin'.

How can you not love passages like this (spoken, mind you, by lesbians, because it's even more fun when they ventriloquize patriarchy!):

"I don't care what you read in books, Rupe. Most Lesbians are deliberate cowards. Usually they're too lazy or too full of themselves to go out and get themselves a man. And they're social pests because they show other women how easy it is to get away with sex without responsibility" (from "The Shadowy Sex," Hilary Hilton).

RachelStardust's picture

Ann Bannon...

Submitted by
RachelStardust (32 posts)
on May 26, 2008 - 10:14pm.
I have all of her books except for Journey to a Woman, and I really wanted to like them. I actually enjoyed her first book (the most) and I liked her second book ok, but the other two were just...I dunno, I couldn't get into them. Anyway, I noticed that in the book, Odd Girl Out, Laura comes from a happy family, but by I Am A Woman, her mother and siblings died when she was a child and her father was abusive---and that I think, was used to partially explain why she was a lesbian. Did anyone else notice that the backstory changed? Was that for a reason or just something that happened?

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