Books by and for independent women

Lesbian Pulp Fiction

These days, if I were sauntering through the smut and bustle of Charing Cross whilst waiting for a train, one of the last things I would expect to come across at one of the abundant magazine stalls would be the bawdy jacket of a pulp novel.

As a society, we have evolved through enough movement and shift so as to now get our lowbrow kicks from celebrity magazines and inconsequential scandal. But mid-way through last century, when a lot of what is today relatively open was still closeted, said pulp genre was a clandestine marker for cryptic sexualities.

In the 1950s and 60s, amidst the usual throng of detective zealots and science-fiction fantasists, was a curbed score of lesbians, some of whom had only an outside notion of their own sexuality from what they had read about in lesbian pulp novels.

Cheap enough to throw away and available from bus terminals, drugstores and magazine racks, lesbian pulp displayed florid jackets of half-naked women, usually framed by heroically written teasers.

If I were to find such a paperback today, perhaps entitled Butch Fever and with an erroneous jacket copy informing me that ‘to satisfy her unnatural lusts, she savagely ravaged any young girl she met,’ I think my brain would be fixed somewhere between absolute horror and a comical sense of ironical awe. But sixty years ago, such books were sought after with tentative relish, and were a necessary tool for self-identification.

The pulp genre in general, so named because of the cheap paper the books were printed on, received little respect from both publishers and readers, and so censorship was thought unnecessary.

Homosexual literature was defined within the same bracket as other subversive trends that emerged after the Second World War, such as drugs, gangs, murder, and crime. This bracket was known under the collective name of ‘dirty topics.’

After browsing an internet page of lesbian pulp jackets and reading the copy on each one, it seems hard to imagine that the genre was in any way a positive marker for the lesbian community. Many of the authors were men, writing with female pseudonyms and with the obvious intention of fulfilling sordid male fantasy.

But out of the hundreds of titles produced, a good number were written by lesbian women, with the objective of reaching other gay females who were isolated from their sexuality.

Despite this, publishers would not allow any literature be sent to print that promoted homosexuality. The novels had to follow a strict formula, which stated that no character was to be happy at the novel’s end unless they renounced their lesbianism.

The doomed women who slung their fated limbs across the pages either had to become straight and end up with a man, or else suffer some abominable finale such as death or insanity.

Today, this idea is paradoxically horrific and laughable, and holds a kind of debauched and kitsch irony. But were it not for lesbian pulp, the more respected of female lesbian authors would perhaps not have been so bold with accrediting their characters with the immunity to censorship, and allowing their women to partake in whatever sexual activity and happy ending they chose.

The first mainstream exception to the lesbian pulp formula was a book entitled The Price of Salt (also published as Carol), written by Patricia Highsmith of The Talented Mr Ripley fame.

Perhaps if it were not for lesbian pulp, contemporary writers such as Sarah Waters and Ali Smith would be hermetically disguised in degenerate corners, and bought with a level of awkwardness and embarrassment. And perhaps other gay fiction that preceded lesbian pulp, such as the literature of Jean Cocteau, Colette, and Radclyffe Hall, would still be labelled as black market.

I would recommend the reading of lesbian pulp, maybe on a delirious Sunday of glassy eyes and a throbbing skull. There is something decidedly maudlin and poignant about following girl-soldiers and disgruntled schoolgirls through their first sexual awakening.

But if you sway more towards the erotic then perhaps choose something more hedonistic, the majority of lesbian pulp, at least the kind written by actual lesbians, is comical and tender but rather tame by today’s standards.

Intrigued? Try Katherine V. Forrest‘s Lesbian Pulp Fiction anthology, for £9.79 from Amazon, or Cleis Press in America have republished a number of the original lesbian pulp classics.

Jen Thompson (Originally published in Sister Magazine)