Lesbian pulp fiction
[2] These books were sold at drugstores, magazine stands, bus terminals and other places where one might look to purchase cheap, consumable entertainment.
[3] Those notable novels were published in hardcover and were as follows: During World War II, the military distributed small paperbacks to its forces, causing a large population of Americans to become accustomed to having access to cheap books and thus creating a demand for the same easy access to reading material when the soldiers returned home.
[4] As a result, in the years after the war, there appeared a new and often subversive trend in publishing that allowed for books to be written, cheaply produced, and widely distributed using technology previously unavailable.
[5] These mass market paperbacks, printed and bound on cheap paper, often addressed "dirty" topics like drugs, gangs, white slavery, crime, murder, and homosexuality.
[6] Several publishing houses created special imprints, such as Fawcett's "Gold Medal" division, to satisfy the demand for pulp fiction.
This was especially true during the atmosphere of the McCarthy trials...Although tame by today's standards...these volumes were so threatening then that women hid them, burnt them, and threw them out.
The story was a fictionalized account of Torres' experiences in the Free French Forces in London during World War II.
[10] The Committee concluded their investigation with a report that required publishers to conform to certain moral standards in the content and publicizing of their books, or else face fines or imprisonment.
After the success of Women's Barracks, Gold Medal Books published another paperback with lesbian themes, Spring Fire.
Spring Fire, which was published by Gold Medal Books in 1952 and sold more than 1.5 million copies, is about two college girls, Mitch and Leda, who fall in love and have an affair.
[13] The tragic endings of Women's Barracks and Spring Fire (suicide and insanity) are typical of lesbian pulp novels.
A character had either to turn heterosexual and end up coupled with a man or, if she remained homosexual, suffer death, insanity or some equally unappealing fate.
The first exception to this formula, and technically not a pulp fiction, is the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, published in hardcover by Coward-McCann under the pseudonym of "Claire Morgan".
Writer Yvonne Keller divides books within the lesbian pulp fiction genre into subclasses she labels "pro-lesbian" and "virile adventures".
Virile adventures, on the other hand, had covers that were considerably more sexualized, and would frequently feature men in the pictures, conveying their voyeuristic natures.
Everything would circulate back to the idea that virile adventures needed to end within the throes of heterosexuality to counteract the effects lesbianism could have had on its audiences.
[12] Due to their popularity, these books set the standard of what consisted of lesbian pulp fiction, accounting for about 85% of the genre.
Lesbianism was often linked to other topics that were seen as salacious or shocking at the time: witchcraft, Satanism, bondage and discipline, orgies, and voyeurism.
[19] Barbara Grier, who started Naiad Press, called the years between 1950 and 1965 the "Golden Age of Lesbian Pulp Fiction".
The popularity of the books as well as the continuity of characters gave them a remarkable longevity and earned her the title, "Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction."
1927) wrote under the pen names of Vin Packer and Ann Aldrich, as well as serving as a copy-editor for Gold Medal Books.
For years Bradley refused to admit she authored her early paperback lesbian fiction, and was reluctant to publicly speak about her work on The Ladder.
[citation needed] Literary scholar Yvonne Keller recognizes a small group of writers whose work formed the subgenre of "pro-lesbian" pulp fiction, including Bannon, Meaker, Smith, Taylor, as well as Sloane Britain, Paula Christian, Joan Ellis, March Hastings, Marjorie Lee, Della Martin, Rea Michaels, Randy Salem, and Shirley Verel.
[23]: 6, 20 According to Keller the subgenre includes approximately 100 novels whose authors, often lesbians themselves, refused to acknowledge the conventional voyeurism of the rest of the genre.
Because lesbian pulps were not typically bought by libraries, cover art played a big factor in their selling.
They also portrayed the content of the novels as scandalous and sensational, and made it clear that the reader would find sex scenes inside.
Patience and Sarah (originally self-published by author Alma Routsong in 1969) is considered the first novel to initiate a feminist publishing run.
Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt was adapted into the 2015 film Carol by Phyllis Nagy and directed by Todd Haynes.
Starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, it received numerous accolades, bringing a 1950s lesbian "pulp story" to a wider modern audience.
In the 1980s and 1990s, lesbian fan fiction surged to the forefront with hundreds of authors writing stories, novels, and whole series and making them available online via the Internet.
