The Odd Girls’ Journey Out of the Shadows: Lesbi-Pulp Novels and the Creation of a Lesbian Discourse

Allison HectorHACU 3155/8/01

The Odd Girls’ Journey Out of the Shadows: Lesbi-Pulp Novels

and the Creation of a Lesbian Discourse

June of 1969 marked the beginning of the contemporary

American gay liberation movement at the riot at Stonewall

Inn. Certainly, the 70s were the most visible beginning of

the gay and lesbian political action, as well as the

emergence of a new discourse. But the foundations of a

movement and discourse were already real. Both inside and

outside of early gay and lesbian subcultures, the levels of

acceptability and visibility fluctuated throughout the 20th

century according to time and place. Significantly, groups

were indeed forming, different language was being used, and

non-pathological images were being produced before the

1970s. In the 1950’s and 60’s, this transition was happening

on the racks of neighborhood drugstores and in the corners

of the lesbians’ bookshelves. Lesbian pulp novels emerged

out of a thriving mass market paperback industry controlled

by a culture not necessarily invested in promoting a

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positive image of lesbians. Female authors working in this

genre, however, possessed both the desire and freedom to

create such images. Regardless of the intended audience or

the emphasis on profit-making stereotypes, these novels

provided a forum for a lesbian discourse to begin in a way

that was at once non-threatening and conforming, while at

the same time having radical implications. That is, while

the women writing these novels were still overseen by

publishers and male audiences, they were given the space to

make decisions about the social meaning of lesbians that

were not produced by hostile, heterosexual institutions. I

explore in this paper how this was possible and the

implications for both the lesbians of the 50s and early 60s

and the female authors who, whether knowingly or not, took

part in creating a new discourse. Key elements of the

lesbi-pulp paperback such as accessibility, new and positive

representations of lesbians, and self-definition formed a

prototype for a lesbian-feminist discourse.

A thorough understanding of lesbian pulp novel must

first look into the history and conventions of the

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paperback. Slowly emerging in Europe and North America since

the late 1800s, mass-market paperbacks began to gain

significant following in the 1940s. Called pulp, because of

the low quality paper upon which these novels were printed,

or pocket books, because they were small and could be

carried easily, these books were driven by exaggerated

plots, a sense of fantasy and, in the case of the lesbian

paperback, voyeurism and titillation. The project of this

new industry, then, was not to create long lasting,

expensive hardcover books to fill a respectable library in

which to entertain elite guests. They needed to be cheap

and appeal to a wide audience. A wide audience, however,

includes the middle and working classes that, most

importantly, work. That is they have little time to spend

reading, especially because other forms of cheap mass

entertainment available and competing for their time. The

importance of portability and cost effectiveness are

emphasized in this New York Times ad from 1939:

Today your 25-cent piece leaps to par with dollar bills…These new Pocket books are designed to fit the tempo of our times and the needs of New Yorkers.

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They’re as handy as a pencil, as modern and convenient as a portable radio—and as good looking. They were designed especially for busy people—people who are continually on the go, yet want to make the most of every minute.

Never again need you say, “I wish I had time to read” because Pocket Books gives you the time. Never again need you dawdle idly in reception rooms, fret on a train or bus rides, sit vacantly staring at a restaurant table.1

Portability, then, is also an important issue, and standard

sizes were often used, and the term pocket book came into

general use in a similar way as did pulp novel. Because the

working class was now considered part of a target market

these books became available in a wide array of places

including newsstands and drugstores.

Valerie Taylor, a popular lesbi-pulp author of the

time, includes the presence of the paperback in the text

itself when some of the girls go to the drugstore:

The girls wandered around looking at costume jewelry, nail polish and eyeliner, paperback books on the racks. They would buy something they didn’t reallywant, she knew, to justify wasting their time this way.The place was full of people buying things for something to do.2

1 Thomas Bonn, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of Mass Market Paperbacks (Penguin Books, 1982), p. 35-36.

2 Valerie Taylor, Journey to Fulfillment, (originally 1964; Naiad Press 1982), p. 85.

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This self-reflexivity appears in Journey to Fulfillment, published

rather late in the heyday of the pulp genre. In some ways

this appears to be simply a mirror, a way for the audience

to see themselves within the text in a concrete way, but

Taylor compares her genre to other cheap things such as

costume jewelry that these girls do not necessarily want but

feel compelled to buy. These girls have nothing better to

do, no better options to buy, which, in a way can also tell

us something about the representations of lesbians of the

time. That is to say that there are not better

representations of lesbians, of themselves, in the

literature of their everyday lives. In this passage Taylor

subtly asserts the importance of the existence of the

paperback novel, which can be extended to the lesbian

paperback, while at the same time pointing out its

inadequacies. This makes sense as Journey to Fulfillment was

published in 1964, right on the tail end of the lesbi-pulp

craze and just before the beginning of a political movement.

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Availability in high traffic areas does seem an

integral part of the existence of pulp paperbacks in the

1950s. Because of their constant presence in highly

frequented establishments, it was easy to draw a reader in.

For this purpose cover art became integral to novel sales.

Thomas Bonn talks of his early encounters with pulp novels:

In the middle class neighborhood where I grew up, “pocket books” were found in Golden’s drugstore, acrossthe street from our church and school. They were displayed on revolving wire racks, between the greetingcards and magazines. Entering Golden’s for a frozen Milky Way candy bar, I would cast amazed glances at thefleshy female victims of the mayhem and murder exploding on their covers. Bare backs, thighs, and breasts barely restrained by flimsy blouses or slippingnightgowns tumbled off the foreground of the covers…Sometimes the cover furnished a keyhole or window to peek through.3

Because the drugstore was an integral part of Bonn’s life,

right across from church and school, all items placed there

are within his reach. What make them desirable are the

salacious covers. This particular sales tactic points to

the intense voyeuristic quality of pulp paperbacks in

general that applied especially to lesbi-pulp novels.

3 Bonn, p. 15.

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One of the first to use this idea, in the form of a

knothole, God’s Little Acre (1946) “…promised forbidden

insights into Southern comforts [and the voyeurism of the

knothole] was credited with stimulating much of the sales.”4

Perhaps more importantly, the voyeurism promised by the

keyhole is played out in the novel. Though a book can be

found in a common context it is then constituted as the

“other” because the characters within belong to sexual

categories that are not normative and are therefore “other.”

Yet, because,

…the lesbians depicted were still women—[this] meant, to more men than Hugh Hefner, that they were still sexually available to men and, moreover, nonthreatening to depict…not coincidentally, fewer pulpnovels were published with gay male themes.5

Simply because women are always accessible to men in society

their possible sexual transgression can be seen as easily

controllable, a lure rather than a threat like male

homosexuality. More often than not, feminine women adorn

the cover to entice the masculine reader, that is, the

4 Ibid., p. 102.5 Yvonne Keller, “Pulp Politics: Strategies of Vision in Pro-

Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1955-1965” in The Queer Sixties, ed. By Patricia JulianaSmith, (Routledge, 1999), p. 3.

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pleasure seeker. He (which turns out to also be she)

actively looks upon the woman on the cover, familiar,

attractive, inviting, who turns out to be completely

unfamiliar. But, because the reader has already been

invited to look, he continues to watch. The portrayals of

sexual acts between two women are moments that a man can

experience in a fictional, non-threatening way that he could

not in real life.

Both female characters may be feminine, which fits well

with the idea of straight male desire, but often one of the

partners happens to be a butch woman. In this way gender

roles and heterosexuality appear familiar to the male reader

and appear to be reinforced by butch/femme. In some ways he

may be even be able to identify with the butch. However,

identification is not the only goal. He can desire the

butch as well and keep his sexuality in the realm of the

heteronormative while desiring a masculine body. While the

focus of his lust is still female the action he gazes upon

is homosexual. Barale uses Ann Bannon’s novel Beebo Brinker

to illustrate this point,

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I want to suggest that among the pleasures—and dangers—offered the heterosexual male reader of this novel is the opportunity to engage in non-heterosexual imaginings. Moreover, it is the opportunity to encounter them not as the distant observer of other folks' rituals of romance, but as a participant. To put it simply, Beebo Brinker invites the straight male reader to leave his homosexual panic behind. It shows him how folks who might look straight—folks like himself, for instance—do indeed have dreams and desiresof a gayer sort. It invites him to come out of the cold and take part in Close Encounters of the Queer Kind.6

This freedom to move in and out of the queer world, though

targeted at heterosexual males, can also be accessed by

women, thereby creating not only a new lesbian discourse but

also making it possible to view sexuality as fluid and

complex. Sexuality can be constructed as a continuum and

not as a binary system even in a culture that values the

binary both in discourse, and emerging counterdiscourse. The

difference between identification with, and desire for, is

blurred.

The “straight” woman, too, can be invited into the

sexual transgression party. She may be intrigued and

6 Michèle Barale, “When Jack Blinks: Si(gh)ting Gay Desire in Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, (Routledge, 1992), p. 604.

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titillated by the idea of sexual and gender play, and could

see herself readily in the positions many of the books’

characters found themselves in, that is, assuming they were

straight only to discover their lesbianism through a

seduction. In a seduction, then, the woman is not wholly

responsible for her homosexual actions/yearnings but is

coerced. So too can the book function as a seducer of

women. For the woman reader, then, the characters and

actions they portray in the novel are accessible and

applicable to their own lives the distinction between

themselves, whom they see as heterosexual and the

characters, seen as homosexual is not so clear. Though

Nestle asserts that,

…these books were often hidden away on the pulp racks of the more sleazy drugstores. To pick the booksout, carry them to the counter and face the other shoppers and the cashier was often tantamount to a coming out declaration.7

Clearly, the ability to purchase a novel at any local

drugstore was a more accessible way for heterosexual, semi-

heterosexual or presumed heterosexual women to learn about

7 Joan Nestle, “’Desire So Big It Had To Be Brave’: Ann Bannon’s Lesbian Novels,” (unpublished article, January 1983), p. 2.

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and experience homosexual life than entering lesbian

gatherings places, especially if they did not happen to live

near New York or San Francisco.

Many of the buyers of these novels, like Nestle, were

lesbian women leading lesbian lives (I would even venture to

use the term “out” in certain contexts of their lives).

They recognized these texts as powerful and visible despite

their multiple problems of background, voyeurism and

inaccuracies. This recognition paved the way for the

beginnings of a distinctly lesbian discourse. While women

authors wanted to create a positive image of lesbians for

both their lesbian readership and the general populace and

so were wary of including too much gratuitous sex publishers

still pushed for it, seeing their audience as heterosexual

men interesting only for the titillation factor. In a 1959

article in The Ladder, writer Lora Sela (pseudonym) talks

about the compromises she makes with her publisher: “I

agreed to give him overt sex scenes IF he would allow me to

get my own propaganda over—to gain understanding and

tolerance for Lesbians with the readers of these books”

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(underlining and capitalization theirs).8 But to dismiss

sex in lesbi-pulp novels is to disregard not only

significant moments in these novels but also the role they

played in creating a literary lesbian language. Gabriele

Griffin asserts that,

…[certain passages] could come from any romantic pulp writing. However, the assertion of lesbian sexualdesire and the need to have it fulfilled is made over and over again in ways designed to support the validityof these desires, their urgency and power. Similarly, the joy and sexual release women find in having sex with each other is repeatedly emphasized.9

So, while certain novels were criticized for containing too

much sex the sex included in the female authored pulps can

be see as having taken on a positive meaning. Ann Bannon in

her Beebo Brinker series has many sex scenes that are joyous

and positive. Laura’s (one of Bannon’s main characters)

first lesbian encounter speaks of “shock[s] of intense

pleasure,”10 she “heard her faraway voice groan in ecstasy an

she held Beth so tightly it seemed they must somehow melt

8 “I am a Lesbian,” The Ladder, January 1959, p. 17.9 Gabriele Griffin, “Writings in the 1950s and 60s,” in Heavenly

Love: Lesbian Images in Twentieth Century Women’s Writing, (Manchester UP, 1993), p. 48.

10 Ann Bannon, Odd Girl Out, (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1957; Naiad Press, 1986), p. 67.

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together...when finally the furious desire abated a little

it was only to gather strength for a fresh explosion” (Odd

Girl 67). Her encounter with Beebo is equally intense. “…her

own body responded with violent spasms—joyous, crazy, deep

as her soul…she felt like a column of fire, all heat and

light, impossibly sensual, impossibly sexual. She was all

feeling, warm and melting, strong and sweet.”11 The

language Bannon uses to describe these encounters speaks of

the joy and pleasure that the women get to enjoy and do not

refer to their love-making as dirty in any way. Because

sexual pleasure was not necessarily something that the

acceptable heterosexual woman of the 1950s enjoyed then

portraying lesbians as enjoying sex makes them seem

promiscuous and oversexed. But if women of any sexual

orientation are allowed to enjoy sex, then these scenes can

be viewed as celebratory of lesbian sex. The power of

sexual portrayal may have worked against the desire of women

authors to depict lesbians positively in the 50s, but worked

for a positive representation a decade later. In fact, the

11 Ann Bannon, I am a Woman, (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1959; Naiad Press, 1986) p. 93-94.

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portrayal of lesbian sex as positive and exciting was a

piece of representing lesbianism positively as well as

making a new discourse by making sex positive.

The way sex is treated in these books, the amount and

explicitness, though it varies, lies in between the male-

targeted pornographic and the female-targeted romance.

Suzanna Danuta Walters places the lesbian pulp in contrast

to both written porn and the romance as she writes,

For it is not only that [female authored] novels tend to be less explicit sexually than male authored ones, but that the construction of sexuality and sexualpreference itself constituted differently from both themale version of this genre as well as from the dominantculture…[while] the description of the female pornographic genre of the Harlequin as desexualized anddecontextualized (“waiting and yearning”) could not be more at odds with the “sex in context” style of the Bannon books.12

Because lesbi-pulp novels situate themselves between

narratives associated with males and those associated with

females, but directly mirrors neither of these extremes, it

speaks in a new language. This language, though feminine,

does not hold to the framework of the traditionally feminine

12 Suzanna Danuta Walters, “As Her Hand Crept Slowly Up Her Thigh:Ann Bannon and the Politics of Pulp,” in Sexual Politics and Popular Culture, (Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990), p. 83.

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genre. It has built a new structure that houses a new

feminine discourse, that of the lesbian. In contrast to

earlier texts, such as 1928’s famous “lesbian” novel The Well

of Loneliness, Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker identifies the main

character, a butch lesbian, as such and not as either a

transgendered person and/or a failing male.

Stephen’s [from The Well of Loneliness] name is unambiguously intended to designate the masculine gender. Beebo’s name, on the other hand, bears no pre-given assumptions of gender; it is a name that could belong to a boy or a girl.13

The characters, too, make choices about naming

lesbianism, as can be seen more specifically in the butch

positioning herself as neither traditional woman nor man.

This image of the masculine woman/gender transgressor was

already a prevalent image. What the characters in Bannon’s

books articulated was the desirability of such a being.

While Beebo eventually loses her famous love interest, Venus

Bogardus due to her inability to live as a lesbian because

of her career, it is clear that Venus prefers Beebo to her

13 Diane Hamer, “I Am a Woman: Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s,” in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Mark Lily, (Macmillan, 1990), p. 59.

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husband, and all the other relationships with men she has

had.14 It becomes clear then that Venus (as well as other

feminine lesbian characters throughout the series) does not

desire a man even as she lusts after the masculine woman but

…more importantly, it is [Beebo’s] being a woman that defines her desirability in specifically lesbian terms; what Beebo holds over all Venus’ six husbands, for example, is stated by Leo, the sixth, as “the fact of her femininity.”15 Beebo’s lovers make it quite clear that their desire for her is precisely as a butchor masculine woman, not as a poor imitation of a man.16

14 The following is a brief summary of the Beebo Brinker series. In Odd Girl Out Laura and Beth meet in college and have an affair. Beth then falls in love with Charlie—a college boy. Laura tried to get Beth to leave him but they remain together and Laura leaves college alone. I Am a Woman opens up with Laura after she has left school and gotten a job in an NYC doctor’s office. She meets Jack Mann (who is gay), and goes to her first gay bar where she meets and goes home with Beebo. She continues to see her but has a crush on her straight roommate Marcie. After a bad visit from her father (who attempts to seduce her), Laura disappears for a couple of days, but then returns to the arms of Beebo. Women in the Shadows is Bannon’s darkest novel and includes a faked rape, dog murder, Beebo’s slide into alcoholism and a tortured affair between Laura and a black woman who pretends she is Indian. In the end Laura and Jack get married and she gets artificially inseminated. In Journey to a Woman, Beth is married with two children, to Charlie and has an affair with a woman named Vega then leaves Charlie to search for Laura. After a liaison with Nina, a lesbian pulp author, Beth finally finds Laura, married with a daughter, to Jack. They make love but realize its over for them. Vega goes to Beth’s hotel and shoots herself and Charlie bails Beth out of jail, wanting her to return but she refuses. Beebo and Beth then fall in love. Beebo Brinker is actually the first book in the series chronologically and begins with Jack meeting Beebo. Beebo gets involved with a woman for the first time then meets Venus Bogardus,a famous movie star, and moves to California with her. Beebo, forced togo back to New York when rumors begin to spread about the relationship, returns to the open arms of Paula. (Hamer 99, footnote 1).

15 Ann Bannon, Beebo Brinker, (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1962; Naiad Press 1983), p. 165.

16 Hamer, p. 59.

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Butch, then, in the context of lesbi-pulp novels of the 50s

is quite different from earlier representations of the

mannish lesbian. Beebo has the desire to wear the clothes

associated with men, to perform the actions associated with

men, to perform as a man, not to be one. The representations

of butch vs. femme in the bar culture (reflected in the

novels) were not only prevalent but also an essential part

of performing working-class lesbianism in the 50s. It was

problematic and not always inclusive. It was framed by

heterosexual norms of gender representation but it was not

heterosexual. It paves the way for further distancing from

the original heterosexual signifiers.

By 1964 Valerie Taylor discusses role playing within

the narrative. In this scene Peg, an experienced college

girl, is coming on to Erika, a younger girl who is new to

America.

Peg asked abruptly, “Are you butch?”“Please?”“Are you the active one? You look more like a boy

than a girl.”“Oh, I would like to be a boy! Then I could have

a nice girlfriend who is beautiful here.” She flashed

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a suddenly mischievous smile, putting her palms againsther chest.

Peg laughed. “I’m kiki. I can be either, depending on who I’m with. Comes in handy sometimes.”17

In this scene, the more experienced partner, Peg, is not

only aware of butch femme roles but is ready to step in and

out of them as she sees fit. While this is also not set in

a bar culture she seems to attach no stigma to the word

“kiki,” which acts as both signifier of a lesbian community,

slang that was created out of gay culture, but also as a

transgression of certain role playing enacted in lesbian

culture that found its initial roots in heterosexual

relations. This new term that creates a place to deviate

from what (arguably) became lesbian norms, does not negate

the role playing in doing so. Peg, here, feels comfortable

not conforming to butch or femme, and yet she gives Erika

the freedom to identify as one or the other if she wishes.

It is unclear whether Erika’s desire to be a boy is based on

society’s requirement of aligning of gender and sexuality,

because she wants to be a top (the active partner in a

17 Taylor, p. 45.

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relationship), or because she feels any amount of otherwise

transgendered feelings. Even this ambiguity, however,

creates a space for the beginnings of questioning gender and

sexuality separately, critiquing roles (specifically

butch/femme), and bringing those critiques into everyday

practice. All of which were vital to a lesbian discourse.

While butch/femme plays a large part in Ann Bannon’s

Beebo Brinker series, there are important shifts in the

stations of certain characters. Bannon has archetypes but

actively destabilizes them. Laura most definitely thinks of

herself as a girl and is frightened to think she would have

to act mannish to be a lesbian. “She looked back at

herself, hugging her bosom to comfort herself, and she

thought, ‘I don’t want to be a boy. I don’t want to be like

them. I’m a girl. I am a girl. That’s what I want to

be.’”18 Bannon crafted Beebo to be the perfect butch of her

dreams.

I think there is some mystique about Beebo. And Isuppose it’s partly because I wrote her as a love object that people see her that way. But I look back and see not only how narrowly I cast her in that diesel18 Odd Girl Out, p. 64.

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dyke mode, but how much of that role playing I depict…She was part of my own personal, private fantasy world before I ever wrote anything.19

These are the two characters most focused on in Bannon’s

novels and they represent fairly rigid models of butch and

femme. If you take these two to be quintessential butch and

femme characters, however, it problematizes the identities

of other characters. Beth, with whom Laura had her first

relationship in college, reacts to Laura in a somewhat butch

manner, though they are more of equals in manner of dress

and even in their eventual lovemaking. But Beth does ask

for a kiss,20 tells Laura to be her date,21 persuades her to

sleep in the same bed alone with her,22 and eventually

seduces her in ambivalent sort of way. Even without these

flimsy sort of butch markers we can view Beth, as Laura’s

opposite, as a butch. However, Beth, at the end of the

series in Journey to a Woman, ends up with Beebo (after

realizing she has no future with Laura) thereby positioning

19 Tricia Looten, “Ann Bannon: A Writer of Lost Lesbian Fiction Finds Herself and Her Public,” Off Our Backs December 1983, p. 14-15 and 20.

20 Odd Girl Out p. 37.21 Ibid., p. 43.22 Ibid., p. 51.

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her as femme. And in Beebo Brinker, Beebo has a relationship

with a femme named Paula who has just broken up with a woman

identified only by her plaid pajamas. Throughout the novel

the assumption is that this woman was butch, though “plaid

pajamas” turns out to have been one of Beebo’s own love

interests and thereby a femme, but also very feminine in her

own gender performance. So, while Bannon mirrors

butch/femme culture as both an exaggerated fantasy for

interested readers and the reality of lesbian norms, she

also transgresses the norms she, herself, has set up. In

doing so she aids in creating a lesbian culture derived from

heterosexual norms, while also beginning a further lesbian

discourse framed around non-traditional role playing and

non-role playing. Without necessarily realizing the

implications in her contradictions and ambiguities

concerning roles or identification, Bannon allows for a more

progressive representation of the lesbian. Older writings

had pathologized lesbians, and elements of pathology can be

found in Bannon’s texts as well, but she does negate this

concept of the lesbian as pathological. According to Hamer:

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…[there is a] more radical emphasis to Bannon’s writing. This is Bannon’s refusal to settle on any definitive cause of lesbianism. If at moments she appears to condone dominant explanations, at others shereworks them entirely, or drops them altogether.23

There is power in this ambivalence. And it moves the

uncelebrated, cheaply produced pulp paperback novel into the

political via the “personal is political” concept of the 70s

by “…allow[ing] lesbian characters to speak their own

identities in a way that challenges the presumption of a

dominant heterosexual culture to define lesbianism.”24 Val,

a character in Paula Christian’s Edge of Twilight after a sexual

encounter with another woman says, “There’s a name for what

we’re doing now.”25 She specifically states that the action

she is taking a part in can be named and has a name and yet

does not give that name. She does not wish to use a label

set up by heterosexual institutions and has not yet created

her own name for such an action. By identifying the action,

however, she makes room for her to be able to later name

such actions. Toni, the woman she falls in love with, is

23 Hamer, p. 54.24 Ibid., p. 53.25 Paula Christian, Edge of Twilight, (Timely Books, 1983; originally

published 1959), p. 40.

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then able to articulate her naming of the lesbian. She

tells Val, “We’re ‘gay,’ or Lesbians, or homosexuals, and

sometimes ‘twilight people,’ but not ‘queers’!”26 While Val

may be conscious that she does not want to use terminology

she has not created to identify actions she is involved in,

Toni goes one step further by actually putting forth names

she prefers to identify as.

Significant internal struggle marks the lesbian pulp

novel of the 50s and early 60s as a place of transition. The

cultural roles that these novels played were as fluid as the

roles of the characters within them, that is, quite rigid in

some ways yet conversely flexible in others. New visibility

and representations of lesbians, made by and for lesbians,

were publicly available to middle and working classes as

relatively commonplace items. This is not to say that there

was not still risk involved in purchasing an openly lesbian

text or a stake in claiming that text as your own (as a

writer or buyer), but rather that this inevitable investment

made room for first identifying individuals as members of a

26 Ibid., p. 57.

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group and thereby uniting these people and their ideas in a

community. Within a community then, change on a mass

movement scale can begin. This is how the women’s and/or

gay and lesbian movement of the 70s was formed partially by

these novels. But aside from movement and group

identification it gave, the lesbian paperback was an

important tool for the individual. It was a piece of

accessible literature that suggested not only that there

were other lesbians out there but that, although a lesbian

life may be difficult one, it could also be a happy and

sexually fulfilling one. It made the idea of living as a

lesbian possible where it was not even imaginable before.

This change was significant for the writers as well.

If Ann Bannon serves as an example of the transformative

powers of the lesbi-pulp from which we can more concretely

see the impact they may have had for other women. When Ann

Bannon began writing she was married with children. Women

wrote her letters that both frightened and inspired her.

Arno and Naiad Presses actively pursued her when she could

not have imagined that her writing held social and political

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import. But her readers, avidly collecting and keeping

decaying copies, knew they did. Barbara Grier27 knew they

did and the 80s reprints were successful, now accessible in

bookstores and university libraries. Coming out in the

early 60s scared Bannon, and for a while she rejected

visitors to her home and threw away fan letters. But women

did write and visit her, and she did write her fantasy into

these novels. For the year she lived in Philadelphia, she

visited gay bars in New York as often as she could and

fraternized with another lesbi-pulp author, Ann Aldrich (aka

Vin Packer), who also scared as well as informed her while

helping her in her quest to experience gay life in the

Village. She was not an out lesbian while she was

publishing the Beebo Brinker series, but later in her life she

did go to graduate school, became a professor, and separated

from her husband. With the reprints of her novels, and

27 Barbara Grier, aka Gene Damon wrote for The Ladder, as well as some other publications (such as Tangents) in the early 60s before becoming the editor of The Ladder in 1968. Her editorial style was more political and in anticipation of a rift she and Rita LaPorte whisked away the publication to put it out on their own as a distinctly feministpublication. In the early 80s she founded Naiad Press, which republished many important lesbian texts and collections, including lesbian pulp novels.

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subsequent interviews that followed in Off Our Backs and the

Gay Community News, Bannon, while still hesitant, does come

out. Such an act of coming out, though, did not happen in

isolation. As these books facilitated coming outs and

realizations that one belonged to a larger collective these

novels were also one component of a lesbian community and

culture upon which future emerging lesbian politics relied.

Coming out is what these novels were about. They were

coming: arriving on the scene, beginning a process, and

exciting a middle- and working-class population. And they

were out: published for the public, a tangible object one

could hold in her hand, and using a new and powerful

terminology of the culture they helped to create.

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