Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels
Cleis Press, $16.95, 415 pages
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Good news for everyone: Katherine V. Forrest-- known, primarily for her wonderful novels, such as Curious Wine, as well as for her Kate Delefield mystery series-- has edited a fabulous collection Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 which is indispensable for anyone interested not only in gay and lesbian literature, but 20th-century culture as a whole.

Enthusiasm for lesbian pulps has been vibrant since the early 1970s. One of the most popular features that Gay Community News ever printed, in the middle of that decade, was a cultural analysis-- replete with pictures of pulp covers-- of novels by Maida Tilchen. And lesbian collectors have been buying and hoarding these novels since the 1960s.

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It was clear from the beginning that lesbian pulps (and their fabulous covers) were not only literature, but history, community, and art as well. Several years ago I published an anthology entitled Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps, which was a look at gay male literature from 1945 to 1970. I included many paperback originals in the collection, as well as some books that also appeared first in cloth editions with "pulp" covers. While I did quite a bit of research to find these titles-- a reminder that gay and lesbian culture is lost every day, as well as with each generation-- my gold-star standard was to make gay male pulps as famous and as well known as lesbian pulps.

What Katherine Forrest has done in Lesbian Pulp Fiction with wit and a historian and novelist's eye, is to bring us not only great excerpts of 22 lesbian pulp classics, but to supply us with both the literary and cultural contexts that bring these works to full life.

There has been a longstanding myth-- helped along by both heterosexual historians as well as some gay culture-watchers-- that lesbian and gay pulps were a manifestation of pre-Stonewall self-loathing.

And while the tag line on the covers did proclaim some strongly worded suggestions of homophobia-- "Trapped in a web of her own making, drawn to a world she married to escape!" proclaimed the cover to Valerie Taylor's Return to Lesbos-- many of them, for the most part, were celebrations of lesbian life and sex at a time when this was not just rare, but dangerous.

Forrest hits all the high spots here-- Anne Bannon-- the foremother of all lesbian pulp writers-- is represented with excerpts from Beebo Brinker and I Am A Woman, and Vin Packer (now the noted YA writer M.E. Kerr) is included with a chapter from Spring Fire, the first paperback original to be written specifically as a lesbian pulp. There are also selections from ground-breaking novels by Valerie Taylor, Paula Christian, and Artemis Smith.

There are also some surprises. Brigid Brophy, a renowned writer of novels and critical non-fiction, makes her mark here with a chapter from her wonderful The King of a Rainy Country, and Tereska Torres, a major European novelist of the 1950s, is here with Woman's Barracks.

Katherine Forrest's introduction to these excerpts is both illuminating and informative, and the original covers and back-jacket copy is invaluable for historians. Lesbian Pulp Fiction is a major contribution not only to our understanding of gay and lesbian literature and culture, but to our history as well.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com