However, I had a project or two to focus my visit: mid-sixties period research with a lesbian slant; and finding out what I could about an obscure periodical, Sisters United, published in Kansas in the early eighties.

A little background. In our home library there is a book called The Love of Two Women, by one Jean Vivian. It was published by Womanbooks of Galena, Kansas in 1980. It’s a strange and fascinating little book–the literary equivalent of folk art. In the course of a recent book purge, I reread this story of two housewives getting together and building a blissful life free of THE MAN for the first time in twenty years. Back then, before the invention of the internet, we could only wonder what the hell was going on in Galena, Kansas. Now there is google, and I put my ace researcher on the job.

Here’s what she found out: as we’d long suspected, Galena, Kansas was not a hotbed of lesbian activity, but simply the home of two energetic, slightly crazed, lesbians with a printing press–both, alas, now dead. We will never eat at Ruth and Jean’s restaurant, the Chicken Inn, but they have left us their lesbian newsletter, Sisters United, to explore.

Worldcat did not list the Lesbian Herstory Archives as possessing a copy, but it seemed worth asking Maxine, the archivist on duty, who hunted down a periodicals list (“This is me getting cranky, when people don’t put things where they’re supposed to be”). No Sisters United was listed, but she said it was worth looking in the alphabetically organized files on the second floor.

Bingo! One copy of the spring, 1984 issue of Sisters United coming up.

Time flew by. There were too many files I wanted to poke into and too many things to read.The Archive has limited hours and Maxine was very clear that she left PROMPTLY at four, so I ended up xeroxing the best bits of Sisters United frantically at five to four, then racing upstairs where Maxine had already turned out the lights and putting the file back where it belonged by the dimness of the rainy winter twilight, when I couldn’t find the light switch. If I’d torn myself away from the minutes of the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis a little sooner, I might have been able to copy the whole thing.

But I think I got enough–enough to get a sense of Ruth and Jean’s views on religion (who knew the pentecostal faith and lesbianism were so compatible?) and past lives (yep, we have ‘em). I copied Ruth’s delirious account of Jean injuring herself falling off a stool, and how the reason Ruth felt guilty about this accident, which she was in no way responsible for, is that in their past lives she’d been an unwed mother who’d abandoned her newborn baby–who was Jean, in her past life!

And so I left the Lesbian Herstory Archives, walking to the subway stop in the drizzle, happy that I lived in a world where two pentecostal lesbian feminists who believed in reincarnation and lived in Kansas could put out their own newsletter expounding these diverse ideas, which would be carefully preserved in a Brooklyn townhouse for me to read thirty years later.

Worldcat lists Sisters United as part of a microfilm reel of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Archives, and Ruth Lang and Jean Vivan Mallat’s other periodical, Words of Life, is archived in the Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago, as well as at various university archives focusing on theology.

Best line: “There’s a reason we teach you correct posture. If your pelvis isn’t tilted forward, the organs in the area are affected unfavorably.”

The Plot: Poor Louise, married and with an eighteen-year-old daughter has never had an orgasm. Ever since that date-rape in college she’s been all twisted up inside, and marriage hasn’t helped–she’s mired in suburban misery. “The hollandaise had been spectacular” but that can’t disguise the fact that her life is one “cruelly civilized evening of superficiality and loneliness” after another. Now hubby Warren is chasing after her best friend, while daughter Betty is enamored of the son of Louise’s college boyfriend, the date rapist. Will correct posture save this neurotic, middle-aged housewife?

After the sexy underwear she bought at the department store doesn’t solve her problems, Louise throws on her vicuna and heads to Margo DeVries “Total Personality and Figure Development” for a consultation. She’s too embarrassed to admit why she’s there, but sophisticated, pants-wearing Margo intuits it and tells her: “You feel tense and on edge and alone. You’re not quite sure what an orgasm is. You’re afraid you’ve never had one and soon it’ll be too late.” The “handsome, sun-tanned creature” whose “hand is as blunt as a man’s” assures her that she, Margo, will prove that Louise is as “normal as any woman…I believe we should start with an old-fashioned massage.” Yowza!

Louise responds well to treatment, a series of increasingly intimate massages in Margo’s private office. The author telegraphs loud and clear that predatory Margo is molding dim-witted Louise into her next paramour (a previous scandal is hinted at). A suspicion or two crosses Louise’s mind, but she manages to avoid the truth staring her in the face. Even after feeling Margo’s hand “slip down over her inner thigh between her legs” she still wonders, “was it possible that this woman was making a pass?” Nah, she decides–it’s just a massage. Margo hypnotizes Louise with the big emerald she always wears, as if they’re in some Victorian vampire melodrama, all the time making remarks like, “You’re a lovely girl who’s had a raw deal. It’s time for you to have a little fun out of life and I’m going to help you all I can.”

Alas, just as things are really heating up at the massage parlor, Louise is struck by homosexual panic and and runs for home. She can’t go through with it–despite thinking “this is your chance to find out what it’s like!”–not with this “bizarre creature, neither male nor female.”

This reader’s interest petered out as Betty eloped with the son of the date-rapist and Louise confronted the dad and finally came to terms with that long ago date-gone-wrong. Once she’s made peace with her past, her “problem with no name” vanishes, and she throws herself into a sort of total woman surrender to Warren, who masterfully takes her upstairs to give her that long-awaited orgasm. Vampirish Margo is left to hunt for another, more amenable housewife.

Sex: “I even know I have a vagina and a clitoris!” modern young Betty declares. But knowledge of physiognomy does these hapless characters no good. The sexual encounters are one near miss after another. Warren almost has sex with the best friend. Louise almost has sex with Margo. Daughter Betty’s elopement wedding night is a fizzle. And even that elusive marital orgasm is still waiting in the wings as the book ends.

Drinking: The characters are “well-cocktailed,” Mad Men style. There are pre-dinner martinis, post-dinner stingers (Margo also serves stingers, with each massage), mid-day refreshers of coffee and bourbon, not to mention the references to sleeping pills, Miltown,  and “the torpor of tranquilizers.” We’re deep in 50s suburbia here.

Homo Psychology: Freud looms large. Louise is pondering her penis envy in Chapter One, and has delved deeply into psychological literature in the course of searching for a solution to her “problem.” Nonetheless, she has emerged from this extensive psycho-sexual research believing that lesbians are “hideous square creatures with bumpy faces and furtive eyes,” which is why she never suspects attractive Margo of any deviant tendencies. Per usual, a bad mom is to blame for Louise’s inhibitions, but that doesn’t cut any ice with daughter Bets: “Daddy and I are sympathetic with your anxiety neurosis, but there are limits.”

Author Gwynn Wimberly

Barbara’s Take: One Touch made its appearance on The Ladder’s triumphant round-up of 1959 lesbian-themed books, but was never reviewed. In summing up the year’s lesbian lit, Barbara was disappointed by the decline in romance, but “on the plus side…is the amazing amount of tolerance, acceptance and sympathy in this year’s fiction.” I think Barbara would have classed One Touch as sympathetic. After all, it’s clear that Margo’s massages did help Louise on her path to orgasm; and although Louise briefly considers warning the world against the evil lesbian in their midst, she changes her tune in the end to a more tolerant, live-and-let-live attitude.

Comment: This is clunkily-written, gray-flannel-suit hokum; skippable, except for the Margo sequence, which is pretty darn entertaining. “Louise, a sensitive woman like you can’t throw herself away–I’ll give you anything. We’ll travel. I have all the money we could ever need. Don’t run away!”

I pulled this gem from the SFPL’s 3rd floor page desk, which turned out to be quite a production. Apparently the book could only be looked at in a certain spot, a particular table next to the Art and Music reference desk, under the eagle eye of the reference librarian. I speculated it might be because Bunny Yeager’s photographs—pin-ups, cheesecake, calendar art—fell into some theft vulnerability category the librarians have made up. After all, Bunny Yeager is best known for her Betty Page photos, and Betty Page has quite the cult following, what with bio-pic, books, and a store on Haight Street named after her.

I was hoping that the Bunny Yeager book would tell me more about her career—her transformation from pin-up model to photographer (what’s not to like about the theoretically significant male gaze of the typical cheesecake photographer being replaced by the gaze of the model herself on both herself and fellow models?) and particularly the business end of the pin-up photo biz (who bought the pictures? For how much?). Readers of the Lesbian Career Girl series may have figured out that Dolly, who appears in Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary, and the forthcoming Maxie Mainwaring, Lesbian Dilettante, is in part inspired by Bunny Yeager.

DIY A-Go-Go!

Turns out, the title is absolutely literal. This is a guide for women who want to make “glamor” photos of themselves and are too shy to go to a professional (the assumption is that means male) photographer.

As such, it’s a delight. Any time I come across evidence that today’s trends are nothing new, I’m happy. This book takes today’s DIY spirit and applies it to mid-century’s cheesecake photography. Bunny schizophrenically covers topics from both sides of the camera, listing possible poses in one chapter and advising on lighting in the next. She even includes budget-conscious instructions for making a “swimsuit” with a plunging neckline out of a few yards of black wool. This is the one-man-band version of glamor photography.

I learned a lot from this book: the importance of developing multiple smiles, and the many posing possibilities–“standing poses, kneeling poses, reclining poses, sitting poses, poses with props.” (Each category gets its own chart of silhouetted poses to illustrate). I took to heart Bunny’s advice on the importance of props: “Being an experienced model, I can pose for hours without props if I must, but with the addition of these excellent posing assistants, I can go on indefinitely.” One imagines a Guiness Book of World Records entry—longest time spent striking sucessive poses. Props are also helpful for concealing imperfections: “Scars, stretch marks and bruises can be hidden by a prop held gracefully,” she advises. Get out your wagon wheels, towels, and telephones, ladies!

Long before feminists were talking about acceptance for all shapes and sizes, Bunny was there, albeit with a 1964 sensibility. “Near perfection may be obtained with girdles, waist cinchers, padded bras, etc. in everyday life…but what can you do to disguise flaws in the nude figure?” she asks, and answers promptly “Very little.” So just accept your body as it is, she advises. Everyone has some feature worth highlighting in a photograph: “Even when the bosom is impossible to work with, there is always the buttocks and back.”

The book is illustrated abundantly with photos of Bunny, by Bunny. I couldn’t always tell which ones were or weren’t Bunny, probably because of the dazzling array of different smiles, props, and poses she used, not to mention the changing hair color.

Bunny’s matter-of-factness and all-American enthusiasm for her corner of the soft-porn market is infectious: “Come on, admit you like to take off your clothes, and make some good photographs!”

The tasteful cover is a harbinger of the tedium to be found within

The House in the Mulberry Tree, by Zena Garrett, 1959, Random House

Book Jacket Copy: “Then Elizabeth’s burgeoning, formless emotions, blown hither and yon by the strife around her, crystallized into a youthful and innocent passion for Nonie, nourished by Nonie’s kindness and Elizabeth’s idealization of the relationship that Carter and Nonie seemed to enjoy.”

A dull southern gothic, penned by first-time author and Carson McCullers-wannabe, Zena Garret. The “About the author” blurb gives the reader fair warning: “Her writing career was postponed, however, because of the happy discovery that she had talent as a sculptress.”

The Plot: Eleven-year-old Elizabeth is bored and unhappy on the family farm near Abbotsville, your standard small-town hotbed of repressed passion.  When newly-wed Nonie Cameron moves in next-door, the precocious pre-teen promptly develops a big ol’ crush on her quirky neighbor. Nonie encourages Elizabeth in an absent-minded way–her adoration distracts Nonie from wondering whether her husband, Carter, is actually still in love with his crazy first wife, Holly.

Down the road, there’s another June bride fresh from the city; Gay, short for Gayther has married Joe Abbot to escape a life of white-collar drudgery. But before you can say, “I married a creepy control freak hung up on his dead mother,”  Gay is eyeing Elizabeth’s older brother, Rand.

Endless interior monologues from multiple points of view makes the novel feel like one long chorus of discontent. No one is happy with their lot in life in this book. This mental whining and complaining takes up the bulk of the book’s 249 pages and the rest is filled in with alligator eggs, snakes, stud horses, overripe mulberries and other heavy-handed sexual symbolism. Freud is responsible for a lot of bad mid-century writing, that’s for sure.

Finally, the author winds up the frayed plot threads. Rand rejects the depressed Gay, who lies down in her hammock and slits her own throat with a pair of pruning shears (introduced early on, like a gun in the first act, when her control-freak husband won’t even let her prune the roses). Carter can’t forget first wife Holly and he and Nonie split up. Nonie is making Elizabeth a dress and during a fitting session, pinches the young girl’s nipple, just as Elizabeth’s mother walks in. Mom forbids Elizabeth to see Nonie, and Elizabeth runs away and is found in a storm. The book ends with Elizabeth looking forward to starting school, after the dreary summer.

Sex: Some off-the-page heterosexual encounters and lots of inchoate yearning. Elizabeth wraps her legs around the mulberry tree trunk and squeezes. “Something was happening inside her that was going to make her explode if she didn’t do something about it.” Elizabeth also fantasizes about an ideal future with some faceless man. “Who was sitting in the chair? Was it Mrs. Cameron or the faceless man?” This conflation of  female crush and dream lover is the closest thing to lesbian content the book has. Turns out the nipple-pinching has a perfectly rational explanation: Elizabeth was describing how she’d been molested by a Mexican farm hand, and Nonie says, “Is this what he did?” and illustrates absentmindedly–she’s actually brooding over Holly and only half-listening to poor Elizabeth.

Drinking: The Camerons like their cocktails. Poor, depressed Gayther gets drunk on whiskey at one point.

Homo Psychology: Mean, controlling moms are to blame for any deviant tendencies. Per this book, half the inhabitants of the Gulf of Mexico are headed for the twilight world.

The most exciting part of reading this book.

Barbara’s Take: “Although psychiatric opinion insists that the emotions of pre-teenage children do not constitute variance, students of variant literature will enjoy this novel. Lonely, unwanted and unloved, 11-year-old Elizabeth Henderson’s love and devotion for a married woman who lives next door is told with great compassion and understanding. Her cruel mother sees some innocent caresses between the two and forbids the girl to see her friend again. The ending gives some hope for the child’s future.” (The Ladder, March, 1960)

Comment: I can see that Grier would get excited in 1960 about a book featuring a pre-teen who’s so clearly a baby butch, but “enjoy” is too strong a word for the experience of reading this novel. It’s fairly well-written, which somehow makes it much more tedious than a trashy pulp. Give me predatory lesbians over yearning pre-teens any day of the week. I slogged through 249 pages of this swampy novel for maybe one page of faintly deviant content. And now you don’t have to. Ever. You’re welcome.

I went to see Side by Side Sunday afternoon, a documentary about digital movies versus the photo-chemical kind, and it made me think of the fountain pen, as well as fundamentalists, a book I once read called Shock of the Old, and how watching the film was like seeing my professional life (such as it is or perhaps was) flash before my eyes.

First there were moviolas, rewinds, split reels, splicers; then huge tapes being pushed into the decks of linear editing machines; then Avid (and the Media 100, Premiere, and Final Cut, although those don’t get mentioned). Obsolete formats I can’t watch anymore? Check. Michael Goi says 80 video formats have been developed since video’s inception; I have material on SVHS, Umatic, Hi8, beta, digibeta, dvcam, and dvcpro. I have sat with a color timer discussing how the release print should look and I have changed the color of skin and sky on my computer. And it was hard not to think of projection, sitting in the theatre where I once worked as a projectionist, and remembering the difference between pushing a button on the deck and threading the projector. And sitting in the front row, seeing the sawtooth edges of pixels when interview subjects shrugged their shoulders.

The filmmakers interviewed in the doc might be divided between pro-digital people and doubters, although there was some overlap. The pro-digital people might further be divided into the zealots–those who think, like the fundamentalist christians, that there is one way to salvation and it is through Jesus, only they substitute digital video for Jesus–and the experimenters. The zealots believe that everything is better with digital–there are no downsides. The future is sunny, change is progress, and all problems will be solved very soon. They use words like “power,” “control,” “manipulate”–”manipulate to death” someone says about color correction. They believe that digital film let’s you “do anything” and control everything. Basically, they want to be god, and they believe digital video will lift them to Mount Olympus. They are the control freaks, the neatniks (Soderburgh complains about the dirt and mess of film projection), paranoid men, who dislike sharing their power with anyone else. I used to think that no one could have a bigger ego than James Cameron, but that was before I saw the interview with George Lucas. George Lucas doesn’t want to entertain audiences; he wants to subjugate them to his vision of the universe.

The experimenters were easier to swallow (although Danny Boyle apparently belongs to that culture that takes its aged and when they can no longer chew, puts them out on mountain tops to die. If you don’t want to jump on the digital bandwagon, he says in essence, let the vultures pick out your eyes and the sun bleach your bones). People like Bradford Young (who made Pariah so beautiful) may someday reconcile me to the decline of celluloid. They talk less about power and more about possibility–the shots they couldn’t get before, the films that became affordable.

But my heart is with the doubters. Anne Coates (Yes! Finally a woman!) and her story about the planned dissolve in Lawrence of Arabia turning into a straight cut. Robert Downey Junior protesting with mason jars of piss; the cinematographer who likes the feel of film. They talk about accidents, discoveries, leaps of faith, rhythm. They talk about pauses–the pause when you change the film magazine, the pause when you rewind the film to your edit mark.

Which brings me back to pens. One of the things I hated most about editing for money was the constant pressure to be fast, the unarticulated assumption that pausing to breathe and think was unproductive, and that anything that made working faster possible was in and of itself good. But creativity, it turns out, is not a prize won by speed. Ideas may occasionally race through my head, and my hand may occasionally race across the page, but that is the systole to the diastolic moments of doing nothing.

Someone in the film says “there will always be stories and storytelling.” Duh! That’s not what I’m worried about. It’s whether I’ll be able to breathe while telling them.

Isn't it keen how the reflection of my cell phone mimicks the shadow of the murderer?

I was looking forward to Helen Nielsen’s The Fifth Caller (Morrow, 1959) from the Grier-McBride collection–the library catalog lists “Lesbian physicians–Fiction” as the second subject. Alas, only a completionist collector like Barbara Grier would put this rather dull mystery with its few elliptical references to sapphic tendencies in her lesbian library.

The Plot: Dr. Lillian Whitehall has been found dead in her office and all evidence points to her nurse. Nursie can’t defend herself, because she was found unconscious on the beach with her wrists slashed and has no memory of what happened that day. Tall, square-jawed D.A. Investigator (I’m sorry–I’ve already forgotten his name) thinks Nurse Anna is awfully pretty though, so he doesn’t arrest her right away, but instead trots a series of witnesses into her hospital room in hopes of jogging her memory. There’s a lot of “Mrs. Griswold bumped into you at 10:42…the doctor’s brother says he saw your car at 2:05…if the doctor went to the bank at 4pm…” and so on. Ho hum.

If you can make it to page 221, as I valiantly did, you’ll discover the murderer was the gas man. Seems the doc was quack pyschologist, and by a crazy coincidence, the guy who came to fix the faulty pilot light was a former patient with some unresolved issues. Did I mention I didn’t care?

The only thing that kept me reading were the faint hints the author tossed out like some hack pied piper to keep me following along: “Men, yes. It was always men that she [Dr. Helen] hated.” or even better, “it was a very close attachment [between nurse and doctor] and very close attachments between women seldom work out.” and most suggestive: “Anna Bardossy [the nurse] was too young and vital to live indefinitely in an unnatural world.”

There were also references to a “shock-sensation ending” which made me imagine that some jealous ex of Dr. Helen’s was going to show up in the final pages and the whole lesbian subtext would be brought into the open. Alas, my imagined plot did not materialize. There was no real hanky-panky between Dr. Helen and Nurse Anna, just a one-sided crush, inappropriate in the context not only of their work relationship, but also because Dr. Helen had sponsored Nurse Anna’s immigration from Communist Hungary. This last was the only reason strictly straight Anna put up with Doctor Helen as long as she did–she actually had a Hungarian boyfriend she was planning to marry, except that he had a heart attack the very same day Dr. Helen got bludgeoned with the clock, and that’s why Nurse Anna slit her wrists. Now you know everything I do.

Sex: None.

Drinking: Coffee, pots and pots. The book takes place over 24 sleepless hours, and the D.A. Investigator and his sidekick, the wise doctor, are constantly brewing up a fresh pot.

Homo Psychology: Dr. Helen had a bad husband and felt like Nurse Anna was her “spiritual daughter.”

Comment: In addition to the fact that this was a complete failure as a lesbian pulp, it was a time-table mystery–my least favorite kind. Although I put in my time with both Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, I could never stomach the endless poring over train schedules, or the calculations on how long it would take the prime suspect to nip over to the victim’s and knock her on the head and then nip back to his card game. It seems a pity for mystery writers to do all that careful plotting when readers like me just skim over it, eyes glazing.

Probably my favorite part of the book was seeing the original bookplate with a woodcut of an owl that said “ex libris Helen Bennett and Barbara Grier”. To prevent any possible error, someone had written in blue ballpoint cursive, “property of Helen and Barbara, September, 1959″.

Which got me thinking. The SFPL’s pulp collection is named after Barbara Grier and her last girlfriend, Donna McBride. But is this quite fair when clearly earlier girlfriend Helen also did her share of the collecting? It just seems all wrong to me, and not the least because it mimicks that whole hetero couple thing where you pretend previous involvements never happened, as opposed to the (infinitely more civilized) lesbian tradition where you invite previous involvements to your commitment ceremony potluck. Or call a collection “the McBride-Grier-Bennett collection.” It has a nice menage-à-trois ring, doesn’t it?

Lose the caption and the coke logo and we have the cover of a lesbian pulp!

Ah the joys of research. Mystery author Sara Gran was once asked at a reading “how much research should a writer do?” Her answer: you can never do enough, basically research until you run out of steam or time. This is the opposite of the usual pragmatic advice that writers should do the bare minimum of research necessary to make their fiction convincing. I was delighted to hear someone else validate what has always been my preferred approach.

For me, writing lesbian pulp parodies is really an excuse to read old Teen magazines, Girl Scout Handbooks, Sears Catalogs, and of course The Ladder, the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, everyone’s favorite lesbian activist group from the 1950s. I know that not everyone is as enthralled with fashion copy as I am (“the skirt billows with quintuple cluster pleats…the total look: nonchalant”–sheer poetry!) but The Ladder is really mandatory reading for anyone interested in what actual lesbians were doing and thinking while their fictional counterparts lived out their pulpy lives.

Here’s a sample of the fascinating stuff you encounter: in January, 1964, The Ladder reported that previous to September 20, 1963, the Coca Cola plant in Sacramento required job applicants to submit to “a depth interview and polygraph evaluation.” In other words, a lie detector test. Anyone with a burning desire to bottle the “official drink of 47 state fairs” would be hooked up to a polygraph machine and quizzed on topics “relating to applicants’ sex life and sympathy towards unions.”

Don’t you love the juxtaposition of topics? I would have failed on both counts, alas. No assembly line for me! The polygraph testing came to a stop only when a state law prohibiting their use went into effect on the above mentioned date.

This means work for me, pleasure for others

I’m not a fan of the internet. I’m an old-fashioned gal who prefers knitting while listening to Alan Farley talk about his Noel Coward obsession on the radio to web surfing. I was violently against ebooks until a royalty statement made me change my tune (turns out I’m making money from them!).

However, cracks have recently appeared in the mud wall I have built to hold back the tide of “progress.” Friends send me links to stuff they have written that appears only online, and I have to check those out, right? From there it is an easy slide to clicking on the “this is interesting” links people also send (the traffic is less, now that people mostly post that stuff on facebook, which I rarely look at). But the biggest fissure is that I have subscribed to an online magazine– Lambda Literary. And painful as it is to admit, I have found out many valuable things I wouldn’t have otherwise.

For example, Tereska Torres, author of seminal lesbian pulp Women’s Barracks has been alive all this time! Except now she’s dead, at the age of 92, per today’s issue. I still regret that I never had a chance to interview her myself, but there’s a link to a Salon interview she did in 2005, and quotes from an Independent interview from 2007. I feel better about not liking her books after reading that she “hated” being considered queen of lesbian pulp. What do you think sold your four million copies, you ingrate? It wasn’t your turgid prose!

Even more fun is this time-travel look at lost lesbian magazines from the early days of lesbian publishing. Of course I’ve heard of Vice-Versa, and have long leaned on The Ladder for research purposes, but my new goal, shared by many I’m sure, is to find a copy of Better Homes and Dykes. If that’s impossible, I’ll take an issue of Killer Dyke – Lesbian Separatist Magazine By The Flippies (Feminist Lesbian Intergalactic Party)–from my hometown Chicago, no less!

I hold my friend Ann accountable for most of my internet surfing. I always click on the links she sends me. Since she has become a big sewer, that means a lot of sewing links, which is fine, since my idea of soothing reading is an instructional sewing book (on my to-do list: make a dress form shaped from my body using lots of duct tape and maybe some sort of plaster–I have to get that book out of the library again). Even though it took me a year to finish a simple skirt, I am delighted to know that I can replicate the dress featured on the cover of The Lion’s House, should I want to (remember that one? bad story, great cover).

Of course I’m always getting links to lesbian pulp art, and I’ve done the image search thing myself. There’s tons of it out there. Who doesn’t like lesbian pulp cover art? That’s what makes this blog unique [ed note: this claim has not been substantiated]–it’s about the content, people. I actually read the stuff. Which is why today’s recommended link for lesbian pulp fiction is this post from the Yale Library. It’s about the content! And it’s written by a Ph.D candidate! Plus, it’s heartening to know that an academic institution is collecting lesbian pulp. Although I bet they can’t match the SFPL’s Grier-McBride collection.

A last link for those who like their surfing to be about pictures rather than words: the  covers from gay male pulp of the sixties–new to me and fun for boys and girls both!

Twisted Loves

“A story of strange passions and forbidden lusts that changed a young girl into a twisted sinner!”

This is the template for the exploitation pulp. Lots of big breasted, horny women, sex, sex, and more sex, and then a heterosexual rescue on the final pages. From the cover to the content, this is what most people think of when they think of lesbian pulp.

The Plot: The book opens with Connie Chapin getting drunk in a Third Avenue bar, being mauled by a fellow customer, and then passing out in the street. She is rescued by Lee Fielding, “a tall masculine woman” who takes her home to her “modernistic apartment” on Riverside Drive, gives her a bath and more to drink, and then sleeps with her. Connie is ripe for seduction, as she has sworn off men after some bad casting couch experiences and an abortion, but due to the burning, constant desire all women in this book feel, she has to have some sort of sexual outlet, and Lee seems like an okay choice. At least she can’t get Connie pregnant!

Connie conceals her new relationship from her roommate Paula, who deals with her own uncontrollable desire by anonymous sex in Central Park when none of her beaux are available. A nympho and a lesbian rooming together, Connie thinks at one point. Paula periodically tries to fix Connie up with Tom, a guy at her office, but even though Connie thinks “he might be the man would would rescue her from the long slide into loneliness, alcoholism and lesbianism” (foreshadowing!) she keeps turning him down when he calls.

Trouble strikes when Lee has to go away on business and Connie is left alone with her “throbbing, unsatisfied loins”. In desperation she jumps roomie Paula one hot night. “I tell you, I couldn’t help myself,” Connie sobs. “It was a sudden craving!” Paula isn’t buying it. “Ugh! I feel filthy even now. You make me sick.” Paula moves out the next day, and Connie thinks of suicide. However, a telegram from Lee announcing her return arrives, and presto, suicidal impulses vanish. Connie then makes herself some hard boiled eggs, salad and coffee. Remember that menu the next time you feel down in the dumps.

Connie is over at Lee’s airing out the apartment, when the doorbell rings. It’s Jane Withers, not the child actress, but “an exceptionally handsome young woman,” an ex of Lee’s who wants her back. Jane and Connie insult each other (“upstart little slut!”), then fight (“they clawed at each other violently”), tearing their clothes (“bare to the waist and covered in blood”), and then “a strange thing began to happen”…yes, sex, just what Connie’s been jonesing for. They apply iodine to each other’s scratches, chatting cozily, then have more sex, then fall asleep in Lee’s bed. Connie wonders “if it would be possible for the three of them to form a little unit, she and Jane and Lee. It was unusual, but it sounded appealing.”

Lee goes for it–”why not?” and everything is idyllic for about a page and a half (“There was something tremendously wicked and shameless about such a set-up that delighted all three of them”). Jane moves in with Connie and they set up a rotating schedule for who sleeps with who and when, after one unsatisfying attempt at a threeway.

Alas, with no positive models for this kind of polyamorous lifestyle, things fall apart. I blame Connie, who starts to second-guess the whole arrangement, turning paranoid about whether Jane is edging her out of Lee’s affections. One night, when Jane is with Lee, she falls back on old habits and drowns her sorrows in alcohol. When she staggers home there’s a guy in the hallway, waiting for her. No, it’s not a stalker, It’s Tom, the persistent friend of Paula’s  who’s been phoning her for a date, despite her many refusals, despite the fact that he’s never even seen her! Hmmm, maybe he is a stalker. He helps her into her apartment and makes her some coffee.

Suddenly, Connie decides he’s what the doctor ordered, and they have sex. When the “intensity of their passion” has “burned away her sick love of women,” Connie declares her love. Tom points out, “We’re strangers, we don’t even know the first thing about each other.” Connie hints, “You don’t know what you saved me from, Tom.” He soon finds out, for who should walk in but Jane. Rather miffed by Connie’s two-timing (three-timing?), she gives Tom the skinny on Connie’s lesbian proclivities, and then stalks back to Lee. Connie tries to jump out the window, believing that now that Tom knows about her lesbian doings, he won’t want her anymore. Who does she think is reading this book? Tom pulls her back inside. He still loves her. “You were a crazy mixed up kid…you aren’t any real lesbian.” The end.

Sex: Sex is always a rush: “They brought each other to the summit of ecstasy,” but problems arise when you can’t get your fix: “She had grown so dependent on Lee that she needed her four to five times a week.”

Drinking: Connie drinks whiskey until she passes out. Lee gives her creme de menthe as a hangover cure. Jane makes a pitcher of cocktails and when Connie arrives home from work, pours “two cold shimmering drinks.”

Homo Psychology: In a flashback, Connie recalls a visit to some farming relatives one summer. On the farm she develops a crush on her buxom cousin Alice after some nude swimming in the creek. Then she spies Alice getting it on with a farm hand behind a haystack (oh those primitive rural folk!) and feels disgusted. “Maybe in her adolescent crush for Alice and in the bitterness of Alice’s ‘betrayal’ the seeds of Connie’s strangeness had been sown.”

Barbara’s Take: Barbara celebrated 1959 as a banner year for lesbian literature in The Ladder’s end of the year book round-up. The numbers were up; 52 novels, more than double the stats for 1957. “Without exception the 18 hardback novels were either sympathetic to Lesbianism or pointed no moral of any kind,” Barbara exults. The 34 paperback originals on the other hand, “ranged from nearly pornographic tripe to  lyric and beautiful writing.” Barbara doesn’t mention Twisted Loves beyond including it on the list (just above Artemis Smith’s Odd Girl) but I think we all know where it falls on the tripe to lyric scale.

There was a handwritten note (Barbara’s?) inside the cover of the copy I got from the collection that said “see also Loren Beauchamp Strange Delights, Midwood Tower, 1962.” I’ll be on the lookout.

Comment: Everything about this book screams “cheap exploitation!” from the taxicab yellow cover to the way the editors get their own title wrong in the back-of-the-book catalog (“If you’ve enjoyed Twisted Lusts, you may also want to order…”). And yet, there’s something rather appealing about this unpretentious, “I am what I am” approach. Maybe because it followed my readings of The Lion House and The Golden Cage, I was ready for a story of adult women identifying as lesbians and having sex with each other, instead of all the literary pussyfooting I’d had to wade through in the previous books with so little reward for my trouble. At least this book delivers what it promises.

And aside from the “women are constantly in heat” premise that drives the book, I was surprised at how possible a positive reading was, with a little selectivity: “The world condemned their sort of love, Connie thought, but what does the world know of Connie Chapin’s private torments and fears?” and “It was probably better to sleep with other women than to get drunk in cheap bars and collapse on the streets. In those terms, at least, lesbianism made a certain sense.” Lee brags that giving up men has kept her young, as if Lesbianism was some kind of health fad. This treatment of Lesbianism as a pragmatic lifestyle choice is at odds with the melodramatic heterosexual rescue at the end, which is so improbable you wonder whether the author was just faking that “intense passion”.

I imagine this is the kind of book that lesbian readers might have revised by tearing out the last twenty pages. If you end on page 153 with Connie, Lee and Jane happily entwined in a menage a trois, the book easily moves into the “sympathetic” category. Unfortunately, no amount of excised scenes will earn Twisted Loves the “lyric and beautiful writing” award.

Anyone in the know now knows that Madmen’s Peggy bears more than a passing resemblance to HGB, who worked as a secretary for Don Belding, partner in the advertising agency Foote, Cone, & Belding, eventually being promoted to copywriting, and quickly rising to become one of the highest-paid women in her field. (is magazine editing in Peggy’s future?)

The recent HGB biography (Bad Girl’s Go Everywhere, by Jennifer Scanlon) and most current articles also identify Candace Bushnell and Sex and the City (the book, the TV series, the movies, the phenomenon) as HGB’s heir to the business of glamorizing the single girl, while paying lip service to the traditional goal of matrimony.

Yet fewer fans probably know of HGB’s predecessor, the one and only Marjorie Hillis, who published Live Alone and Like It in 1936. While less of a cheerleader for the single girl’s sex life, Hillis, like HGB hinted more than once in her single-girl self-help manual that marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Her follow up to the best-selling “guide for the extra woman,” was the more topical (it was the Depression after all) Orchids on Your Budget, which includes the chapter “Can You Afford a Husband?” Hillis admits, “It may be an extravagance, but even periods of strict economy should include some extravagances if possible.” How much was she kidding?

Twenty-six years later, HGB opened Sex and the Single Girl this way: “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband.” Two hundred and forty-six pages of mixed messages later (you need a man! you don’t need a man!) HGB ends with the empowering idea that “Those who glom on to men so that they can collapse with relief…are the ones to be pitied.”

I must admit that the pre-women’s lib era feminist tidbits, pleasurable as they are, pale besides the true appeal of single girl self-help — the apartment and clothing makeovers. To hell with high-minded sentiments about singlehood, I want that “corner of Versailles” that will make people say, “That girl has the most divine apartment!” I never get tired of reading how HGB’s friends “Mark and Schuyler” (do we doubt for a second they were gay?) made over her pad with “two enormous white rococo lamps,” a “low travertine marble table” and (my favorite) “several satin pillows.” Sure, when I really think about an apartment that’s “moss green, hot pink, and white,”it sounds uncannily like my twelve-year-old best friend’s bedroom, but still.

Just as appealing is the apartment that belongs to one of Marjorie Hillis’s “cases” (Hillis peppers her advice with anecdotes about good and bad single ladies, who illustrate her advice in a kind of Goofus and Gallant point-counterpoint). Case XV is Miss W., who transformed her one-room apartment by “constructing…bookshelves and cupboards made of light colored modernistic-lookng wood. The doors of these conceal a radio, a bar, and a wide variety of shelves and equipment, all as compact as a Pullman.” She adds some “charming white pottery,” “Basque linen from Macy’s,” and “red glass from the ten-cent store” and we get an apartment “as gay and chic as a millionaire’s villa on the Riviera.”

HGB and Hillis also share a belief in repaying hospitality with big cocktail parties where you disguise your cheap liquor by mixing up horrendous concoctions like Helen’s “chloroform cocktails” or Marjorie’s “glüg, a delicious Swedish drink.” They like inviting people to tea (Hillis) or brunch (HGB), both cheaper than dinner.

Their fashion advice follows the same well-worn path. Single girls can’t afford not to follow fashion; build your wardrobe around one (Hillis) or two (HGB) colors; buy well-made coats and economize on the clothes you wear less frequently. Both of them tout the little black dress which can be varied by altering the hem length and tying different scarves around your neck.

In fact, that’s a pretty good metaphor for this type of book. As HGB reveals in her chapter on makeup and how to apply, “Mademoiselle, Glamour and Seventeen go over the same instructions again and again, slightly regilded to make them current.”

It’s been fifteen years since Sex and the City. Someone, somewhere is regilding the single girl how-to, writing about today’s extra woman/career girl/bachelorette/spinster, and how she’s perfectly happy living alone (although if she wants to get married, that’s okay too) in her hip apartment (I’m seeing a mixture of DIY and mid-century modern), wearing her quirky, individualized, yet fashion-forward wardrobe (handsewn from scavenged items), and serving home-brewed beer and wine as she celebrates the single life with a fabulous (and cheap) cocktail party. Can’t wait to read it!