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Lesbian sex sells. Amid encroaching censorship in the present, history can remind us how queerness persisted during times of social control. The 1950s U.S. was home to cookie-cutter neighborhoods, nuclear family values, and the ambiguous Cold War fears of neighbors’ illicit lifestyles beyond the white picket fence. A culture of fear so pervasive that most never dared to stray beyond their designated moral lanes.

Valerie Taylor dared for more. Among an array of emerging lesbian pulp novelists, she was a stay-at-home wife and mother of three, though a subversive voice of anti-domesticity by trade. She and around fifteen other female lesbian pulp novelists began to cultivate a lesbian subculture through the written word. Publishing under pseudonyms, these women carved their existence into the margins of a culture hell-bent on containing beliefs and roles in their puritanical positions (i.e., white, heterosexual, Christian).

“Twilight lovers," “inverts," “strange women," “odd girls," and most pointedly: “deviants." This became the coded language of female queerness acceptable to the mainstream, the publication of lesbian pulp. Writers had to toe the line of publishers’ pockets and the christening of a lesbian subculture. Under the guise of warning the public about lesbianism’s dark roots, small enclaves of understanding were able to emerge in the subtext. A compromise publishers established to avoid obscenity charges, and profit from expanding the readership to straight men.

The first mainstream U.S. lesbian pulp novel, 'Women’s Barracks,' published by Tereska Torrès, hit shelves across the United States in 1950. Kickstarting the genre’s success into the mid-1960s. Valerie Taylor would release her novel 'Stranger on Lesbos' during the heart of its golden era. Playing with themes of moral light and shadow, we see Frances, a housewife, caught between the stark light of a perfectly manicured homelife and the comfort found in her mysterious lover’s dark apartment and avant-garde social life.

Guiding an audience to the gothic underworld of heterosexual society, where women indulged in dark liquor under flickering hues of permission to act on queer desire, a growing third space began to form in the minds of American readers. Despite the seeming impossibility of the publishing industry’s censorship, lesbian pulps gave insight into how queer women could seek one another out.

In 'Stranger on Lesbos,' Frances finds herself in the liminal bar where queer women surround, and drinks flow with the ease of a life made natural, sitting on leather barstools alongside her partner of two years, Bake.

Bake, who first lured Frances during the throes of her dull and lonely marriage, is depicted as a worldly and headstrong figure in Frances’ life. Together they order double martinis from the bartender, Frances initially perceived as a boy until something “indefinable in her walk gave her away." In the haze of endless night and drink, Frances comes to face her own narrow-mindedness, opening readers to conversations of gender expression beyond the era’s severe apt for traditional values.

In the mystic space, women dance in twos to a record’s spin, and another round is poured up. Through warm conversations and glasses clinking, the scene narrows to the violence of her lover throwing another woman against the solid wood bar top. Bake’s spell of liquor-induced rage rendered the other woman unconscious on account of flirting with her partner, Frances.

The publisher’s moral punishment requirements drape the scene­, foreshadowed by Bake’s character, written with an affinity for indulgence and upheaval. The door was left cracked for queer women to find themselves between lines of persistent moral taboo and brief moments of being actualized. The scene escalates into a bar raid in which Bake flees without a trace, leaving Frances to be herded with the rest of the bar’s patrons by reason of morality speculations.

Abandoned, heartbroken, and stuck in jail, Frances dwells on her love for Bake while Bake returns to an old flame, never coming to pay bail. This is the lesbian pulp paradigm; Frances had been allured to the morally compromised queer life but could redeem herself by returning to a husband and son in a home fit for 'Father Knows Best’s' set design.

The publishing industry’s moral standards were based on compliance with Cold War-era obscenity laws to avoid local and federal fines from the distribution of obscene media—the naturalization of queerness being considered a primary domestic threat.

The bar scene, laced with external compromise, meant Bake stood no chance of being a stable, loving partner; those pulling the strings wouldn’t risk the unstable financial implications. After the indulgence of spirits and queer desire had taken its course, one had to face punishment deemed suitable enough for paperback. Forcing an end to the possibility of enduring queer love. Characters would have to be satiated by their predestined return to heterosexuality or written as identifiably “ill” by the reader, covers depicting them as case studies from the jump.

At the end of 'Stranger on Lesbos,' Frances is left to face the shame of her son’s disapproval over the chance of his girlfriend’s family finding him unsuitable for marriage by association.  This causes Frances to compare her queerness to her own father’s alcoholism and inability to show up properly in her upbringing. She chooses to break this believed familial cycle, though showing up to her son’s wedding physically beaten by a one-night stand with a woman. Her last hurrah before a “return to the light” of heteronormativity. Then, under the steeple’s roof, religious themes of light and morality pour down onto her as she falls back in love with her husband the moment her son is wedded in holy matrimony. A scene one can only hope the author found exhausting herself.

The documentation of lesbian desire was not new, but rather new to the general public’s access. Lesbian pulp made space for an identity otherwise nonexistent in traditional Cold War America.

The genre’s rigidity, safeguarding permitted belief, was also a ground for innovation for writers like Ann Bannon, who found ways to craft careful acknowledgment into the humanity and depth she gave her characters. Pushing the limits of the publishing constraints, she and a select few lesbian pulp writers began to break the status quo of the brash attributes given to lesbian characters, as we see in Bake.

In a culture where lesbianism was reduced to illness by sexologists and permitted for men’s pleasure of sex appeal over sensuality, courageous voices chipped away at the rule book to create something unmistakably queer. Recognized by readers in Bannon’s thinning veil of lesbianism’s supposed threats, she offers the appeal of humanity in a budding lesbian identity. An innovation of existence when it seemed like there was no other hope, and a reminder that reaches through to the current day of book banning and media censorship. There will always be the voices in the shadows, even when normative rhetoric floods.

The pulps, in time, would help form a collective concept of lesbian identity and lay the foundation for social reform; their history would be a stepping stone in helping queer women find one another and learn how to gather. Later, becoming a time capsule of its era, lesbian pulp fiction would fade into obscurity around the mid-1960s during the advent of the early gay rights movement and lessening media censorship. Merging into the era of Stonewall riots and gay liberation of the 1960s onward.

Though the messaging is in conversation with the generation it emerged from, we can look today at the groundwork lesbian pulp provided in the community and its role in a much larger archive of lesbian history.