The revival of interest in pulp paperbacks of the 1950s and 1960s is not new for lesbians in search of their history. In the mid-1970s Maida Tilchen and Fran Koski brought their slide show of lurid book covers and readings from some of the more preposterous texts to the Lesbian Writers Conference held on the University of Chicago campus. In their essay 'Some Pulp Sappho' published in Lavender Culture (1975) the young women re-claimed the pulps as history of an earlier generation of lesbians seen 'through the filter of fiction—a culture we've never experienced.'
Paperback books have existed since the mid-1930s, but the 'pulp' label wasn't applied until WWII paper shortages and rationing left publishers with only low-quality wood pulp for their books. Smaller type and page size saved precious paper and made books easier to carry by the servicemen and women who received millions of free copies during the war years. After the war, paperback reprints (PR) and paperback originals (PBO) were distributed via magazine stands in drug stores, train stations, etc. The garish covers were adopted to enable the pulps to compete for a market share with True Detective, True Romance, Modern Screen and other magazines. The pulps developed a cover art iconography. Westerns, Sci-Fi and Mysteries were easily identifiable. Romances featured the requisite hetero-lovers; Gothics had a sweet young thing down front looking over her shoulder at a scary old house looming in the background.
Lesbian genre pulps, which were selling millions of each title by 1960, usually had two very femme women looking sexy but sad. Cover blurbs included such words as: strange, daring, unnatural, twisted, forbidden passion, forbidden fruit. The two women (bearing no resemblance to the book's characters) were for benefit of the hetero-male one-handed readers. 'Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world.' Male gay pulps were few; the most popular, John Rechy's City of Night (1963), appeared in paper as pulps were passing their peak. The death knell for the genre sounded with the publication of Alma Routsong's novel Patience and Sarah (1969). Written under the pen name Isabel Miller and privately printed, it was picked up by a major house and became a Literary Guild Selection on the cusp of the gay lib and women's liberation movements. It appeared in several PR editions with successively demure covers, but the blurb still proclaimed: 'Bold, innocent and strange was their love.'
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) put the final nails in the pulps coffin. Her novel sold 90,000 copies in 11 printings through the feminist publishing house, Daughter's Inc. When the PR rights were sold to Bantam, publisher and author split a quarter of a million dollars. Paperback covers were embossed, die cut, and using metallic inks; flash—to compete in bookstores. Bantam's first print run of Rubyfruit (1977) was 1,000,000 copies and featured an embossed, metallic, single red rose on the cover.
Censorship Sells
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, originally published in 1928 and censored in Britain, was among the earliest lesbian paperback reprints. Foreign books (Anna Elisabet Weirach's The Scorpion, translated from the German by U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee figure Whittaker Chambers), classics with pro-lesbian portraits (Diana Fredrick's 1939 autobiography, Elizabeth Cragin's 1936 Either is Love, Patricia Highsmith''s 1952 The Price of Salt), and critically acclaimed novels (like Gale Wilhelm's 1935 We Too Are Drifting reviewed by Chicago poet Carl Sandburg) swelled PR ranks.
But the book that cracked the genre wide open was a paperback original, Women's Barracks (1950) by Terreska Torres. In 1952, the U.S. House of Representatives called for an investigation of the paperback industry under committee chair E. C. Gatherings, D-Kan. The Gatherings' Committee summoned publisher Ralph Daigh of Fawcett Gold Medal Books to defend Women's Barracks, which dealt with lesbianism in Free French forces during WWII.
In effect, Daigh said that any book that sold a million or more copies was a good book because the public endorsed it by purchase.
Among the 1960s PBOs were a half dozen by Chicago writer Valerie Taylor whose first in the genre, Whisper Their Love, sold two million copies. The voracious appetite of the PBO market for new material was fed by Ann Bannon, Ann Aldrich, and Paula Christian, who wrote several titles each, some since reprinted by women's presses like Naiad and Cleis. But trash novels soon outnumbered the good stuff. In her keynote address to the first Lesbian Writers' Conference, Valerie Taylor noted that a local male used several names to write lesbian novels—one of his was Strange Sisters, under the pen name Sylvia Sharon.
Where the Boys Are
Several factors account for the dearth of gay male titles on the mid-century pulp racks. Oak Park native and lesbian literary historian Dr. Jeannette Howard Foster in her 1930s University of Chicago Ph.D. thesis demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of fiction readers were women. While lesbian titles had crossover sales to heterosexual males, that group would be less likely to purchase gay male fiction. Gay guys were buying physique magazines for the visuals and '8-pagers' for more hard-core content. Magazines like Drummer that targeted gay guys were still a decade away.
Lou Rand's book Rough Trade (originally published by Argyle as The Gay Detective) was released as a crossover title from the Paperback Library in 1965. The back cover blurb reads: 'A daring novel of handsome men caught in the violence of the twilight world of sex.' Rand's protagonist, Francis Morley, is probably the first gay detective in print. He and his hunky leg-man, ex-Marine Captain Tiger Olsen, probe through the gay underworld of 1950s San Francisco. Set in the McCarthy era, Rand portrays the queer bars, after-hours clubs, and post-WWII transgender nightlife of the city. No doubt an accurate glimpse as Lou Rand Hogan was in fact a San Francisco queen whose unpublished memoirs are in the GLBT Historical Society. Hogan performed as a chorus girl under the name of Sonia Parlijer in a number of legit musical comedies including The Desert Song and Varsity Drag. As Chef Lou Rand Hogan he also authored another crossover title, The Gay Cookbook, published by Dell paperbacks. The cover sketch shows a 'nellie' cook in chef's hat and femme apron dropping a steak on a grill. The cover blurb reads: 'a compilation of campy cuisine and menus for men ... or what have you' and features recipes for chicken queens, swish steak, what to do with crabs, and aphrodisiacs.
Sometime Chicagoan Sam Steward was also writing his classic Phil Andros stories in the 1960s; many had their first publication abroad and were not available in popular editions until the mid-1970s. Steward was an English professor who taught here at both Loyola and De Paul universities. In the late 1950s he opened a tattoo parlor in the south Loop using the name Phil Sparrow. Steward was an intimate friend of author Thornton Wilder and numbered sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas among his admirers. Steward's books were reprinted by gay Alyson Press in the early 1980s.
Pulp as Chicago History
Some half dozen stories in the Phil Andros books portray 1950s Chicago. Andros is a gay hustler who in one story worked as a singing waiter at Zum Deutschen Eck, a Chicago landmark German restaurant that used to be just south of the Athenaeum Theatre on north Southport. He cruises the Bohemian area around LaSalle, Clark and Division where gays used to hang out at the old Mark Twain Hotel bar and frequent the secluded seats in the Windsor movie house. 'Pansies in flame colored hair and stretch pants' mince along the avenue, 'Hairburners,' window dressers at Marshall Fields, and 'guys in narrow neckties and skinny shoes' are some of his customers as he frequents off-Loop bars like Sam's, Jamie's, and the Short Line. He recreates another forgotten cruising area, Oak Street Beach, and haunts on the Gold Coast. He tells us that the oldest line in the business was: 'You got the time?' and notes that the 'current summer fashion for fruits' is chinos and white shoes. Hustlers, he points out, 'turned a trick' by being passive; to just lay there was strictly trade.
Another Chicago writer would portray a hustler. African American author Willard Motley created a beautiful young thug who preyed on faggots, often jackrolling or beating them insensible after selling sex. His 1947 novel, Knock on Any Door, sold as a paperback reprint in the 1950s after a sanitized version was made into a movie starring a young John Derek as the doomed Nick. Nicky Romano picked up his trade on west Madison, the Skid Row of Chicago, an area replete with crooked cops, whores and dope fiends. But Nicky is also befriended by a gay man, Owen, he met in an all-night cafeteria.
Illinois native, lesbian Valerie Taylor, lived in Chicago for 17 years. Five of her novels published as paperback originals in the early 1960s by Fawcett Gold Medal Crest had Chicago as all or part of their setting. Her lesbian lovers would meet on their jobs, go to lunches at Chinese restaurants in the Loop, shop at Fields and have tea in the Walnut Room. They were working women, college grads or fresh young things from the rural areas downstate, or just bored wives. They went out to dinner with gay male couples as beards for each other, dining and dancing. When arrested they would pay fines to get released because cops didn't want to go to court. Taylor showed a legal 'system that was fixed so you can't fight back.' She portrayed recognizable dyke bars under fictional names like Karla's, a basement dive on the North Side with a butch drag on the door collecting 'admission.' Some of her women eschewed role-playing; others she drew as femme or butch in the context of the period.
The Paperless Pulp
We are on the verge of a new techno mass market. Computers and the Internet are making available 'books on demand.' Publishing ventures will no longer have to stock books or worry about inventory and taxes. If a reader wants a title, the vendor prints it up and ships on request. Some day soon it will come to the reader's home printer. There is a Berkeley company that has already test marketed self-binding machines. They developed an improved binding medium that they say will enable them to sell a home binder for about $1,400. The negative impact on bookstores is incalculable; but the market for new titles will explode. Every writer will become publisher and the Internet will be distributor.
The media mega-glomerates that own newspapers, TV networks, radio stations and publishing houses will be subverted by Internet self-publishing. Independent writers will get their fresh voices beyond the reach of the monoliths that play to the lowest common denominator and consider the dollar the only measure of success in the arts.
Copyright 2004 by Marie J. Kuda. e-mail: kudoschgo@aol.com
