![]() The act of taking one of these books off the drugstore rack and paying for it at the counter was a frightening and difficult move for most women. Author Joan Nestle called them "survival books" and described purchasing them: However prevalent the books were, purchasing and reading them for many women was the equivalent to coming out to the cashier. This was part of no social agenda on the publishers' parts: they were making quite a bit of money. Hundreds of lesbian pulp titles were published between 19, and millions of copies of each title were often were sold. It made a significant contribution to the lesbian community to have lesbian authors writing more or less authentic stories about what it was like to be a lesbian, as opposed to only having heterosexual men writing stories about lesbians for the titillation of other men. Unlike many publishers, Fawcett made a point of publishing lesbian pulp written by lesbians, or sometimes by heterosexual women, rather than by heterosexual men. Several publishing houses created special imprints, such as Fawcett's " Gold Medal" division, to satisfy the demand for pulp fiction. In terms of lesbian fiction, these books were the only ones available in many locations to people who had no previous access to information or stories that involved lesbian characters. Because the literature was not respected, it was not censored as readily, although most of the larger paperback publishers were wary of postal censorship, and, for instance, took care not to publish works that were overly supportive of "deviant" lifestyles. These mass market paperbacks, printed and bound on cheap paper, often addressed "dirty" topics like drugs, gangs, white slavery, crime, murder, and homosexuality. Pulps were not necessarily "low brow." Many pulp authors are now celebrated with commemorative hardcover editions. These books were dubbed "pulp" fiction because they were inexpensive and usually sensational or low-brow, much like the "pulp" magazines of the first half of the 20th century. As a result, in the years after the war, there appeared a new and often subversive trend in publishing that allowed for books to be written, cheaply produced, and widely distributed using technology previously unavailable. Torchlight to Valhalla (1938, later titled The Strange Path when reissued in paperback in 1953) Gale Wilhem, Random Houseĭuring World War II, the military distributed small paperbacks to its forces, causing a large population of Americans to become accustomed to having access to cheap books and thus creating a demand for the same easy access to reading material when the soldiers returned home. ![]() Pity for Women (1937) Helen Anderson, Doubleday.We Too Are Drifting (1935) Gale Wilhelm, Random House.Those notable novels were published in hardcover and were as follows: In the early to mid-20th century, only a handful of books were published that addressed lesbians as characters in relationships with women. The books were small enough to fit in a purse or back pocket (hence both the brand-name and the generalized term "pocket books") and cheap enough to throw away when the reader was through with them.ġ953 cover of The Strange Path by Gale Wilhelm (illustration by Robert Maguire), originally published as Torchlight to Valhalla in 1938 These books were sold at drugstores, magazine stands, bus terminals and other places where one might look to purchase cheap, consumable entertainment. Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone." The more they are read, the more they are valued, and the more they are read, the closer the relationship between the very act of circulation and reading and the construction of a lesbian community becomes…. English professor Stephanie Foote commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to the rise of organized feminism: "Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. Because very little other literature was available for and about lesbians at this time, quite often these books were the only reference the public (lesbian and otherwise) had for modeling what lesbians were. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 1960s by many of the same paperback publishing houses as other genres of fiction, including westerns, romances, and detective fiction. Lesbian pulp fiction is a genre of lesbian literature that refers to any mid-20th century paperback novel or pulp magazine with overtly lesbian themes and content. Cover of 1959 lesbian pulp fiction novel The Third Sex by Artemis Smith
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