Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction

Abstract

Forty years after the demise of the genre, lesbian pulp fiction seems both funny and sad. In part, the novels seem funny because of their outrageous melodrama; and sad because the women who wrote the most popular lesbian pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties were always under pressure to remember that, officially, they were writing for a male readership, who would best appreciate stories that would ultimately either punish lesbian characters (with suicide or insanity), or "reform" them (with men for sexual partners). But the ambivalence about the novels extends to its latter-day readers: as lesbian pulp gets claimed as US queer "heritage," it turns out to be hard to say what exactly is being claimed--is it the novels' production, or their consumption? Is it the courage it took to have written such novels in the McCarthy era, or the camp pleasure we feel, reading them now, that we can recycle earlier forms of pain at an ironic distance?