I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that I was born too late. I’m madly attracted to older women. I’m fascinated with the seedier side of our herstory. I love it when women who came out in the bar culture tell me their stories and I do a slow melt just thinking about what it must have been like to be femme in those days, dancing cheek to cheek to a haunting tune on the jukebox with some bad-assed butch in dungarees.

Sure, I know there were plenty of downsides to “being in the life”, like not being able to be totally open about who you are, and hiding and having to play the game. I honestly don’t think I could have lived such a double life. But I’ll never know for sure. Still, from this safe distance, there’s a sense of romance and danger to those days and something wonderfully exciting, erotic even, about all that secrecy and subterfuge.

Perhaps that’s why lesbian pulp novels still hold a fascination for all of us. And it’s why Katherine V. Forrest’s just released Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 is a welcome addition to writings about the pulp genre.

Reading this wonderful collection of selections from classic lesbian pulps is like finding buried treasure. Plenty of writings on the lesbian pulp phenomena have taught us about the lurid covers depicting overly eroticized predatory lesbians, the sin, suffer and repent plots demanded by God-fearing mainstream publishers. And the fact that, while many of these books became a literary refuge for underground lesbians, most were originally written for the titillation of heterosexual males. But Forrest is the first to stress just how well written many of these novels were, to point out how well developed the characters, how powerful the erotic elements and how the “deviant” love between women is often depicted as nurturing and fulfilling.

As Forrest notes in her very learned introduction, while the jacket copy on the paperbacks may have enticed mainstream readers to enter a world of decadence and sexual perversity, the actual novels were far less sensational than their sales job, and far more positive and useful to closeted lesbians of the time than a cursory look might reveal. And she supports this unique approach to the pulps with a broad offering of selections from 21 popular lesbian pulps. Along with reclaimed writers, such as Vin Packer/Maryjane Meaker, Ann Bannon and Valerie Taylor, Forrest also offers up chapters from Ann Herbert’s Summer Camp, March Hastings’ Three Women, Paula Christian’s Twilight Girl and many other long out-of-print and hard-to-find treasures.

Perhaps most importantly, her selections from the genre demonstrate the courage and cunning of pulp authors whom she suggests were more subversive than perverse, hiding in plain sight and propagating covert messages to the real “Twilight” girls through easily accessible popular paperbacks.

The end result is the realization that these supposedly tawdry dime novels exposed the seamy side of lesbian life to a straight audience were in reality laying the foundation of a lesbian subculture in a time when there was little chance for one to exist outside the bars and gay ghettos.

Lesbian Pulp Fiction is a wonderful and important book that looks at the pulps from a new point of view and adds much to our understanding of this time in our herstory.

Sacred Classic: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America by Lillian Faderman

This important work takes its title from the pulps, and while its scope is much broader, it’s the perfection companion read for Lesbian Pulp Fiction. Faderman’s scholarly writing reads as smooth and compelling as a good novel and her subject —lesbianism in the 20th century—has the same kind of plot twists and great characters you’d expect from good fiction. Ironically, it demonstrates that attitudes about lesbianism have had little to do with lesbians themselves and related more to how much society needed its wives and mothers from one decade to another. Beginning with pre-Freudian romantic friends and ending with stories from our very recent past, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers is a necessary read for anyone wanting to better know the richness of our ancestry and it should be gifted to every lesbian on the day of her coming out.

Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965, edited by Katherine V. Forrest, Cleis Press

Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, by Lillian Faderman, Penguin Books