page_title: Lesbian pulp fiction
section_title: Authors
hierarchical_section_title: Lesbian pulp fiction / Authors
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of "I Am A Woman" by Ann Bannon, 1959 Gold Medal Books edition. The blurb on the back reads: "NEW WORLD...Home to Laura was not an apartment or a house with a fashionable address. Home was a dimly lit and badly ventilated bar on a back street in Greenwich Village. She understood the language there, she understood the customs. Only forbidden desires were recognized and love rarely lasted more than a night. The tormented and lost women met there, and Laura, slim and boyish, found happiness for the first time in her life."
context_page_description: 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. Lesbian pulp fiction was published in the 1950s and 60s by many of the same paperback publishing houses as other genres of fiction including westerns, romances, and detective fiction. Because very little other literature was available for and about lesbians at this time, quite often these books were the only reference the public had for modeling what lesbians were. Stephanie Foote, from the University of Illinois commented on the importance of lesbian pulp novels to the lesbian identity prior to feminism: "Pulps have been understood as signs of a secret history of readers, and they have been valued because they have been read. 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...Characters use the reading of novels as a way to understand that they are not alone."
context_section_description: Authors of lesbian paperbacks were both male and female, and often used pseudonyms - the male authors frequently used female names. One retrospective summed up the genre as, "The vast majority of these lesbian novels were written by men, designed to fulfill straight men's fantasies...But perhaps 40 or 50 lesbian (pulp) novels were written by women, and were also good enough to becoming underground classics...The pulps also reached isolated, small-town lesbians who could read them and see that they were not the only lesbians in the world."
caption: Cover of I Am A Woman (1959) by Ann Bannon
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