Chels

Last year, to celebrate pride, I recommended some 20th Century sapphic romance novels. As part of my list, I included I Prefer Girls, Jessie Dumont’s pulp novel. This week is lesbian visibility week, and I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the world of lesbian pulp fiction.

For a lot of us, the immediate response to hearing ‘pulp fiction’ is probably to think of the film – Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is named the way it is because of the inspiration the director took from pulp novels and magazines – the graphic violence, morally grey characters, and confusing, non-linear narrative. Pulp novels were mass produced (named for the low quality ‘pulp’ paper they were printed on), and they had a reputation for being low quality in content too. Obviously, they’re not comparable to the novels we think of as ‘classics’, but I don’t think it’s fair to call them low quality. They were experimental, and they broke new ground in terms of writing on taboo subjects. Pulp novels were typically very sensationalist – the 1950s equivalent of Victorian sensation fiction, and taboo content involving sexuality was part of the genre.

This is what allowed queer stories to be told. They laid the groundwork for the queer fiction we have today. Of course, it was the 1950s, and it still wasn’t socially acceptable to be queer (homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised in the UK and USA until the 60s), so it meant that while queer stories could be told, queer characters had to be villainised, and their perceived wrongdoing had to be punished within a narrative.

This wasn’t a strict rule in literature, but it was a general expectation that bled over from film, where the Hays Code policed depictions of queerness and other social taboos. From 1934 to 1968 Hollywood studios followed the Code to regulate the content of their films, banning profanity, obscenity, and graphic violence, as well as themes of homosexuality, interracial marriage, and promiscuity. Of course, these themes were not banned outright, but in the films that did include them, the so called ‘immoral’ acts were always punished, so as to deter viewers from approving or sympathising. Gay and gay coded characters were either killed off (and it was often specified that their death had to come as a ‘result of their lifestyle’), or were villains. 

The Hays Code is the reason so many Hollywood (especially Disney) villains are so camp – villains were ‘gay coded’ to associate homosexuality with villainy. Male villains were portrayed as feminine or effeminate, while female villains were masculine – the crossing of the gender boundary was so heavily tied to danger, crime, and wickedness, to associate queerness in the public eye with immorality.

As a result, pulp novels generally portrayed their lesbian characters as predatory. They were often quite masculine in behaviour, though usually feminine in appearance – there was a moral panic over the idea of queer people blending in with society, and hiding in plain sight, that heightened the fear of queerness. These characters typically sought out innocent, younger, straight women to seduce and manipulate. There were often further elements of immorality within the relationships, from infidelity against established male partners, or abuse or coercion. The novels were salacious and often sexually explicit, but they were not allowed to be mere erotica – in the case of queer characters, they still served as social policing, reinforcing the fear of queerness.

The audience for lesbian pulp fiction wasn’t primarily queer women. While they made up some of the readership, the pulp fiction audience was a demographic of its own, consisting of people from all walks of life with an interest in the taboo. As a result, lesbian pulp novels weren’t necessarily made for lesbians, so they lacked empathy for lesbian characters; they weren’t designed for women to see themselves represented, they were designed to be shocking and scandalous.

These days, lesbian pulp novels have begun to attract a cult audience of queer women interested in our history. There are plenty of sapphic works of fiction available that represent different stories, with happy, sad, and ambiguous endings. It’s not that we are short of stories to engage with, but there’s something about the pulp novels of our past that are intriguing. Sadly, there aren’t many of them surviving to this day, and those that do survive are often rare and expensive. Two that have solidified their places as cult classics are Jessie Dumont’s I Prefer Girls, which I talked about briefly last year, and Satan Was a Lesbian by Fred Haley, read and analysed by Strange Aeons. Both, of course, were published under pseudonyms – Jessie Dumont was said to be the name used by an established author, though their true identity has yet to be revealed, and Fred Haley is believed to be the name used by Monica Roberts. Haley also wrote Black Heat, another pulp novel exploiting lesbian, gay, and interracial relationships.

On the surface, these novels seem homophobic, exploitative, and sleazy, and it’s hard to argue otherwise – because in most cases, they are. I don’t think, though, that it means we should cast them aside or file them under ‘problematic’ and ignore them. Pulp novels are part of our history – they bridged a gap that helped to bring sapphic fiction into the mainstream, and without them, we may not have some of our beloved contemporary love stories. By this, I don’t mean they should be celebrated without criticism – they still reflect the attitudes of their time, but I think they serve as an accurate time capsule – a reminder of how far lesbian representation has come.They’re also quite cheesy and fun to read because of the heavyhandedness of their stereotyping, so if you’re able to compartmentalise some of the more serious implications, they make for both entertaining and insightful reads.