Arts
Pulp Fiction & Lesbian Rights
by Elizabeth A. Allen
Spring
Fire |
In
the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of cheap paperbacks lured readers between
their covers for soft-core girl-on-girl action. Interestingly, it was
a title by a lesbian that touched off this wildfire of pulp fiction. Cleis
Press' new edition of Spring Fire by Vin Packer (one of the noms
de plume of Marijane Meaker) contains the unabridged text, as well as
a new preface by Meaker. In this context, you can see lesbian pulps as
more than cheap thrills for straight guys; Spring Fire touched
off a literary change that sped along the lesbian-rights movement.
At first, lesbian pulps, with their
stereotypical plots and strong revulsion toward homosexuality, hardly
look revolutionary. The original back text of Spring Fire asks,
"Will Leda [the older sorority sister] corrupt [blond ingenue] Mitch?
Or will the strong and silent Mitch draw the queen of Tri Ep into the
forbidden world of Lesbian love?" The threadbare seduction set-up
leads to perfunctory sadomasochistic sex. Soon Leda gets in a car crash
and ends up nuts in an asylum, while Mitch drops out of college, heartbroken.
In novels like Spring Fire, lesbianism shares an underworld with
heinous sex crimes that lead to disaster.
The homophobia within lesbian pulps
mirrors the culture in which Meaker and others wrote. In fact, Meaker's
editor told her that Spring Fire couldn't contain anything construed
as remotely condoning homosexuality, since that would violate postal obscenity
codes. Far from celebrating lesbian sexuality, the pulps condemned it.
Yet, in the hands of lesbian readers,
Spring Fire and its ilk were revolutionary for their widely distributed
descriptions of lesbian life. Meaker portrays the isolation of post-WWII
gay culture in her preface: "The majority of us were closeted....
My sorority sisters knew nothing about my homosexual love affair in boarding
school.... There were no magazines or newspapers about us, no clubs for
us to belong to" [p. vii]. Though Meaker mentions the bar scene,
queer culture back then seems mostly fragmentary, made up of secretive,
anxious individuals who knew no direct way to find support.
So, when lesbians opened the covers of pulps
like Spring Fire, they found links to their sisters. It was clear
to the queer female readers that some authors, like Meaker and other lesbian-pulp
authors who were lesbians themselves, knew what they were talking about.
For example, here's Mitch having an identity crisis in the middle of Spring
Fire:
A Lesbian was abnormal, a female
who could not have satisfactory relations with a male, but only with another
female, and Mitch knew it had been that way [with her].... Mitch thought
back to the crushes she had had in boarding school, awful emotional orgies
in which she had idolized certain teachers,... and there had never had
been any boys. Until Leda, there had been no one who had set her whole
body pulsing with the sweet pain and the glory in the end. That was abnormal.
[pg. 83]
Amateur style aside, Meaker's description
of Mitch's realization rings painfully true. Trying to understand her
attraction to Leda, Mitch questions herself. Should she trust an authoritative
psychology text, which says she's a dissatisfied freak? Or should she
trust her own desires? When lesbians of any age reconcile themselves to
their sexuality, they often vacillate between these two choices, both
of which seem equally scary. Such scenes in Spring Fire and later
titles brought these once-hidden struggles of lesbian life into mainstream
print for the first time.
Since Spring Fire and its descendants
could be easily purchased in drugstores and tobacco shops nation-wide,
the books reached thousands of grateful women. The book sold almost 1.5
million copies in its first printing, generating loads of fan mail, notes
Meaker in her preface, "from women all over the United States."
These readers cherished the pulps as signs that they were not alone; they
also, Meaker says, "alerted the publishing world to the fact that
there was a very large audience for books about lesbians."
So publishers churned out more pulps, and
readers - some men, but also many women - snapped them up. Descriptions
of lesbian life were thus disseminated. Spring Fire may have
consoled women on an individual level, but it and subsequent titles also
certainly sent some women in search of the life they read about. Meeting
in sororities, bars, artists' colonies and urban enclaves described in
the books, lesbians found love, heartache, acceptance. With increased
visibility in both pulps and their larger social groups, lesbians developed
a greater sense of group identity and even political consciousness. While
superficially discouraging lesbian subcultures, pulps actually strengthened
them by bringing women together and were thus both a catalyst and result
of the nascent lesbian-rights movement.
Elizabeth Allen satisfies her lust for pulp fiction in Boston.