lesbian writing |

(From Literary Hub. Link to the complete article given below)

When I was a little girl with little crutches and braces, science fiction was the only place I saw disability represented in a positive way. Of course, the characters weren’t named as disabled. They were humans adapted for high-G worlds who couldn’t exist back on Earth without an assistive exoskeleton or aliens who had to use adaptive breathing mechanisms because their world had a methane-based atmosphere. These characters could be benevolent space farers, evil pirates bent on the pillage of our planet, or just regular people trying to make a living mining in the outer rim asteroid belts. They could be anything and I grabbed hold of that.

I kept reading science fiction. Sturgeon’s story “Affair with a Green Monkey” spoke to my still unnamed lesbian self, the ultimate heroism of Heinlein’s Podkayne and L’Engle’s Meg helped me become sturdy in a world that didn’t expect that of me, and the integrity of LeGuin’s characters (Semley!) has served me well for 50 years.

It was the mid-70s, and I was in my mid-twenties—immersing myself in feminism and coming out—when (from my point-of-view) women, often lesbians, simply took over science fiction. Women had always been there, but the sheer volume of mind-twisting feminist plots and not-creepy lesbian characters on bookstore shelves was heady stuff. By the 80s I was part of a feminist bookstore, and you bet I expanded and carefully curated our science fiction section with great joy. It was as if I and this genre that had supported me most of my life were evolving together. My own bookshelves, despite many moves and purges, are still filled with books from those times. They’re piled around me while I write. Here, I’m going to mostly choose the most forgotten. (Readers will be pissed about the ones I leave out; heck, I’m already mad at myself.)

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(From Atlas Obscura. Read the full article at the link below.)

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Not every first encounter with lesbian pulp fiction was so transformative. But for many women of the 1950s and 1960s, these slim paperbacks were pivotal, and sometimes even life-saving. Within their pages lay physical proof that they were not entirely alone in the world. “It was an era of just incredible isolation—a lot of us grew up thinking that we were the only ones,” says the writer Katherine V. Forrest, who compiled the 2005 anthology Lesbian Pulp Fiction. “The books were like water in the desert.”

In her introduction to the anthology, Forrest describes chancing upon Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out for sale in Detroit, Michigan. The year was 1957, and she was 18. “I did not need to look at the title for clues; the cover leaped out at me from the drugstore rack: a young woman with sensuous intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman’s shoulders,” she writes. “Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air.”

Forrest’s experience was not atypical. In a 1995 essay, Donna Allegra recounts grappling with feelings of embarrassment and shame on her way up to the front desk. But however hard she found it, she wrote, “It was absolutely necessary for me to have them. I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival.”

Women like Allegra and Forrest didn’t have to look far for their fix: America’s drug stores and airport bookstores sold lesbian pulp fiction quite openly. The novels were displayed cheek-to-jowl with stories of alien invasions and Nazi torture. Pulp novels had tawdry titles, conspicuous covers, and taglines that promised readers everything from “the sex traps of vacationing she-wolves” to a glimpse into “the intimate sex needs of America’s 900,000 young widows.”

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