Well Covered: Pulp Pride

It’s Pride Week here in New York, a time to celebrate the city’s thriving LGBT community and, of course, to commemorate the forty-first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. While the pre-Stonewall era was in most ways a dark time for gay rights, it was something of a golden era for gay and lesbian pulp fiction. During the post-War paperback boom, several publishing houses launched imprints devoted—however cryptically—to gay and lesbian novels. Though most of the books were little more than pornography, some&#8212like Ann Bannon’s “Beebo Brinker” series, which is still in print after fifty years&#8212have slowly earned critical recognition. Lesbian titles were especially popular, crossing over to a straight-male readership (some things, it seems, never change). Despite their explicit subject matter, the novels tended to include ham-fisted moral lessons about the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle; in this way, publishers could claim that the books served a public service beyond mere titillation. Savvy readers knew the truth.

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