L. said: I’d give it a seven.
I said: Yeah, it wasn’t bad the way I thought it would be bad.
Jim said: I hated it.
Allen said: If it had been a foreign film with no subtitles I would have liked it a lot.
Lauretta and Susan and I agreed: It had moments.
I … Read more
A brief list:
There’s a treasured shelf in my collection of mid-century teen fiction and career girl books. It holds those rare voumes in which the burgeoning civil rights movement of the sixties collides with the whitebread high school fantasies of the fifties to form a schizophrenic hybrid of the malt shoppe romance and the problem novel. It’s culture clash, Y-Teen style.
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Titles include Julie’s Heritage (a black high school girl grapples with racism and dating), Why Did You Go to College Linda Warren? (good-girl Linda gets embroiled with anti-war activists during her first year of college), Lots of Love, Lucinda (Corry’s white family invites a black student from the south to stay with them and go to school in the North), Continue reading
The Friday night lesbian feature at the Castro was violent, implausible, silly, and yet strangely satisfying. It was a genre picture (shades of this festival’s theme) in search of a genre; not quite sure whether it was an action or horror flick, and stumbling over some of the details essential to gratuitous violence films, Continue reading
So I recently finished Indomitable: The Life of Barbara Grier by Joanne Passet and at last I understand why those Naiad Press books ol’ Babs put out had that distinctive look. Barbara, it seems, was your classic lesbian cheapskate; she would do anything to maximize the number of books she could get in a box, and that included squishing more Continue reading
The Heart in Exile by Rodney Garland, W.H. Allen 1953
Cover line: A disturbingly frank novel of homosexuality in London
I discovered this gay British novel, not precisely a pulp but on the pulpy end of the spectrum, through a citation in my favorite book of 2015, The Spiv and The Architect. “Queer novels of the 1950s frequently exploited the continued currency of the traditional moral economy of furniture and design as a useful device for highlighting the domestic propriety of their respectable ‘homosexual’ protagonists,” wrote author Richard Hornsey, using The Heart in Exile as his example. He ties the novel’s detailed description of a bachelor flat to the way “a specter of malignant queerness haunted modern design,” leading to the perception of modern furniture as “an agent of corruption that would seduce children from the normative rituals of family life.” Who wouldn’t be intrigued?
The Plot: The suicide that ends many pulps starts this one. Tony Page, a queer, currently celibate psychiatrist takes on a new patient, Ann Hewitt. Continue reading
Kate, by Chet Kinsey, Beacon, 1959
Cover Line: “A novel that tells the truth about those homes for unwed mothers…”
Add this book to the category, “I’ve slogged through it so you don’t have to.” This is a perfect example of the mediocre stuff that was churned out solely to keep those drugstore bookracks filled. Did even Barbara Grier read this? I doubt it. Some friend said, Continue reading
69 Barrow Street, by Lawrence Block writing as Sheldon Lord, Tower, 1959
Cover Line: “Their Love was Right! But Their Sex Was Wrong!”
We’ve all known them: the men who long to be lesbians. in the days before they found an outlet for their frustrated desires by dominating the discussions in women studies classes with passionate paeans to Monique Wittig, they wrote lesbian pulp.
Does Lawrence Block belong to this esoteric tribe? One thing is for sure: before becoming Continue reading
I had a busy day at the bookstore Tuesday. There was a box from triliteral to unpack (I want all the books in the semiotexte series — so small, so simply designed, with such apocalyptic titles) and I was entering the books in the system while customers kept interrupting me — which is good! No complaints. We like it when people buy books.
A man in town for a convention asked if we had any books on dachshunds. No, I said, after conscientiously doing a keyword check, was he a dachshund fan? he wasn’t, his wife was. But stronger than a fan she was…”obsessed?” I suggested. He bought a psychedelic card. Continue reading
There aren’t a lot of lesbian kisses on screen. Especially in the 1930s. In Japan. But this is one of the best. Continue reading