Lesbian Pulp Fiction:
The Temptations of Unnatural Love
 Nymphomaniacal (white) Lesbians (always capitalized) lurked in the shadows, ever ready to entrap the unwary maiden with the Temptations of Unnatural Love. The Lesbian was a pathetic yet menacing deviate doomed to a life of Arrested Development: playing softball, swearing, driving fast sports cars, wearing tailored pants and "mannish" shoes, smoking, getting tattoos, raising dogs, riding motorcycles, writing books, engaging in Homosexual Activities, travelling where no Real Lady ever ventured, wearing ducktail haircuts, earning college degrees, associating with Colored People, drinking like a fish in seedy bars and making her own living. This miserable lifestyle usually ended in suicide.
Suicide, alcoholism, insanity and/or careers as prison matrons awaited the fictional Lesbians. Otherwise, lesbian pulps would never have gotten published. No publisher dared appear sympathetic to The Homosexual Lifestyle in 1959. So pulp Lesbians had to be sacrificed. The real life Lesbians knew this and didn't care. They could walk into any corner drugstore in America and, for a quarter, buy a book that let them know they were not the only dyke in Boise.
Yeah, yeah, we know that lesbian pulp novels were edited to satisfy the weird fantasies of heterosexual males. Who cares? That meant steamy sex scenes for everybody. Most of the writers were lesbians, and some of them actually could make a living doing what they enjoyed, thanks to America's bottomless craving for Lesbian pulps. By compromising, they created a priceless legacy. Thank you, Lesbian pulp foremothers.
Our Lesbian/lesbian pulp foremothers behaved much as the French Resistance during WWII. During the mid-twentieth century, your own personal nuclear family could get you confined in an asylum, then lobotomized and shocked until you drooled into your Jello for being a lesbian. At any age. If you were 58, your mother or your husband could do that to you. One day a week in every high school in America was Queer Day. Imagine being a hormone-crazed teenage lesbian, hopelessly in love with another girl, spending every minute of every day monitoring every gesture and word lest someone guess the Truth. We could be our own worst enemies. If you busted somebody else for being a dyke, that exonerated you.
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