5. Midwestern farmers’ daughters: heartland values and cloaked resistance in the novels of Valerie Taylor

Jennifer Dentel

In their 1967 bibliography, The Lesbian in Literature, the editors of lesbian magazine The Ladder rated all known lesbian literature with A, B, C and T ratings. The first would indicate ‘major Lesbian characters or action’ whereas the last was a ‘T for Trash’.¹ In their 1975 second edition, they cut out nearly three thousand ‘Trash titles’,² a large number of which were pulp novels from the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘golden age’ of lesbian pulps.³ As a genre, most of these were written by men⁴ for a predominantly heterosexual, male audience.⁵ The novels were voyeuristic and titillating, typically featuring moralistic endings that fitted with traditional, heterosexual values. Lesbian characters were either vile seductresses who met untimely ends (usually by insanity or suicide), or naïve girls who realised by the end of the story that they truly belonged with a man.⁶

These categories closely mirrored sexological research that had divided homosexual behaviour into two categories: inverts and ‘acquired inverts’. Seen through the lens of a common trope, lesbian schoolmistress and pupil, the seductive older schoolteacher could be seen as a pathological invert, whereas her younger, innocent conquest could merely be an ‘acquired invert’, one who had been led astray and could revert to heterosexuality once the invert’s influence was removed. There were, however, several lesbian authors of pulp who managed to challenge and subvert the pulp formula. Valerie Taylor (1913–97), from the midwestern state of Illinois, was one of the most prolific, with her first lesbian novel Whisper Their Love (1957) selling two million copies and considered a historic milestone for realistically portraying lesbian lives.⁷ Taylor’s own life as an activist in Chicago clearly informs her novels, and they give an accurate picture of gay and lesbian life in that city in the 1950s and 1960s.

Early lesbian pulps could not be seen as promoting homosexuality,⁸ and in order for them to be published, it was important that they have some sort of ‘redeeming social value’.⁹ Taylor herself refers in an interview to the standards expected: ‘Apparently anything goes, just so everyone is miserable in the last chapter.’¹⁰ Pulps, named after the cheap quality of paper on which they were printed, were often able to publish material that ‘legitimate’ publishers could not get past the censors.¹¹ Ann Bannon, ‘the queen of lesbian pulp’, argues that the status of the genre led to a kind of ‘benign neglect [that] provided a much-needed veil behind which we writers could work in peace.’¹² Because pulps were disposable and low-brow, their exposés of deviant groups such as homosexuals could be fairly explicit – provided, of course, they left the reader with a moral lesson. While the blatant homophobia in many early lesbian pulps caused some scholars to view them with derision,¹³ others, like activist Joan Nestle of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, have categorised them as survival literature. Buying one could be considered an act of resistance, often self-discovery, and one of few ways to find out about the larger gay community.

Within the pulp genre, pro-lesbian pulps could have a particularly large impact. Lesbian writer Katherine Forrest describes the feeling of finding an Ann Bannon pulp as ‘it opened the door to my soul and told me who I was. It led me to other books that told me who some of us were, and how some of us live.’¹⁴ Scholars such as Yvonne Keller argue that the pro-lesbian pulp subgenre was able to work within the pulp format to undermine ‘oppressive structures by offering spaces, moments and even whole stories with incipiently pro-lesbian representation’.¹⁵ These pro-lesbian pulps sharply contrast with the negative portrayals in most other lesbian pulps. Writers like Taylor consistently argue against social prejudice towards lesbians and provide positive representations.¹⁶ While some argue it is going too far to speculate on the intentions behind these female pulp authors and ‘few would suggest that they were undercover feminists seeking to subvert patriarchal culture by embedding radical messages in cheap popular novels’,¹⁷ a close reading of Valerie Taylor’s early pulp novels does in fact appear to reveal this cloaked resistance. Taylor also speaks explicitly as an activist about her intentions to use the pulp medium to both educate heterosexuals and provide positive lesbian representations.

Valerie Taylor resented being thought of as merely a pulp novelist. Born in Illinois in 1913, she was a lifelong activist who began writing lesbian fiction because she ‘thought that we should have some books about lesbians who acted like human beings’.¹⁸ Her first novel, Hired Hand, is not a lesbian pulp, but it does include a passing reference to a character’s early lesbian sexual experimentation. Additionally, Hired Hand, like nearly all of Taylor’s subsequent novels, deals with controversial social issues such as abortion, sexual violence, gender inequality and poverty. Taylor used the profits from this novel to pay for her divorce from an abusive husband. She later lived in an artist community in Chicago, worked in publishing and wrote eight books between 1955 and 1965 while being actively involved in the city’s burgeoning gay rights movement. Taylor is unique in that she was one of the first lesbian pulp authors to be relatively open about her sexuality. Scholar Katherine Forrest describes her as ‘militantly active in the gay liberation movement’.¹⁹

As both an open lesbian and a political activist, Taylor is a unique author in the pulp genre. Taylor centres the Midwest in her novels and illustrates both the vibrancy of gay life and the beginnings of gay activism in Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nearly all of Taylor’s early novels are set in the Midwest, primarily in Chicago, with Whisper Their Love being the only work that primarily unfolds outside of that region. In the story of US queer history, the Midwest and Chicago are largely ignored in favour of San Francisco and New York. Even today, the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York often serve as the starting point for discussions of gay activism in the US, with much of the focus remaining on the country’s coasts. However, the Midwest and Chicago have played a highly important role in queer history and the study of sexuality, with milestones such as the founding of the first US gay rights organisation, publication of Kinsey’s groundbreaking studies of sexuality, and the launch of Naiad Press, the oldest lesbian publishing house, all occurring in this region.

Valerie Taylor was also a poet and political activist, involved in the founding of one of Chicago’s earliest homophile organisations, Mattachine Midwest and the Lesbian Writers’ Conference. This activism is apparent throughout her novels and, while they are still certainly pulps and share some of the issues found in the majority of lesbian pulps, she takes control of the genre and uses it to disseminate information to the queer community in Chicago, consistently challenging the standard.

Taylor differentiates herself by inserting references to books, spaces and terms to help illuminate the reality of the Chicago gay community. She also provides a critique of police entrapment and bar raids, the legal and psychological standing of homosexuals and, most importantly, she portrays her lesbian characters as distinctly human individuals. Without giving in to the voyeuristic tendencies of most lesbian pulps,²⁰ she hopes to portray her characters as ‘people who [act] human, who [have] problems, and families, and allergies, and jobs, and so on.’²¹ These women are sympathetic characters with chances at love, community and careers. While this seems minor, given the huge advancements in gay visibility and rights since the 1960s, positive representations of lesbians would both humanise this minority group for heterosexual readers and provide a lifeline for a lesbian audience. In this way, Valerie Taylor’s early pulp novels subvert the typical lesbian pulp narrative by presenting resistance to traditional midwestern values as well as representing a growing gay community and activism in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s.

Taylor’s first and third lesbian pulp novels do show signs of having to adhere to moralistic publishing guidelines. In Whisper Their Love, the main character, Joyce, realises her lesbianism is simply a case of ‘retarded development’. A helpful male character explains this to her and offers to have sex with her because, as he says, ‘maybe a sample of the real thing would help straighten [her] out.’²² He presses her by saying having sex with him would ‘prove you’re a normal female … not tied down to something you’ve already outgrown.’²³ Somewhat implausibly, this argument moves Joyce, and she ends the novel planning to marry him. When interviewed in 1991, Taylor acknowledged that this ending ‘was almost required [at that time]; either she [killed] herself … or she fell in love with a man.’²⁴ In Stranger on Lesbos (1960), Frances, a housewife who has an affair with a female classmate named Bake, similarly realises that the lesbian liaison has harmed her family. She retreats to the comfort of her husband, relinquishing any thought of future lesbian affairs. As she looks at him, she thinks ‘what she saw was reassuring. What if he was getting a double chin? What if his hairline was beginning to recede? He was Bill. Dear, familiar, safe, the stuff of day-by-day living. After all, she admonished herself, life isn’t made up of romance.’²⁵ These two novels, published in 1957 and 1960, are Taylor’s only novels that end with her lesbian characters reverting to heterosexuality, and even a casual reader can observe the author does not view these as happy endings. In the case of Frances from Stranger on Lesbos, Taylor even gives her redemption and a truly happy ending with a woman in her later novel, Return to Lesbos (1963). While Whisper Their Love and Stranger on Lesbos do submit to the publishing standards of the time, Taylor still manages to insert subversive material within them as well as in her later, more pro-lesbian novels.

One key theme throughout all of Taylor’s novels is the importance of books in finding community and educating oneself about homosexuality. In Stranger on Lesbos, Frances is encouraged to read D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which leads to her lesbian awakening. In The Girls in 3-B (1959), Barby is given a lesbian book by her boss, Miss Gordon, with whom she eventually ends up in a relationship. After reading it, she is entranced and thinks, ‘it was like stepping into a new world … was it possible she belonged in that world, too?’ This idea of books spurring self-discovery and revelation is echoed in A World Without Men (1963), when Kate spends the day in her neighbour Erika’s apartment and examines her bookshelves to find titles such as We Walk Alone, Whisper Their Love (Taylor’s own novel)²⁶ and Edge of Twilight. After Kate reads all day, Erika comes home and notes ‘a certain lack of variety in [her] reading.’ Kate responds that she has discovered something about herself through reading, to which Erika replies ‘come to bed and I’ll show you what you found out about yourself.’²⁷ Books, for Taylor’s characters, are a window to another world and a chance to identify with others who hold similar feelings. In Return to Lesbos, which revisits Frances from Stranger on Lesbos, books are one of her only outlets while trapped in a loveless marriage to her husband. In describing the lesbian books she kept, Frances says,

By inserting references to books by writers as diverse as D.H. Lawrence, Colette, Katherine Mansfield, Radclyffe Hall and other pulp authors, Taylor gives her audience resources for finding other places where they could find themselves represented. In an age where it could be extremely difficult to find any reference to gay people in books, let alone a positive one, Taylor is giving her readers a reading list. In a 1961 interview with the gay rights group Mattachine, Taylor acknowledged that fiction was a way to reach people who were ignorant of homosexuals. While most people would likely not buy a scientific textbook, ‘they will spend 35 cents for a paperback with a lurid cover that they can read on the bus.’²⁹ Taylor even gives her audience locations of second-hand bookstores in Chicago so that they can track these titles down.³⁰ Taylor’s choice to include real titles and authors is one of many ways she sheds light on further resources for her lesbian audience.

In the 1950s and 1960s, bars were among the few places in Chicago and elsewhere where gay people could socialise and find each other outside of parties in private homes. Taylor writes several fictional gay bars, from Karla’s and The Gay Eighties in Stranger on Lesbos to The Spot and Happi Time in Unlike Others (1963). She also provides the bars’ specific intersections and areas of Chicago. Taylor is essentially giving her readers an accurate queer roadmap of Chicago. While the names are fictitious,³¹ the locations of these bars mirror the general sites³² of many real gay bars in the Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.³³ Taylor names general neighbourhoods³⁴ for her bars, and in Unlike Others, she even gives driving directions³⁵ that would have led her readers to one of Chicago’s largest gay distr icts. In this time period, it could be really difficult to pinpoint the location of these gay spaces, unless you had a friend who could give you information. Taylor’s books could ostensibly assist those who were alone and had not yet found their community.

In Taylor’s novels, gay bars are sanctuaries where lesbian characters could be themselves. In Return to Lesbos, Frances observes a lesbian couple at Karla’s Place and thinks, ‘Here, at least, they could look their love and not be afraid of what outsiders would think.’³⁶ As Jo gets out of a cab by a bar called The Silver Spike, in Unlike Others, she anticipates, ‘Maybe there’ll be something here for me. Maybe this time I’ll meet somebody or learn something, and it will make all the difference.’³⁷ On entering the bar, her gay friend Richard remarks, ‘Sometimes I understand why foreigners gang together so … this is like finding somebody who speaks my own language.’³⁸

Although Taylor does portray many positive sides of the gay bar scene in Chicago, she is also critical. While the bars were places to find community, they were a limited option. Several of Taylor’s characters, including Stranger on Lesbos’s Bake and A World Without Men’s Kate, are alcoholics. Many of her characters dislike the bar scene but view it as their only option for meeting people. Bars were also dangerous places due to the risk of public exposure. Taylor describes tourists who are ‘out to get a great big thrill looking at the queers’.³⁹ In Stranger on Lesbos, Frances is recognised by a classmate who cruelly laughs at her and threatens to expose her.⁴⁰ Throughout her novels, Taylor stresses the harsh consequences of exposure. In Whisper Their Love, Edith’s previous lover was a teacher who lost her job when she was exposed and then killed herself.⁴¹ Taylor also exposes the problem of police raids in gay bars. Two of her novels feature bar raids and several of her other novels reference the ever-present fear when one is in a gay bar of being swept up in a raid.

In Stranger on Lesbos, Frances is taken to jail when police raid Karla’s Place. This outs her to her husband, whom she has to call for bail money, and exposes very real problems for gay people in 1950s and 1960s Chicago. A prisoner at the jail says, ‘They figure it’s better to pay than get their names in the paper and maybe lose their jobs.’⁴² When bars were raided, names were printed in the newspapers and people often did lose their jobs. Some even committed suicide.⁴³ In Unlike Others, Jo’s friend Richard is at a gay bar called the Happi Time, when he accepts a proposition from a stranger who turns out to be a cop.⁴⁴ In this example, Taylor exposes the Chicago Police practice of entrapment, where male cops would pose as homosexuals and arrest men who took them up on offers of sex or companionship.⁴⁵ When discussing the concern that Richard’s name would be printed, his friends ask what he does for a living and then reply ‘could be worse. He could be a teacher.’⁴⁶ In 1964, shortly after the publication of Unlike Others, the Fun Lounge in Chicago was raided and more than a hundred people were arrested. While the newspaper could not print all of the names, they ensured that they printed the names of the eight teachers who were arrested. The charges were dropped one month later, but the consequences of having had their names printed made this correction largely irrelevant.⁴⁷

Valerie Taylor reveals great empathy with the different struggles gay men and women faced, commenting on the greater violence and risk of arrest to which gay men were subjected. In Return to Lesbos a character comments, ‘it’s lucky we don’t have as much trouble as the boys – if a boy looks the least bit swishy he’s had it, even if they can’t prove anything.’⁴⁸ In Unlike Others, Jo worries about police raids but mentions, ‘she had never heard of a gay girl being entrapped by a policewoman as men often were by detectives.’⁴⁹ Jo asks her friend why men are targeted instead of women. Her friend replies ‘A lot of people don’t even know women do these things.’⁵⁰ As with all these so-called benefits of being a lesbian rather than a gay man, there is a catch, with lesbianism being taken less seriously and often with an assumption, as Taylor espouses in Whisper Their Love and Stranger on Lesbos, that lesbians are just in a stage of ‘retarded development’ and will eventually outgrow it and end up with a kindly male character or return to their husband.

In Unlike Others, Jo bemoans how hard it is to find people outside of the bar scene. She runs through a list of ways to find others, including carrying a book with lesbian content or reading ‘one of the special magazines’.⁵¹ This reference to magazines hints at the growing number of activist groups, or homophile organisations as they were called in the United States. In the early 1960s, gay activism was growing in several major cities through homophile organisations such as Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis.⁵² Taylor herself was a member of both,⁵³ and was likely involved in two early Mattachine chapters in Chicago from 1954 to 1957 and between 1959 and 1962. She also helped to found Mattachine Midwest in 1965, an extremely influential group that fought for gay rights in Chicago for more than 20 years.⁵⁴ In Return to Lesbos, Taylor’s character describes a gay activist meeting as ‘a group for people like us. We have speakers and book reviews – like what are our legal rights and how can we get better jobs.’ They have a national magazine and market themselves as a good way to meet people. The character later goes on to say, ‘The last young man Vince asked was so disappointed. He expected orgies. We’re very serious.’⁵⁵

The meeting is nearly identical to the early gatherings of real US homophile organisations, and Taylor even admitted the group was directly modelled on Mattachine.⁵⁶ In the novel, the group invites a speaker from the American Civil Liberties Union to speak with them about their legal rights.⁵⁷ Similarly, early Chicago Mattachine meetings organised speakers to discuss legal rights for homosexuals. Homophile groups also offered opportunities to socialise. As Erika in the novel expresses, ‘It is nice to sit and drink coffee with people who know what you are, that’s all.’⁵⁸ Taylor’s characters express hope for an alternative to the bar scene. She thinks, ‘This might be one way to an answer – an organization, a magazine. For lonely girls in small towns, in colleges, in impersonal cities, at least the reassurance that there were others.’⁵⁹

Psychiatrists are also common speakers at these homophile meetings. Taylor discusses psychiatry and statistics throughout her novels. While later activists were critical of organisations like Mattachine for their emphasis on assimilation and approval from authorities, such as psychiatrists or the police, this was an important part of this early movement for gay rights. The lesbians in Taylor’s novels come across several psychiatrists and authority figures. Some are negative but a few are really positive. On the negative side, in several cases Taylor describes an ex of a lesbian character going to an analyst ‘to be cured’. She discusses various psychiatric theories, such as lesbianism being a sickness or a case of ‘retarded development’, representing the mainstream psychological beliefs of the time. In Stranger on Lesbos, Frances’s son catches her after a night at a lesbian bar and is concerned about the damage his mother’s behaviour will have on his upcoming marriage, arguing ‘Maybe this is some kind of neurosis you’ve got. Okay, go and see a psychiatrist if you think it would do any good. Only for God’s sake don’t spoil my whole life!’⁶⁰ However, Taylor’s characters challenge these beliefs. In Unlike Others Jo explains to her gay friend Richard that one of her ex-lovers is seeing an analyst who thinks she is making progress. Richard remarks, ‘Sure, we’re neurotic. Who in hell isn’t? Society breeds neurosis. I suppose the heteros who run around laying every female they can get their hands on are normal. I suppose the morons who rape and dismember little girls are mature mentally. Also the frigid housewives who are always so tired when their husbands come to bed.’⁶¹ By ridiculing a psychiatric view that places homosexuals in the same category as child murderers and rapists, Taylor asks her readers to question their own views.

Though some of the psychiatric references in her novels are quite negative, Taylor also writes several supportive authority figures that corroborate her lesbian characters’ resistance to compulsory heterosexuality, including a minister in Return to Lesbos and a psychiatrist in A World Without Men. In the latter, Kate returns to her psychiatrist Dr Liebermann expecting him to try to ‘cure’ her of her lesbianism. Dr Liebermann responds,

Dr Liebermann supports Kate’s lesbian relationship and when she asks him if he thinks there is something wrong with her, he replies, ‘If you love someone, you’re lucky. The world is full of lonesome people.’⁶³ In Return to Lesbos, Frances seeks out a minister in a moment of desperation. Struggling to explain her problem, she finally confesses to him that she’s a lesbian. Flippantly, the minister says ‘What am I supposed to do, drop dead?’⁶⁴ He then goes on to explain that a tenth of women in the US are homosexual and how he is not shocked by it. He supports Frances’s decision to leave her husband for a woman saying, ‘then why are you asking me? You really have it all worked out in your mind … you have to find your own courage.’⁶⁵ Frances’s relief is evident as she thanks the minister for not thinking she’s a case of ‘retarded development’ and continues, ‘Straight people almost never realize what seems abnormal to them might be perfectly normal to someone else.’⁶⁶ You can see Taylor’s perspective through her characters’ views, and it is interesting that she chooses these male authority figures to deliver a logical, reasoned defence of homosexuality. Perhaps Taylor felt these figures would have more impact on readers unfamiliar with homosexuality and trained to believe patriarchal authority figures. Pondering why the minister helped her embrace her lesbianism, Frances thinks, ‘I only needed someone to tell me what I knew all along. Someone I could respect. Nothing was changed, but she went home full of new hope.’⁶⁷

Taylor’s characters find many sources of community, including the aforementioned bars, books and organisations. In addition to representing the public side of the homosexual community in Chicago, Taylor’s depiction of private lesbian relationships is empathetic without being voyeuristic. Taylor’s portrayal of positive lesbian relationships and domesticity is striking and contrasts with her often-damning portrayal of heterosexuality. The Girls in 3-B, which follows three roommates who move to Chicago together, provides an especially good contrast. While Barby ends up in a protective, loving relationship living with a woman, her two roommates, Annice and Pat, fare quite differently with their male counterparts. For Annice, her relationship with Alan, a truly reprehensible character who abandons her after she becomes pregnant from coerced unprotected sex, offers a window into the misogynistic, racist side of Beat culture. The third roommate, Pat, provides a critique of the gender imbalance in the workplace. As the story progresses, Pat realises, ‘it was evident that most of the problems and woes of the female sex grew out of their preoccupation with men.’⁶⁸

Taylor’s novels portray lesbian relationships positively with just a few exceptions. In A World Without Men, Erika helps Kate overcome her alcoholism, making Kate feel ‘safe and cared for’.⁶⁹ At the end of the novel, Kate tells Erika that she wants a marriage. Laughingly they speak of domestic issues: ‘We’ll have bills to pay and dishes to wash.’⁷⁰ In Unlike Others, Jo realises that ‘she knew couples who had been together four, five, even six years, girls who seemed to be faithful to each other, who didn’t drink too much, who paid their bills and went on vacations together and were concerned with the everlasting female business of making a home.’⁷¹

This representation of ordinary domesticity is important. In addition to providing positive representations, these depictions also humanised lesbians to readers unfamiliar with homosexuality. Taylor argues that ‘for many people with conventional viewpoints, books are the only point of contact with the offbeat people’.⁷² Moreover, ‘if the truth about the homophile movement is ever to filter down to the general reading public, we need more books which begin with the idea that what’s normal for you may not necessarily be normal for me and that our neighbor may be still another kind of person.’⁷³ Taylor stresses throughout her novels that gay people are everywhere, giving hope to readers in small towns and challenging the idea that places like New York’s Greenwich Village were the only places to find other gay people. Pulps were one of the few places where lesbians could see themselves and their community represented.⁷⁴

Several of Taylor’s characters muse that lesbians must exist everywhere. In A World Without Men, Kate ‘supposed there must be others, in small towns, on college campuses, everywhere.’⁷⁵ In Return to Lesbos, Frances describes many cities that have gay bars and her knowledge that ‘everywhere you went … you found the “different” ones, ready to recognize and welcome their own.’⁷⁶ Taylor is fond of inserting statistics into her novels, which likely came from sources such as the recently published Kinsey Report. In Return to Lesbos, Frances reflects on lesbianism, supposing that ‘it happened now and then, in a country where one tenth of all women were supposed to be gay.’⁷⁷ These statistics undoubtedly helped Taylor’s readers, as she said in an interview, ‘feel reassured and comforted when they discover[ed] that their own hidden feelings and secret experiences are actually quite common and not universally condemned’.⁷⁸

In Unlike Others, Jo thinks, ‘I’m exactly like a thousand other girls, except I like making love to women instead of men. So what? It’s my own private business.’⁷⁹ This emphasis on private behaviour, and the assertion that a community of homosexuals existed, runs throughout Taylor’s novels. The drive to find their people, whether it is other lesbians, gay male friends or sympathetic straight people, is often a driving force in Taylor’s characters’ lives. In Jo’s fury at Richard’s arrest she thinks:

Taylor’s stance on private morality is clear, and she often uses her characters to express her outrage at social prejudice against gay people in Chicago.

In Taylor’s early pulp novels, she manages to subvert the typical moralistic, anti-lesbian pulp formula by providing cloaked and overt resistance to the homophobic values that characterised American society in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor inserts educational details with her references to additional books with lesbian content, as well as locations of gay bars and spaces in Chicago. She offers a glimpse of the burgeoning gay activist movement through her references to homophile organisations, and writes empathetic lesbian characters with generally positive relationships and aspirations. She consistently appeals to her readers to see the injustice in treating gay people differently, and the logic of allowing people to go about their personal lives in private. Taylor shows her readers proof of a lesbian world and provides resources for them to access it. Katherine Forrest, lesbian pulp scholar and author, argues that lesbian pulp showed lesbians they were not alone and that finding each other was the first step on the path to the gay civil rights movement.⁸⁰ To end with Taylor’s words:

This is true of all Taylor’s novels. She provides representation and resources, and in doing so, she resists the classic pulp narrative, draws a clear picture of gay life in Chicago, and opens a path for further activism.

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1 Gene Damon and Lee Stuart, The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (San Francisco, CA: The Ladder, 1967). While A indicated ‘major Lesbian characters, and/or action’, B indicated ‘minor Lesbian characters, and/or action’, C specified ‘latent, repressed Lesbianism or characters who can be so interpreted. This behavior is properly termed “variant” behavior’, while T, of course, indicated ‘that regardless of the quantity of Lesbian action or characters involved in the book, the quality is essentially poor, and the “T” is for trash’.

2 Gene Damon, Jan Watson and Robin Jordan, The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography, 2nd edn. (Reno, NV: The Ladder, 1975), 4.

3 Barbara Grier, ‘Introduction’, in Valerie Taylor, Whisper Their Love (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2006).

4 Katherine V. Forrest, Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950–1965 (San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 2005), xi.

5 Roberta Yusba, ‘Twilight tales: lesbian pulps 1950–1960’, On Our Backs 2 (1): 30–1, 43 (summer 1985).

6 Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1991), 146–8.

7 St Sukie de la Croix, Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 202.

8 Ibid., 147.

9 Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 147.

10 Valerie Taylor, ‘Five minority groups in relation to contemporary fiction’, Mattachine Review, 7 (5): 13–22, at p. 14 (1961).

11 Yvonne Keller, ‘Pulp politics: strategies of vision in pro-lesbian pulp novels, 1955–1965’, in The Queer Sixties (New York: Routledge, 1999), 4.

12 Livia Tenzer and Jean Casella, publisher’s foreword, The Girls in 3-B (New York: The Feminist Press, 2003), x.

13 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Quill, 1981), 355–6.

14 Forrest, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, ix.

15 Keller, ‘Pulp politics’, 17–18.

16 Claude J. Summers, The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and their Works from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 525.

17 Tenzer and Casella, publisher’s foreword, The Girls in 3-B, ix.

18 Kate Brandt, Happy Endings: Lesbian Writers Talk about their Lives and Work (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1993), 51–2.

19 Forrest, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, xi.

20 Keller, ‘Pulp politics’, 1–25, cites Taylor as the paradigmatic example of a lesbian author who avoided voyeurism. Taylor ‘successfully avoided sensationalism and extraneous sex scenes and worked to normalize, humanize and desensationalize the lesbian characters while keeping them central to each story’, 6.

21 Brandt, Happy Endings, 52.

22 Valerie Taylor, Whisper Their Love (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1957), 144.

23 Taylor, Whisper Their Love, 145.

24 Brandt, Happy Endings, 53.

25 Valerie Taylor, Stranger on Lesbos (London: New English Library, 1970), 107–8.

26 Brandt, Happy Endings, 58. Taylor acknowledged the in-joke of including her own book title within the novel with ‘Yes, well, my books get a little inbred sometimes.’

27 Valerie Taylor, A World Without Men (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1982), 50.

28 Valerie Taylor, Return to Lesbos (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1982), 75.

29 Taylor, ‘Five minority groups’, 16.

30 Valerie Taylor, Unlike Others (New York, NY: Midwood Tower, 1963), 44.

31 Out and Proud in Chicago, ed. Tracy Baim (Chicago, IL: Surrey Books, 2008), 55–68.

32 International Guild Guide 1965 (Washington, DC: Guild Book Service, 1965).

33 John D’Emilio, ‘Rethinking queer history: or, Richard Nixon, gay liberationist’, in Out in Chicago: LGBT History at the Crossroads (Chicago, IL: Chicago History Museum, 2011), 100.

34 Taylor, Stranger on Lesbos, 33, 98.

35 Taylor, Unlike Others, 105.

36 Taylor, Return to Lesbos, 9.

37 Taylor, Unlike Others, 16.

38 Ibid., 16.

39 Taylor, Stranger on Lesbos, 36.

40 Ibid., 36.

41 Taylor, Whisper Their Love, 63.

42 Taylor, Stranger on Lesbos, 53.

43 Baim, Out and Proud in Chicago, 65.

44 Taylor, Unlike Others, 119.

45 D’Emilio, ‘Rethinking queer history’, 101.

46 Taylor, Unlike Others, 120.

47 Baim, Out and Proud in Chicago, 62.

48 Taylor, Return to Lesbos, 10.

49 Taylor, Unlike Others, 86.

50 Ibid., 121–2.

51 Ibid., 86.

52 John D. Poling, Mattachine Midwest: History of a Chicago Gay Rights Organization, 1965 to 1986 (master’s thesis, Illinois State University, 2002), 17–32.

53 Brandt, Happy Endings, 57.

54 Poling, Mattachine Midwest, 37.

55 Taylor, Return to Lesbos, 63.

56 Brandt, Happy Endings, 56–7.

57 Taylor, Return to Lesbos, 79.

58 Ibid., 63.

59 Ibid., 64–5.

60 Taylor, Stranger on Lesbos, 89.

61 Taylor, Unlike Others, 17.

62 Taylor, A World Without Men, 156.

63 Ibid., 157.

64 Taylor, Return to Lesbos, 116.

65 Ibid., 118.

66 Ibid., 119.

67 Ibid., 119.

68 Taylor, The Girls in 3-B, 107.

69 Taylor, A World Without Men, 30.

70 Ibid., 187.

71 Taylor, Unlike Others, 129.

72 Taylor, ‘Five minority groups’, 22.

73 Ibid., 19.

74 Summers, Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, 75 and 525.

75 Taylor, A World Without Men, 48.

76 Taylor, Return to Lesbos, 64.

77 Ibid., 28.

78 Taylor, ‘Five minority groups’, 19.

79 Taylor, Unlike Others, 70.

80 Forrest, Lesbian Pulp Fiction, xviii.

81 Taylor, ‘Five minority groups’, 22.