I It .. .. - Ffigggfilfifia isrueuu We frame old magazines, movie posters, old ads, theater and concert programs & tickets, record albums, baseball cards, buttons, autographs... \ history hide in your bureau drawer? If you have a collection‘ of interesting stuff from days gone by. don’t hide it, Frame Our certified framers will , preserve your valuable ephemera in archival frames for permanent enjoyment. \ I creativé habitat at Ben Franklin ‘ .".1i‘:‘.i'Q.‘.'l.".'. - - Flllrliilliilii ecflva-34$:-mg l"l‘ it B? liii?‘-Ut‘-‘lri R',EB”£ — L Dapio GENDER SPECIALISV individual, couple, family and goup i.sur9eryandireferfafs.fi> medical .setVi<=9S.f0r . . Gender Dysphoria AssociafionI’.v[l~llBGDAja'dil i I IIininos.is Works Item fllitlnuton. um _ . . Ilrllntlllmanlst I 302-345.2943 for 453-,54l1’ leaf Sleep Lose Weight, Conquer Fears and Phobia, Control Habits, Manage Stress Pulp Bv ELIZABETH A. ALLEN of cheap paperbacks lured read- ers between their covers for soft- core girl-on-girl action. Interestingly, it was a title by a lesbian that touched off this wildfire of pulp fic- tion. Cleis Press’ new edition of Spring Fire by Vin Packer (one of the noms de plume of Marijane Meaker) contains the unabridged text, as well as a new preface by Meaker. In this context, you can see lesbian pulps as more than cheap thrills for straight guys; Spring Fire touched off a literary change that sped along the lesbian-rights move- ment. In the 19505 and 19605, hundreds At first, lesbian pulps, with their stereotypical plots and strong revulsion toward homosexuality, hardly look revolutionary. The origi- nal back text of Spring Fire asks, “Will Leda [the older sorority sister] corrupt [blond ingénue] Mitch? Or will the strong and silent Mitch draw the queen of Tri Ep into the forbid- den world of Lesbian love?” The threadbare seduction set-up leads to perfunctory sadomasochistic sex. Soon Leda gets in a car crash and ends up nuts in an asylum, while Mitch drops out of college, heartbro- ken. In novels like Spring Fire, les- bianism shares an underworld with heinous sex crimes that lead to disaster. The homophobia within lesbian pulps mirrors the culture in which Meaker and others wrote. In fact, Meaker’s editor told her that Spring Fire couldn’t contain any- thing construed as remotely condon- ing homosexuality, since that would violate postal obscenity codes. Far from celebrating lesbian sexuality, the pulps condemned it. Yet, in the hands of lesbian readers, Spring Fire and its ilk were revolutionary for their widely dis- tributed descriptions of lesbian life. Meaker portrays the isolation of post-WWII gay culture in her pref- ace: “The majority of us were closet- ed. My sorority sisters knew nodiing about my homosexual love affair in boarding school. There were no magazines or newspapers about us, no clubs for us to belong I to” [p. vii]. Though Meaker men- tions the bar scene, queer culture back then seems mostly fragmentary, made up of secretive, anxious indi- viduals who knew no direct way to find support. So, when lesbians ‘opened the covers of pulps like Spring Fire, they found links to their sisters. It was clear to the queer female readers that some authors, like Meaker and other lesbian-pulp authors who were lesbians themselves, knew what they ‘were talking about. For example, here’s Mitch having an identity crisis in the middle of Spring Fire: ’A Lesbian was abnormal, a female who could not have sat- isfactory relations with a male, but only with another female, and Mitch knew it had been that way [with her]. Mitch thought back to the crushes she had had in boarding school, awful emotional orgies in which she had idolized certain teach- ers, and there had never had been any boys. Until Leda, there had been no one who had set her whole body pulsing with the sweet pain and the glory in the end. That was abnormal. [pg- 83] Amateur style aside, Meaker’s description of Mitch’s realization rings painfully true. Trying to understand her attraction to Leda, Mitch questions herself. Should she trust an authoritative ‘t! Lesbian Rights psychology text, which says she’s a dissatisfied freak‘? Or should she trust her own desires? When lesbians of any age reconcile themselves to their sexuality, they often vacillate between these two choices, both of A which seem equally scary. Such scenes in Spring Fire and later titles I 1‘ brought these once-hidden struggles of lesbian life into mainstream ‘print for the first time. N Since Spring Fire and its descendants could be easily pur- chased in drugstores and tobacco shops nation-wide, the books reached thousands of grateful women. The book sold almost 1.5 million copies in its first printing, generating loads of fan mail, notes Meaker in her preface, “from women all over the United States.” These readers cherished the pulps as signs that they were not alone; they — also, Meaker says, “alerted the pub- lishing world to the fact that there was a very large audience for books about lesbians.” So publishers churned out more pulps, and readers — some men, but also many women —. snapped them up. Descriptions of lesbian life were thus disseminated. Spring Fire may have consoled women on an individual level, but it and subsequent titles also certainly sent some women in search of the life they read about. Meeting in sororities, bars, artists’ colonies and urban enclaves described in the books, lesbians found love, heartache, acceptance. With increased visibility in both pulps and their larger social groups, lesbians developed a greater sense of group identity and even political co_n- sciousness. While superficially dis- couraging lesbian subcultures, pulps actually strengthened them by bring- ing women together and were thus both a catalyst and result of the nas- cent lesbian-rights movement. V Elizabeth A/[en S(l!iAfi£’.V /zer lust for pulp fictimi in Boston.