Steamy Saturday
- The novel that dares to tell the truth about a perverse love.
- Theirs was a love no man could share!
- Draga yielded her long-legged girlishness to unnatural embraces… . it was an ecstasy such as Draga had never known.
- Her lips were tender and clinging as she pressed them to Jo’s voluptuous flesh… .
- She was on the brink of total perversion… . Draga’s only hope now was – a man!
Oh, the steaminess of it all!! Carol Emory’s pulp novel Queer Affair was published in New York as a Beacon Book, an imprint of Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp., in 1957, and even by today’s standards, the sexual frankness of the novel is pretty steamy. Unfortunately, because it’s the 1950s, a fully-realized lesbian relationship will not stand. At least one of the partners has to be off her nut (in this case, Jo), while in the end male heroes come to the rescue.
The story centers around up-and-coming dancer Draga Hamilton who is introduced to celebrity sculptor Jo Stanhope by Draga’s lawyer Gilbert Young who is desperately in love with Jo. Jo, however, has other ideas, as she seduces the vulnerable Draga and they begin a torrid love affair, which, as already stated, is quite frankly narrated. Draga is head-over-heels, until of course her old flame Ronnie Marsh shows up on the scene and ruins everything for Jo.
In the end, the whole sordid love quadrangle literally devolves into a barely-suppressed S&M encounter. Jo takes her revenge on Draga’s infidelity by grabbing a bullwhip that is inexplicably hung on the wall and beats Draga almost senseless with it. The whipping, however, sends both into a building sexual frenzy until both Gilbert and Ronnie come bursting through the door. Ronnie whisks Draga out of harm’s way (at least as he perceives it), and Gilbert gives Jo a taste of her own whipping medicine, to which both react with this memorable passage:
Jo Stanhope looked up at him with misted eyes. “Oh, Gilbert – you’ve done something for me. You’ve rescued me. Why, it–it was –” “Never mind,” Gilbert said. “And you won’t find it so bad being married to me. After all, I’m sort of womanish, you know.”
Meanwhile, Draga is recovering in Ronnie’s soothing arms, to which she responds, “Move over a little, sweetheart … I want to sit in your lap.” THE END. Ugh!!
Despite Queer Affair being mentioned in several texts on early lesbian pulp novels, we could find nothing on the author Carol Emory, who we suspect is possibly a man. Nevertheless, the author makes sure early on that the reader knows Emery has done their homework on lesbianism:
Gilbert had warned her that the sculptress was a lesbian, but at the time the fact had seemed to her irrelevant. Love between women was not altogether a new and startling idea to Draga. She had read many books on the subject, including those by Radclyffe Hall and Diana Fredericks.
Appropriately, Barbara Grier, in her iconic The Lesbian in Literature, gives Queer Affair a rating of A for having “a major lesbian component but not sympathetically portrayed.” While we may not know who Carol Emory is, we do know that the butch/femme cover art is by Frank Uppwall and was first painted for another pulp novel, Gutter Star by Dorine B. Clark, published in 1954, and then reissued for the cover of Queer Affair three years later.
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