UW-Milwaukee Special Collections

Steamy Saturday

“… drawn back to the world she had married to escape.”
“She hadn’t been in a gay bar for a year. She had promised never to visit one again. But her need was too strong.”
“… her struggle with a physical hunger condemned by society.”
“… she remembered her dream of Erika. I have to see her again. But how?
A "journey to fulfillment.”
“Well, … the landlady won’t approve.”

Several months ago, we posted about the 1960 lesbian romance novel Stranger on Lesbos by the well-respected lesbian pulp novelist Valerie Taylor (1913-1997). That story, about married suburbanite Frances Ollenfield’s edgy romance with butch barfly Mary Baker (Bake to her friends), ends with the dissolution of the relationship and Frances’s return to her husband. Very dissatisfying.

Apparently, Taylor thought so too and sought to rectify it in this sequel Return to Lesbos, a Midwood-Tower Book published in New York by Tower Publications in 1963. Here, Frances, after trying to stay with a husband she cannot love, returns to the clandestine queer bar scene, meets and falls in love with Holocaust survivor Erika Frohmann, and this time never returns. Now that’s more like it!

This novel forms part of Taylor’s Frances Ollenfield Series, which along with Stranger on Lesbos also includes A World Without Men (1963), in which Erika Frohmann is introduced; Journey to Fulfillment (1964), which offers Erika’s backstory; and the much-later Ripening (1988), where Erika and Frances grow old together and come out.

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Steamy Saturday

Sam: a successful man who is also an unabashed homosexual.
Toby: lusts darker and more deadly than homosexuality ate at his being.
Addie: she craved fulfillment as a woman.
Walter: he could love both men and women – for pay.
A frank novel of lives and loves in a strange twilight world.

For 1959, this was steam beyond steam. But even in its time, Sam by American novelist and playwright Lonnie Coleman (1920-1982), published in New York by David McKay Publications, and issued as a pulp paperback a year later by Pyramid Books, was praised for its sharp writing, witty dialogue, well-developed characters, and its frank, sensitive treatment of a subject that was quite taboo in its day. This is not surprising, as Coleman, who was an editor at Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s, was already a very successful author of eight novels and several short stories before writing Sam. And his success continued after Sam, especially with his 1973 Civil War-themed New York Times Best Seller Beulah Land, which along with its sequel Look Away, Beulah Land (1977) was turned into the highly-popular but critically-panned 1980 NBC tv miniseries Beulah Land starring Lesley Ann Warren, Michael Sarrazin. Meredith Baxter, and Don Johnson.

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Steamy Saturday

Desire and torment.
Edith’s closeness filled her with a disturbing excitement.
Joyce moved closer, impelled by a loneliness she couldn’t define.
Love made her prey to tormented and forbidden passions.
Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world.
A haunting and shocking story.
All parents should read this book.

All parents should read this book? Well yes, according to the notorious “Park Avenue psychiatrist” Richard H. Hoffmann (1887–1967): “Those who do must leave it with the conviction that they are derelict in their duties if they abandon their responsibilities to immature girls and boys… .”

Whisper Their Love by noted lesbian pulp fiction writer Valerie Taylor (1913-1997), published in Greenwich, Connecticut by Fawcett Publications’ Gold Medal Books in 1957, is a story about lonely 18-year-old freshman Joyce who is seduced by the much older Edith, dean of the college. Oh, the depravity! But as usual in lesbian romances of the 1950s, a man comes along and saves the day. Nevertheless, this first lesbian romance by Taylor was praised for its authentic depiction of lesbian relationships. American writer and publisher Barbara Grier, in her oft-cited “Grier ratings,” gave Whisper Their Love an A** for its sympathetic lesbian characters.

Taylor’s own title for this novel was The Heart Takes Many Paths, but the publisher changed it to Whisper Their Love, which Taylor found “disgusting” because it alluded to secrecy and forbidden relationships, a more societally-acceptable understanding of lesbianism. In subsequent lesbian romances, Taylor tried to maintain greater control over content production, because in writing fiction centered on lesbians she believed “we should have some stories about real people,” not the imagined lives of lesbians that were written mainly by men at the time.

View another lesbian romance by Valerie Taylor.

Steamy Saturday

Twilight lives of talent & torment.
Man-for-man in the world of dance.
The ones who call themselves “strange.”
They drift into a pastel world of fey relationships.
Men who are not quite men.
Hansome, desperate, twisted, born to dance.

The world of dance, as depicted in numerous media iterations, is just bathed in steam! Very often in queer steam. And so it is with Mr. Ballerina by American writer, dancer, and film actor Ronn Marvin (1919-1998), published in Evanston, Illinois by Regency Books (another William Hamling imprint) in 1961. Despite the genre and its inevitable tragic ending, Mr. Ballerina is actually fairly well-written, with authentic dialogue and believable depictions of gay relationships.

The story centers on dancer Dana Bates who works under dance director Lee Apollo at Hemisphere. Dana’s lover is musician Ralph Matthews, who is convinced that he is probably straight, and that it was actually his mother and then Dana, playing on his sexual needs, who turned him into a homosexual. Ralph seeks a way out and turns to a woman who herself is trying to rescue her mother from a lesbian relationship. Ralph breaks up with Dana, punches him in the nose (breaking it), has sex with the woman and proposes to her. Meanwhile, Dana barely escapes a police raid on an all-male party at Lee Apollo’s place but is outed to the police by some jealous flames, leading to the tragic ending that we present above.

… everyone has to pay eventually. Some way or other, everyone pays. Now for Dana Bates – Mr. Ballerina, Pride of the Ballet, Princess of the Bed – it was his turn at last.

In an October 1961 review in The Ladder, Barbara Grier (as Gene Damon) laments the negative aspects of the story, but praises its author:

A rather sad look at the very gay world of the ballet, according to Mr. Marvin, exclusively peopled with homosexual boys and an occasional homosexual girl. Basically another of the conflict stories, in which one character fights against his homosexuality. The San Francisco background is very colorful and the presence of major lesbian characters will make this of interest to Ladder readers. A fairly good first novel. Mr. Marvin will bear watching.

Ronn Marvin began his career as a dancer, but a foot injury ended that line of work, so he turned to writing novels and television scripts. He also appeared in four movies during the 1940s: The North Star (1943); Step Lively (1944); George White’s Scandals (1945); and he was Pulaski in the 1947 film Gas House Kids Go West. The cover art for Mr. Ballerina is credited to “Dillon.” While we have found no direct evidence, based on the characteristic style, we believe this to be the legendary illustrating duo Leo and Diane Dillon.

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Steamy Saturday

A lonely young wife faced with the temptations of unnatural love.
Frances had been left alone too often.
Bill’s … indifference had drained their marriage of meaning and warmth.
She had been without love too long.
It was like being dead.
Now Bake, with her dark, knowing eyes, her tense young body, so alive, so full of passion and hunger, had changed all that.

One finds steam where one can get it, and for Frances, trapped in a loveless marriage, she finds it in the arms of butch lesbian Mary Baker, Bake to her friends. But can Frances find true fulfillment in the Martini-fueled queer bar life of the lesbian underground? And even so, is that worth abandoning her marriage and her 16-year-old son? Apparently not, because in the end she’s back where she started with her self-absorbed husband, Bill:

Bill smiled down at her, “Want to go somewhere and sit down?”
She slipped her hand into his. “All I want,” she said softly, “is to go home – with you.”
The End.

Doesn’t seem like a satisfying ending to us. But, in this novel, Stranger on Lesbos by the well-respected lesbian pulp novelist Valerie Taylor, published in Greenwich, Connecticut as a Crest Book in the Gold Medal imprint of Fawcett Publications in 1960, the lesbian life is just as selfish and self-absorbed as her one-sided marriage, with the addition of alcoholism. So, is it happily ever after, then? We’ll find out when we showcase the sequel Return to Lesbos (1963) in a later post.

Valerie Taylor, one of the pen names for Velma Nacella Young (1913-1997), was a heralded social activist and author of poetry and lesbian and romance fiction. She was a long-time member of the Daughters of Bilitis, was instrumental in starting the gay and lesbian advocacy group Mattachine Midwest along with Pearl Hart in 1965, helped to found the Lesbian Writers Conference in Chicago in 1974, received the Paul R. Goldman award from the Chicago Chapter of One, Inc. in 1975, and was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1992.

Steamy Saturday

Two people shared a secret – one a woman who denied it – the other a man who knew him as no woman ever had …
He was beautifully built … and I felt the urge rising in me again.
I wanted him now as much as I ever wanted a woman.
The feel of his eager masculinity made me shudder in expectation.
We could make love in the myriad way of unnatural sex.

Oh, how the stealthy devolve into steam! An intrepid magazine reporter is sent to California to infiltrate and report on the Hollywood gay scene – “snooping to find out what makes homosexuals tick!” Despite having a girlfriend and trying to maintain his journalistic objectivity, he is nevertheless drawn deep into gay sex life. But can he extricate himself from this seductive but deviant underworld? In the end, he convinces himself that he has –

I walked with my head high, for now I was certain that there was no trace of the homo about me… . “Dammit,” I told myself aloud, “I’m no more a homosexual than the next man.”

Or is he?

The Dungaree Jungle by Riley Benton was published in West Hollywood as an original All Star Book, a division of Challenge Publications, in 1966. Unfortunately, we could find nothing on the author (a pseudonym, no doubt), the publisher, or the cover artist. Please let us know if you have any information.

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Steamy Saturday

Tormented passions of woman for woman.
… trapped by her own animal desires…
… a half-world of erotic cravings… .
Laura was only the first for Leslie. Then came … Ronnie … . Then Eileen, Doris, Roberta, Annette, and others.
A shocking novel of lesbian love.
… written by a woman who is, herself … a tormented lesbian!

Oh, the steamy, tormented life of the serial lesbian! How can she break free of this “half-world of erotic cravings”? Well, find the right man, of course! Which inevitably she does in this uber-pulpy, “Original Nightstand Book,” Sin Girls by the pseudonymous Marlene Longman, published in 1960 by Nightstand Books, the earliest of the numerous erotic-literature imprints of Greenleaf Classics. The ending is so absurdly predictable and suggestive that we include it here for your amusement.

So, who is this Marlene Longman (an equally suggestive pen name) who would write such pulpy trash? Well, none other than the heralded, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning American science fiction author Robert Silverberg (b. 1935). When science fiction popularity tanked a bit in the late 50s and early 60s, Silverberg turned to writing in other genres, including soft porn. In this, he was aided by science fiction enthusiast, pulp writer, and founder of Greenleaf Classics William Hamling (1921-2017), who was later tried and convicted of obscenity and did jail time. Other notable science fiction writers who wrote for Hamling’s erotic-lit imprints were Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. Silverberg wrote hundreds of erotic novels under various pseudonyms. In a 2000 interview, Silverberg reflected on this period:

I was saddled with a huge debt, at the age of 26… . There would have been no way to pay the house off by writing science fiction … so I turned out a slew of quick sex novels… . It was just a job. And it was, incidentally, a job that I did very well. I think they were outstanding erotic novels.

The cover art for Sin Girls is by the prolific pulp and science fiction illustrator Harold W. McCauley (1913-1977).

Steamy Saturday

Most men fall in love with women. But some men fall in love with themselves.
Jerry Carpenter … was flattered to accept a “body beautiful” photographer’s offer… .
And when he found out the manner in which his photos were being touched up and peddled to perverts, he knew he had to break away… . But then he was already in too deep!
MUSCLE BOY, a novel that bares the naked truth about the Beefcake Kings.

Bud Clifton’s Muscle Boy may not have a whole lot of romance, but it is steamy for all kinds of other reasons. Published in 1958 by Ace Books, the story centers on the travails of teenage bodybuilder Jerry Carpenter who is naively seduced by an unscrupulous photographer into the netherworld of gay beefcake publications. Along the way, Jerry encounters a full cast of nefarious noir-inflected characters keeping him rooted in the seedy underbelly of light porn. It seemed like easy money, but now he wanted out. Oh, the shame of it all! But all is not lost; there’s still his young sweetheart who still believes in him.

Bud Clifton is the pen name of American novelist David Derek Stacton (1923-1968), who under his own name wrote several well-received novels, mainly historical fiction, and works of non-fiction. In his short 15-year career, Stacton published 14 novels and three lengthy non-fiction works. The Guardian called him “the most unjustly neglected American novelist of the post-second world war era.” Reportedly gay himself with a penchant for drag, his pulp novels under the Clifton nom de plume, with lurid stories of violent youth, proved particularly popular and were top sellers for Ace. Wikipedia notes this about Muscle Boy:

Muscle Boy, which features in many histories of gay pulp fiction, was inspired by an actual crime ring based in San Francisco, but Clifton transplanted the action to Muscle Beach and populated it with an assortment of flamboyant party boys and hustlers. The reaction of the real life figures identifiable in the novel was one reason he left the San Francisco area, more or less permanently, in 1959.

Ace Books is especially well known for its line of science fiction paperbacks, but in the 1950s it also ventured into a line of juvenile delinquent novels in its now quite collectable “D” series. Muscle Boy is D-330 in the series and bears original cover art by American painter and prolific crime noir cover artist Robert Maguire (1921-2005).

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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.