Special Collections

(Not So) Steamy Saturday

“The times had brought changes to Whitebridge. Could Jane Weaver, R.N., take up her old life and duties… ?”
“‘Jane, I’d like you to meet Dr. Boyd Daves… .’ It took all of Jane’s poise to cover her surprise. For the handsome man smiling politely at her from behind the wheel was black.”
“A new black doctor had introduced the racial question … and Jane found not the threads of her old life but a new challenge to her heart.”

Of the 500+ nurse romance novels from the 1940s to the early 1970s in our collection, it is rare to find one with African American main characters, let alone having them depicted on the cover, and even rarer are interracial relationships. In our collection, the nurse romances that do were all published after Civil Rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Such is the case this pulp novel, Homecoming Nurse by Rose Dana (one of the many pseudonyms for prolific pulp-fiction writer W.E.D. Ross, 1912-1995), published in New York by Lancer Books in 1968.

With the novel showcasing many of the social taboos of the time – divorce, a small New England town forced to come to terms with contemporary racial issues, racially-exclusive country clubs, interracial relationships, mental illness, the village ice queen chasing after a married man – we thought it would have the makings of a fairly steamy plot. But, alas, its narrative is plodding and pedestrian with barely a wisp of steam. Disappointing. To its credit, however, with the entire town fretting over the potential of miscegenation, the story does culminate in an interracial engagement (between the main character Jane’s friend Maggie and Dr. Boyd, not Jane herself). Getting there, however, is tedious and about as exciting as an ice cream parlor on a sleepy New England main street.

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Steamy Saturday

“ … without the society of women, homosexual practices are likely to be evident… .”
“Now Van moved into the masculine world of politics … where he learned that the price of power was a surrender to lust in all forms.”
“Van was almost a senator when Jeff seduced him… and then blackmailed his career … and his manhood.”

Senator Swish by Aaron Thomas (misspelled Arron on the cover), published in 1968 by adult-book publisher William Hamling’s Phenix Publishing/Greenleaf Classics in San Diego as part of its Companion Book series, has a plot line where the main character goes beyond binary choice and learns to accept his bisexuality.

The story line is a little complicated, but here’s a synopsis: Van is a successful L.A. lawyer tapped to run for senator. His girlfriend Jennifer works in the fashion industry and is off on assignment for a couple of weeks. While she’s gone, her college-student brother Jeff shows up, and Van soon learns that Jeff is gay, which upsets him greatly. Nevertheless, Jeff manages to seduce Van, and while he’s conflicted about his sexuality, Van certainly enjoys his time with Jeff. Still, if this affair came out, it would jeopardize his run for senator, and then of course there’s Jennifer. Van decides to get Jeff an apartment so he can be with Jennifer and have her brother on the side. Yeah, that’ll work out great; problem solved.

Jennifer eventually returns and Van tells her that her brother has returned from college. Jennifer is confused and proves to him that her brother is still in Ohio at college. Plot twist! Jeff is not who he says he is! Turns out, this rather elaborate ruse by ersatz-Jeff was just a complicated (and not very believable) frame to blackmail Van! Oh no! But, Jennifer and Van turn the tables on counterfeit-Jeff (how? No spoiler here!), and Jennifer, while hurt by the affair that almost ruined their lives, forgives Van because, after all, she works in the fashion industry and understands the queer world where men can “go both ways.” Oh, lucky Van! They agree to marry, and presumably live happily ever after. We never do learn whether Van becomes a senator, however.

We don’t have any information on the author Aaron Thomas, although the name is used as author for quite a number of gay pulp novels, but we do know that the cover art (apparently trying to appeal to multiple sexual orientations?) is by noted artist and illustrator Darrel Millsap (1931-2012).

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Steamy Saturday

“She longed to declare a love that the world would not accept.”
“For a while, the kittenish Terry Brooks fulfilled that strange desire within her.”
“Then … her brother brought his wife, Kathy, to the city… .”
“Was it right to love her brother’s wife so passionately?”
“… temptation built up within Elaine to a smashing climax!”

Since we haven’t scanned the plot yet, all we know about the story is what is revealed on the covers and inside blurb, which are intriguing enough. But we were initially drawn to In the Shadows, by noted lesbian fiction writer Joan Ellis and published in New York by Midwood in 1962, by its stylish cover illustrated by the veteran pulp cover artist Robert Mcguire.

We do know, however, that the author Joan Ellis, one of the many pseudonyms used by the writer Marilyn Sylvia Wasserman (1919-2006), although not a lesbian herself, insisted on happy endings for her lesbian characters at a time when most lesbian fiction ended in tragedy or a return to heterosexuality. A quick review of the final page of this novel seems to show that, whether or not the romance ended well, the main character, high-powered business executive Elaine Ransome, seems at peace with her decision to return to a life of painting and contemplation.

Wasserman wrote fiction under many different names for a number of pulp publishers, but ended her career writing mainstream fiction under the name Julie Ellis. One of her colleagues at Midwood noted that “Julie was not a ‘dirty book writer,’ didn’t belong in our business, too much class.” Her niece Robin Cohen, a collector of lesbian pulps, only came to learn that her great aunt was the Joan Ellis after decades of collecting. Cohen discusses this in her You Tube presentation, My Life in the Pulps.

Joan Ellis (left) with celebrated lesbian fiction writer Ann Bannon in 2004.

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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

There is love, tender and tempestuous… .
Curt Wiley, a handsome Texas engineer, came to town… .
Judy hated Curt the moment she met him… .
Then, … Judy discovered that Curt was not the playboy he appeared to be … but a decent sensitive human being … who seemed to be falling in love with her.
Judy found herself head over heels in love!
Suddenly, Neal Bentley seemed dull and uninteresting to Judy.
By spring she had made a decision … a decision that was as much a surprise to Judy as it will be to you.

A surprise? Really? The promotional blurbs project the ending before we even get to the first chapter:

I told you … I wasn’t worth it. I’m not the steady sort – say, like your friend, Neal Bentley… . I won’t make any girl a very good husband. Bentley seems like the right sort for you… .

She had to choose between the rootlessness of a life as a construction man’s wife, or the steady, homespun love of her childhood sweetheart… .

A surprise? Neal Bentley, hint, hint. This is staid New England in the 1950s, after all, where:

“When the sap runs in the maple grove … that’s spring in New England. Spring always comes after the snow – after the storm.”. . Love like Neal’s could guarantee that, no matter what came, spring or storm, . . their love – would never change.

Indeed, there’s definitely more sap than steam in New England Nurse by the prolific nurse romance novelist Adelaide Humphries (a pseudonym for Adelaide Morris Rowe, 1898-1979), first published in pulp paperback by Avon Books in 1956. We do appreciate the cover art, however, with its chilly color palate, asymmetrical design, and the nurse who looks, as our intern Ana observed, “like she’s so over it, but at the same time still into it.” We wish we knew who the cover artist was. And then there’s that keen observation about regional differences: “I’m a Texan, not a New Englander. A roamer, not a rock.” And there you have it, in a nutshell.

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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.

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Steamy Saturday

Nurse Gwen Lansing is dating Dr. Craig Marlowe, but what about her childhood sweetheart Bill Grove, owner of a small-time farm management business, who still pines for her? Oh, the dilemma! On top of that, for reasons that are unclear, Nurse Lansing is despised by her supervisor, Dr. Viola Belsare, and when Gwen disobeys her once too often in aiding her beloved friend and mentor, the elderly and ailing nurse Roz Nordquist, Dr. Belsare loses it and threatens to have her dismissed:

She gave Gwen a cold look. “You’ve directly disobeyed my orders!”
“I’m not on duty now. I came as a friend, not as a nurse.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll see to it that you’re dismissed. As soon as possible. I will not have a disobedient nurse in this hospital. You’re through here, Lansing.”

Darn! We were hoping “Disobedient Nurse” referred to something else. Oh well, it looks like it’s curtains for Nurse Lansing. But wait! Drs. Marlowe and Belsare end up in a car accident, severely injuring Belsare. And why were they in a car together? Because Marlowe has been secretly dating Belsare for weeks! No wonder she was always pissed off at Nurse Lansing. Well, guess that’s it between Craig and Gwen. There’s only one avenue left: back into the loving arms of Mr. Farm Management. “… we’ve got the rest of our lives, Bill. Think of that – the rest of our lives – together!” The End.

There’s more sap than steam in The Disobedient Nurse by prolific nurse romance novelist Arlene Hale (1924-1982), published by Ace Books, a subsidiary of Charter Communications, in 1975. We have to admit, however, that Arlene Hale does have some facility with writing. We might be forgiven for thinking that “Disobedient Nurse” might have other connotations because of the cover art of a nurse draped languidly across a bed with her uniform still on but her shoes off while holding the hand of a young man by the noted romance cover artist Charles Gehm (1929-2015).

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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.

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