How Did Lesbian Pulp Fiction Thrive in the 1950s and ’60s?
THE COVERS ARE what draw you in first, just as they were designed to do. They promise sex but, more strikingly, they promise shock — the jolt of the taboo, the sinful.
They’re illustrations of women, usually two, sometimes more, often half-dressed or undressing, in slips and bras, a strap provocatively sliding down the curve of a shoulder.
A knee is raised as a nylon stocking is tugged off. They generally seem to show dusky rooms; if a window is visible, it’s curtained because what has been happening inside is not for decent eyes to witness.
The women might be lounging on a couch or, more daringly, on a bed with disarranged sheets. In those poses, they have much in common with their counterparts on the covers of any cheap paperback — a mystery, a thriller, a Southern saga — of the 1950s or early ’60s.
