Fear so intense that I remember nothing more, only that I stumbled out of the store in possession of what I knew I must have, a book as necessary to me as air.”įorrest’s experience was not atypical. “Overwhelming need led me to walk a gauntlet of fear up to the cash register. “I did not need to look at the title for clues the cover leaped out at me from the drugstore rack: a young woman with sensuous intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman’s shoulders,” she writes. In her introduction to the anthology, Forrest describes chancing upon Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out for sale in Detroit, Michigan. From the blurb: “She was the brain, the sparkle, the gay rebel voice of the sorority and, wonder of wonders, she chose Laura as her roommate … Suddenly the distance between them closed and they were alone on an island of forbidden bliss.” Public Domain “The books were like water in the desert.” The cover of Ann Bannon’s 1957 Odd Girl Out. Forrest, who compiled the 2005 anthology Lesbian Pulp Fiction. “It was an era of just incredible isolation-a lot of us grew up thinking that we were the only ones,” says the writer Katherine V. Within their pages lay physical proof that they were not entirely alone in the world. But for many women of the 1950s and 1960s, these slim paperbacks were pivotal, and sometimes even life-saving. Not every first encounter with lesbian pulp fiction was so transformative.
Soon after, the two became lovers Hutkin left her husband, and they began a new life together. Finally, she wondered whether she might, in fact, be “like that,” too. Her friend presented her with one salacious-looking book, then another, and another-she had “millions” of the volumes, Hutkin remembers, with the same “wonderful” covers and suggestive taglines: “twilight women,” “forbidden love,” “illicit passion.” Once Hutkin was hooked on the stories, her friend made a confession: “I think I’m like that.”Īt first, Hutkin says, she was horrified. At the time, she says, marriage “was the only way a young woman could get out of her house.” It was the early 1960s, in Montreal, and Hutkin had recently married at 21. When Reva Hutkin’s friend from night school offered to lend her something to read, it must have seemed wholly innocent.