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The first time you looked at the cover of one of Ann Bannon‘s books, you probably laughed, or groaned, or just put it back. On the cover of Ann Bannon’s book, Odd Girl Out, the blurb reads,

Suddenly they were alone on an island of forbidden desires.

Right. Next?

But wait, just read the first page. It begins:

“Mmmm…” Beth murmured as Laura’s hands began to trace the curves of her back. “Oh, that’s just marvelous.” She shivered a little and Laura trembled with her. “Under my pajamas, Laur.”

Wait. This was published when? 1957.  And it was followed by four more books in the series, following the gay lives of Laura, Beth, Beebo and Jack.

According to the author, she began writing the novel when she was a 22 year old housewife,

utterly unschooled in the ways of the world. There were millions living the same life; I was to be indistinguishable from them for many years, except for the fact, known very few outside my immediate family, that I was the one who wrote a series of lesbian pulp paperback novels under the pen name of Ann Bannon.

Ann Weldy, as Ann Bannon, wrote her first book about a university sorority house. The relationship between the two women was a subplot. After the publisher read it, she was told to rewrite it and focus on the relationship between the two women. Not a word was changed from the second version.

Lesbian novels such as Ann Bannon’s were marketed primarily to heterosexual men. However, lesbians — especially those isolated from the burgeoning gay scenes in the larger cities — found them and read them too. Reading these books, women struggling with their sexuality, identity and isolation could take refuge in characters with similar confusions and imagine themselves in New York City’s Greenwich Village where there was already a large gay scene.

Bannon wasn’t alone in her genre. There were plenty of other writers who wrote (almost universally using pen names)  lesbian pulp fiction. The reason for the enduring quality of Bannon’s work is in their difference. Written by a woman struggling with her own sexuality, who, like her readers, dreamed of freedom and community, her characters didn’t all end up married, crazy or dead, as lesbian characters so often seemed to in other books.

The first character we meet is Laura Landon. She’s a freshman in university and develops a disasterous infatuation with an older, popular student named Beth. Very feminine, coming from privilege, Laura spends the duration of an entire book dating men and wanting Beth. The books follow Laura’s story primarily, from her desire for Beth, to finding herself in New York City and her complicated relationship with Jack, an older gay man who recognises Laura’s struggle before she is ready to.

Perhaps the most unusual and memorable character makes her first appearance in the second book in the series, I am a Woman. (You want to know what the cover of this book says?)

The sudden realization made her gasp — she could fool herself no longer. She wanted a woman… she wanted a woman terribly…

From the stage adaptation of Beebo Brinker

Back to Beebo. Everyone who knows me knows I have a Beebo Brinker crush. She enters the story when Laura notices her in a gay bar.

There was a girl at the bar, standing at one end, in black pants and a white shirt open at the collar. Her hair was short and dark… There were some other people with her and they were all talking, but the short-haired girl seemed somehow apart from them.

It’s the final book in the series, a prequel titled Beebo Brinker, before we learn Beebo’s story. Her character is a real butch archetype from a time when femininity and masculinity were possibly as strictly regulated as they have ever been. In Beebo, we see not simply a struggle with sexual desire, but with gender identity. Beebo, whose name is Betty Jean, is too tall, too broad, handsome rather than pretty, and strong. She takes jobs well below her abilities because they afford her the freedom to wear trousers. Beebo is by times charismatic, confident and headstrong, then all at once desperate and uncertain. Even in the Village, Beebo is one of a kind. Her identity and her inability to live any other way condemns her to the fringes of society, while the other characters mix in and out of mainstream life, passing as straight.

You’ve probably read them. Barbara Grier once wrote that Ann Bannon’s books “rest on the bookshelf of nearly every even faintly literate Lesbian”. So if you haven’t read them, do. Fun and easy to read, Bannon’s writing pokes at truths in a way that makes it so surprising that they were so widely read in the late 1950s, but not so surprising that they are enduring classics.

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