During my senior year of college, I read forty-four lesbian pulp novels. They were research for my thesis: a play about lesbians in 1958 that drew heavily from the novels’ style and themes. (It was a very historically women’s college/liberal arts kind of project.)
The books I focused on were from the “golden age” of lesbian pulp – roughly 1955-19651. Their content was shaped by the conflicting influences of heavy censorship and prurient (largely male) audiences. They’re fantastic reads – absurd and formulaic, predictably plotted, erotic without actually depicting sex. You’ve probably seen some of their covers before.
As I began collecting them, I ran into an interesting problem: I could only find the best.
Paperback originals, which exploded in popularity after World War II, were sold not at bookstores but train stations, drugstores, and lunch counters. They were meant to be consumed like magazines – plucked from a wire rack for a quarter and discarded after reading. “Pulp” refers to the cheap paper they were printed on. They weren’t designed to stand the test of time.
Books are not the easiest items to preserve in the first place, susceptible as they are to heat and moisture. And most of us don’t really try to preserve them. My own personal library is full of dogeared and stained pages – books are functional objects, not aesthetic ones. They get tossed in bags, read and dropped on trains, fall victim to cups of coffee and sweating water bottles. Titles that endure are not, for the most part, handed down from generation to generation, but reprinted and offered anew.
Most pulp novels, lesbian or not, haven’t been deemed worth reprinting. In the 80’s, a handful of small feminist presses reissued some gems from the golden age. Between Naiad Press and Cleis Press, a modern reader can easily find a copy of Ann Bannon, March Hastings, or Valerie Taylor’s novels – novels written by actual lesbians, not men writing under “female” pseudonyms, and notable for their sensitivity and relative lack of voyeurism. Lesbians rallied to preserve their books, noting that for many readers they were an early lifeline. A few other authors have been reprinted due to success elsewhere; Fletcher Flora and Lawrence Block both gained attention for their hard-boiled crime writing, lending relevance to their earlier work in romance. But for the most part, lesbian pulp has been deemed outdated and insignifcant by the publishing industry. The presses treated their books just as consumers did – used for a moment, then discarded without a second thought.
Many of these books have been lost to time. And, with almost every single writer working under a pseudonym (or several), we may never even know who wrote some of them. Their practically interchangeable titles (chosen by editors, not authors) don’t help either; Twilight Girl, Edge of Twilight, Sexual Twilight, Whisper Their Love, Another Kind of Love, This Side of Love, The Other Side of Desire, The Other Side of Venus, Women in the Shadows, Strange Sisters, The Twisted Ones, Odd Girl Out, Warped, Warped Desire, The Third Sex, The Third Theme, The Third Street, The Third Lust, The Third Way, Three Women – god, they all just blend together.
The thing is, I want to know what the mediocre books contained. When only the exceptional are saved, how are we supposed to know what the average reader’s experience would have been? There were over 500 lesbian titles published in a decade and a half, with maybe a few dozen reprinted since. I can read analyses of how a handful of clever lesbian writers were able to subvert tropes and expectations, but with few of their contemporaries’ preserved, how am I supposed to truly comprehend what they were subverting?
It’s a problem I’ve been reminded of lately as I search for a mediocre noir to watch. I adore The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, but these are the standouts in their genre. I’ve seen some of the less popular but critically adored films saved by the Criterion Collection or TCM, like In a Lonely Place or Kiss Me Deadly. But what about the accidentally cheesy? Where are the detectives who are so hardboiled they become parodies of themselves? Noir has got be one of the most parodied genres of film out there, but easy as the tropes are to name, they’re not so simple to find. Is it too much to ask for a monologue about a dame with long legs walking into a private eye’s office and spelling trouble?
This is more a matter of research than preservation, sure. If I find a movie I want to watch, more often than not I can find a way to watch it. But as our media becomes more digital, more streaming- and cloud-based, I wonder how long that will be the case. I no longer have DVDs and CDs of the shows, movies, and music I love. A song that’s easy to stream today is not guaranteed to be there tomorrow.2 Already we’ve seen shows and movies created exclusively for streaming services get wiped entirely from those very services when they fail to perform as expected.
When Paramount deletes four shows from their platform within months of their release (supposedly to take advantage of tax write offs) and HBOMax shelves nine almost-finished projects as it becomes Max (again, for tax write offs), there’s a new urgency to an old question: who decides what’s worth saving? We’re all at the mercy of a great cultural/media archive, but who are the archivists?
Archivation is an inherently political process. A curator can exclude radical work, can disregard the contributions of marginalized artists – whether consciously or not, they’ll always be subject to their own personal biases. Or they can sanitize history, erasing examples of past bigotry in an attempt to protect a company or creator’s present reputation.3 Again, the question surfaces: what is worth saving, and who gets to decide?
If we erase the existence of movies and shows the moment they fail to meet some specific metric, how will we have any new cult classics? What about all the projects that initially flopped only to find a devoted following years or even decades later? What about the critically adored but not widely popular?4 Clearly the executives at Discovery and Disney and Viacom are culling projects based solely on profitably. A handful will find second lives on smaller platforms like Tubi, but there is no Criterion Collection equivalent for TV, no one seeking out and saving the hidden gems of streaming or cable.
And even if there were someone preserving the best of this era of television, we’re back to my original problem. Who saves the crap? Do we just eventually lose access to forgettable sitcoms like Home Economics or occasionally heinous reality shows in the vein of MILF Manor? I guess it’s easy to say who cares, or that this stuff just doesn’t really matter. Besides, it’s not like we’re ever going to stop cranking out sitcoms and dating shows.
It feels like maybe we’ll lose something revealing about the cultural moment, though. What matters about the mid-tier media of any given generation isn’t so much the quality of its artistry but its content. The plot points of easy, safe TV shows, the tropes that appear over and over again in commercial literature, the trends of box office flops – these all tell us something crucial about our cultural values and anxieties. It’s inevitable that we remember the highlights. It just seems a shame that we might forget the average.
I think there’s value in the mediocre, and plenty of my favorite movies were critically reviled. Sometimes a movie is fun because it’s colorful and stupid. Sometimes you let seventeen episodes of Home Economics play in the background while you crochet a sweater, even though you decided during episode two that you’re not that into it. Sometimes you just need the dulcet, repetitive tones of HGTV’s most middling content to keep you company.
I don’t know, man. Someone made all this stuff.5 And someone, somewhere, loved it. It just seems like a waste to throw that away.
xoxo,
Franny💋📀📚
I’ve often seen the “golden age” defined as 1950-1965, but seeing as Vin Packer’s Spring Fire, the first true lesbian pulp novel, wasn’t even published until 1952, frankly I don’t know what the hell people are talking about.
A solution on the personal level is to create your own archive – I’m not overlooking the powers of piracy or a massive DVD collection
Disney has added a disclaimer to some of their content on Disney+: “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe. To learn more about how stories have impacted society, please visit www.disney.com/StoriesMatter.” They aren’t the only studio to add such a warning.
It’s a good first step, but Disney is still profiting from this outdated, racist content. Still, it seems better than Hulu and Netflix’s policy of removing offensive episodes of tv shows they still host otherwise, without any explanation of the gaps in the catalogue, as if they never existed.
Cultural relevance doesn’t guarantee longevity either. Despite its popularity, there are 97 lost episodes of Doctor Who. The BBC’s piss poor archiving before 1978 means that modern archivists rely on private collectors. Chris Perry, once such archivist, told RadioTimes that “Every year we find 50-70 lost programmes, some famous titles and internationally known names and others not, but significant examples of regional television output, for example.”
After all, art isn’t just for audiences. People need creative outlets, regardless of talent. It gets more complicated when the work becomes commercial – it’s not just about personal expression and the act of creation, but about crafting a product, about money and marketability and bottom lines. But still, someone made that thing. It’s connected to the labor of dozens or hundreds of people, and surely someone somewhere will want to see it again someday. Shouldn’t a key grip get to pull up a movie decades from now and show their grandchildren what they were a part of, even if just to say look how awful this was?
Shouldn’t artists get to lay claim to their own work? Shouldn’t the creators be the ones to decide what they save, and what they no longer want to be seen? But then what happens when a piece is collaborative? What happens when it’s made by a team of hundreds? What happens when a media conglomerate buys the rights? Well, we know the answer to that one…
Thirty years ago, my mother came in second place on Jeopardy. It’s a constant topic of conversation among my family that we have no access to the episode. It’s not available anywhere online. She had a VHS tape at one point, but it was lost decades ago when her basement flooded, and we don’t have a VCR player anymore anyway. It’s weird to know that she was on TV, and millions of people saw it, but her children probably never will.