Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels, 1950-1965

The Publisher’s note explains this title as well as I can.
Long before the rise of the modern gay movement, an unnoticed literary revolution was occurring between the covers of the cheaply produced lesbian pulp
paperbacks of the post-World War II era. In 1950, publisher Fawcett Books founded its Gold Medal imprint, inaugurating the reign of lesbian pulp fiction.
These were the books that small-town lesbians and prurient men bought by the millions - cheap, easy to find in drugstores, and immediately recognizable
by their lurid covers: often a hard-looking brunette standing over a scantily clad blonde, or a man gazing in tormented lust at a lovely, unobtainable
lesbian. For women leading straight lives, here was confirmation that they were not alone and that darkly glamorous, "gay" places like Greenwich Village
existed. Some - especially those written by lesbians - offered sympathetic and realistic depictions of "life in the shadows", while others (no less fun
to read now) were smutty, sensational tales of innocent girls led astray. In the overheated prose typical of the genre, this collection documents the emergence
of a lesbian subculture in postwar America.

These stories had one drawback. They were excerpts from full novels, so they never felt as if you got the whole story. But each one clearly described an earth-shaking event in the life of a particular woman. Ann Bannon’s introduction is very thorough and gives us a history of that period.