People had to be punished for sexual outlawry of any kind and madness or death were the popular resolutions. Gay and lesbian novels with happy endings were unacceptable. They laid down the law about what could and couldn’t be published, or even sent through the mails by the U.S. There had been a committee in Congress known as the Gathings Committee, or The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. By the mid to late 1950s, the morality cops had eased up. What gave you that edge, to keep it so real?ĪB: I was very lucky to be working a few years later than many of the other women authors who wrote lesbian-themed books. GO: Your books are different, meaning your characters didn’t end up with men or committing suicide, like so many other lesbian pulps from that time. For them, these were not character driven stories for us women, they were. Character development and compelling interactions were regarded only as impediments by the male authors, who were always in a hurry to get to the sex scenes they knew the male readers were searching for. Most of the women who were writing the pulps did manage to slip in some delightful love scenes and some tenderness among the harsher episodes. And somehow you intuited that, even though the sexy ladies in the artwork were presented as morally loose, they had little to do with the story inside the covers. The covers, garish though they were, were cleverly designed to lure the reader in. However, I wondered what made you pick up those lesbian pulps? What did they mean to you?Īnn Bannon: The lesbian pulps were just irresistible. GO Magazine: I have heard in interviews and read in forwards what inspired you to write your novels. In May 2018, I contacted Ann Bannon, hoping to interview this extraordinary woman. Much to Bannon’s surprise, her colleagues warmly accepted her.

Her identity was to remain hidden until the ’80s when Naiad Press contacted her and received permission to reprint her material. Her later years would be spent working as an associate dean at California State University. All of Bannon’s novels were published between 1957-1962.Įventually, Bannon stopped writing lesbian fiction and returned to the university where she received her master’s degree and then a Ph.D. Throughout Odd Girl Out, I Am a Woman, Women in the Shadows, Journey to a Woman, and Beebo Brinker, the audience becomes enticed in an LGBTQ soap opera from the ’50s/’60s era. Her courageous novels tell the epic love stories of three coming of age lesbian women and one gay man. She would go on to write six lesbian pulp fiction novels known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, be dubbed the Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction, and become the subject matter for LGBTQ college courses today.

This college lesbian story was the spark that led Bannon to begin writing. A post shared by Housmans Bookshop on at 11:45am PDTĪt the age of 22, fresh out of college and newly married, Ann Bannon picked up Vin Packer’s Spring Fire.

I Am a Woman by Ann Bannon