“ Here, in a single volume, it has been our intention to list, document and review every novel dealing, however slightly, with female variance, lesbianism or intense emotional relationships between women. We have also included a majority of the better known novels which, dealing primarily with male homosexuality, are of interest to the collector of variant fiction in general. ”

“ A married woman with a grown son and indifferent husband, returning to college for work on a college degree, is ripe for an affair with “Bake”, a confirmed lesbian. The affair is told with sufficient skill and restraint to make it believable; even Frankie’s eventual return to her old life is not a cliche “happy ending” but well prepared and well characterized. Remarkably good; the degree of progress from the first to the third of these novels makes your editors anxious to see where Miss Taylor goes from here. ”

“ Now obviously the field of homosexual literature is going to place a certain emphasis on the sexual problems of humanity which will be quantitatively greater than that of—say—the Western novel, or the detective story. Sex alone has not been made an excuse for consigning any novel to the trashbin. ”

“ An unmarried woman missionary in Siam incurs criticism and suspicion when she shows marked favor to an unfortunate American girl at the mercy of the Orient; later, when she risks her own life by isolating herself to nurse Angela through typhoid, she loses her own position. Neither the author nor the heroine of the novel admit the faintest tinge of lesbianism to the relationship, which is full of warmth and selfless sacrifice, and India angrily denies the accusation when it is made ”

“ However, in self-defense, we have had to find a way to dispose of the more repetitive rubbish. Allowing for differences in taste, and granting that many people like their books well-spiced, if there is a reasonably well-written story along with the sex we have called it “Evening waster”—on the grounds that it may very well provide pleasant entertainment for anyone not a hopeless prude. ”

“ This is perhaps the best American source for current novels in hard covers and non-fiction. They issue catalogs and lists, give a sizable discount for large orders, and will also locate hard-to-find or out-of-print books. Leslie Laird Winston, who is the presiding genius here, is one of the nicest people to deal with that we have ever known. Every month they feature some new or special book in the field, at a special price. Getting on their mailing list is the best thing that can happen to a collector. ”

“ Excellent novel of a Belgian family; the weakling son marries, brings his bride into home dominated by his mother, shadowed by his lonely sister. Eventually sister takes the young woman away from her brother. ”

“ The blurb reads “Life and love among warped women”, but don’t let it scare you. This is one of the better and more serious approaches to the writing of a serious novel of lesbians through the stereotyped pattern of the paperback novel. The basic plot concerns Anne, and her experiences in trying to find out for herself, the hard way, whether she is a lesbian or whether she can successfully adjust to life as a normal woman. The story ends with the surprising, but growingly popular affirmation that “adjustment” is not always to be desired at all costs. ”

“ Naive, if not too intelligent girl sent to a woman’s reformatory, encounters the usual hardening experiences—corrupt matrons, police-court-type lesbians, trusties and well-meaning officials who have their lives to live and can’t or won’t do anything to better conditions. ”

“ In the course of this novel a curious and intense relationship develops between Elsie and a young schoolmistress named Helen; a compulsive domination, attraction and revulsion. One might suspect Dr. Holmes, whose medical writings and observations place him far ahead of his era psychologically, of gentelly camouflaging a portrait of variance, 100 years ago, by making the girl a creature of macabre fantasy. ”

“ Much of the work of this important French novelist was variant. Only the most explicit are named above. The first three form a connected narrative, telling of Claudine’s school crushes, her friendship with a male-homosexual cousin, and her “indulgent husband” who connives at her lesbian affair with a woman friend, in order to enjoy it secondhand. “Bella Vista” tells of a vacation spent, at a hotel managed by two middle-aged lesbians; the narrator’s fascinated interest in the couple vanishes when one of the “ladies” turns out to be, actually, a disguised man. ”

“ The heroine’s hesitation between marriage with a steady and reliable man, and insecure excitement with a hoodlum, is resolved when her affairs are interrupted by concern for the daughter of a friend; the young lesbian, Mab, whose life has become entangled with some very shady characters. ”

“ Fine, funny, highly risque story of the king of a strange country, who has a thousand wives, like Solomon, and believes in freedom for everybody except his daughter, Aline—who eventually runs away with a “boy” who is really a girl. ”

“ Evening waster about a young no-good who earns his living as a paid escort/gigolo and relaxes with boy friends but still loudly insists he is normal. Your editor enjoyed this out of sheer perversity; usually novels treating of male homosexuality engage the subject with deadly seriousness, while the paperback originals reek with drooling voyeuristic strip-teases about lesbians, for the sake of men who like to enjoy pipe-dreams about lesbians making love, and about some Big Handsome Hero who eventually converts the girls to “normality” with some secret formula of caresses. ”

“ A repressed, inhibited, small-town girl, Lavinia, at the mercy of elderly tyrannical relatives, forms a close friendship with a Negro man who was her only childhood friend. The friendship between Lavinia and Augustus is purely platonic; she attends a school he has set up for colored girls who wish to improve themselves, and he helps to find her a job ”

“ Laura suffers under this treatment for a long time, then runs away again to shack up with a butch-type Village character, Beebo. In the third book, Laura and Beebo have been living together for two years; Laura is tiring of this lengthy affair and cheats on Beebo with a colored dancer named Tris, while Beebo, to win Laura back, resorts to such trickery as staging a phony “rape” ... inflicting wounds on herself in search of sympathy. Tiring of this life, Laura runs away again, this, time to marry a male homosexual friend, Jack, in a search for stability and permanence. ”

“ The plus indicates good of kind, not intrinsic merit. An interesting story of a lesbian triangle—Chris, Dizz, and young Carol. One reader commented that this story was a sort of lesbian dreamworld—these women seemed to live in a society, and a world, completely unmixed with ordinary life at all. Certainly they are all treated as quite the ordinary thing, and there are almost no hints that there is a heterosexual world outside the gay one, which must be taken into account. Certainly it makes no incursions into the novel. ”

“ Your editors have conscientiously waded through all this newsstand slush (and believe me, we get no kick out of it) because experience has taught us that even the worst peddlers of commercialized sex-trash sometimes come up with exceptionally well-written, honest and sincere work. For instance, Beacon Books (a subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Company) —some of whose paperback originals can be called printable only by the uttermost charity,—are currently also publishing the work of Artemis Smith, one of the major writers in the variant field today. ”

“ It is our further contention that many novels dealing with male homosexuality come also within the province of the serious collector of lesbiana. We make, however, no claim for completeness for novels which fall within the homosexual, rather than the lesbian province. In general, the male titles included in this list—clearly defined, in each case, by the sign (m) —have been included because they were of special interest to the editors and therefore are presumably of interest to other collectors of lesbiana. ”

“ Based on the Pierre Louys novel, this starred 366 models and dancers from the Folies bergeres; among these near-nude and nubile nymphs was one disguised as a male ballet dancer, with whom the King’s daughter Aline had a romance even after discovering that they were of the same sex.
ALL ABOUT EVE took the Academy Award in 1950. There is a very lesbian situation used to introduce the main protagonist into the movie; later events proved the woman only pretending lesbian-type devotion, but the inference, in the beginning, is clear and unmistakable. ”

“ A man makes the most important decision of his life on the rebound of disillusion after discovering that a woman who risked her life to save him is a lesbian.
+ KRAMER, N. MARTIN (pseud. of Beatrice Ann Wright) . Hearth and The Strangeness. Macmillan 1956, pbr Pyramid 1957. An excellent novel of the fear of inherited insanity in a family. The youngest child, Aliciane, becomes a lesbian; this is one of the few realistic and unromanticized portraits of the factors in the development of homosexuality from childhood. ”

“ Allegedly a novel of a woman’s prison, complete with glossary of “prison slang”—but if the author has ever been inside a woman’s prison, or even done any authentic research, your editors will eat a copy of the book, complete with cover jackets. Brief plot; butchy Rusty makes a pass at prison newcomer Marcia, in order to share her commissary credits. When Rusty gets out of prison she marries and goes straight and Marcia kills herself. ”

“ Mixed bag of passengers on a transcontinental train, including a lesbian who tries to captivate a young girl and is murdered by another passenger to give her intended victim “a chance at real happiness with a man.” ”

“ Brittle novel about a wall street banker; his beautiful wife is a lesbian, but he naively believes her faithful because she prefers the company of women.
+ HASTINGS, MARCH. Demands of the Flesh. Newsstand Library pbo, 1959. Ellen, a young widow suffering from physical frustration, goes through a period of promiscuity involving several men and a brief affair with a lesbian, Nita. Oddly enough for this sort of borderline-risque stuff, the lesbian character is well and realistically drawn; realizing that Ellen is basically normal, she helps keep her on an even keel until she remarries. ”

“ World Without Women. pbo Gold Medal, 1960, Science-fictional evening waster; all the women in the world die off, except a few, who must be carefully protected as potential mothers of the human race. One episode involves all the surviving lesbians, who barricade themselves in a prison. ”

“ These people are the out-of-print bookfinders par excellence. I’ve ordered many books from them; their prices are reasonable, never exorbitant; their service is good, the books they supply are always of high quality. ”

“ One brief, incomplete lesbian episode in a long, interesting novel of a woman’s continual search for real love in a life filled with fleeting liaisons.
+ FERGUSON, MARGARET. The Sign of the Ram. London, Philadelphia, The Blakiston Co, 1944-45. Sherida comes as companion-secretary to crippled Leah, passionately adored by her whole family including sixteen-year-old Christine. Subtly playing on Christine’s emotions, Leah spurs her to the point where she attempts to murder Sherida. On the surface, the motivation is simply the love of power, but Christine’s emotions are clearly variant ”

“ Three Women. pbo Beacon Books 1958. Good and sympathetic story of a young girl involved with a basically decent older woman, a lesbian, Byrne. Unfortunately Byrne is deeply involved with, and obligated to, her Insane cousin Greta, and the affair ends in tragedy, leaving young Paula to marry her faithful boy friend. The lesbian interlude, however, is treated not as a “twisted love in the shadows” or any such cliche matter, but simply as a human relationship, in its' total effect on Paula’s personality; and she always remembers Byrne with affectionate regret. ”

“ Happily untypical of this publisher’s racy trash, this story of a young man searching for self-knowledge in New York’s Bohemias is very good of its’ kind.
DELL, FLOYD. Diana Stair. Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. Long novel of the early 19th century. Diana is a woman writer, but also explores life as mill-girl, school-teacher and abolitionist. Though attracted to, and attractive to men, she is never without “some older woman to adore and emulate, or some younger woman to teach and inspire.” ”

“ A novel about London teenagers, told in Soho idiom—a sort of bastard hip-talk. The characters in this novel include several male homosexuals, and one lesbian, Big Jill. Enough space is devoted to social problems, by an author who is quite obviously one of the “angry young men”, to give this novel real status. ”

“ An idyll of two women ends tragically with the marriage of the younger.
WELLS, KERMIT. Reformatory Women. Bedside Books pbo 1959. Surprisingly good for this publisher of rubbish. After escaping from a sadistic lesbian matron in the reformatory, Noreen works as a fake butch in a Greenwich Village Gay bar and tourist trap; later goes to work for gangsters in a roadhouse, falls for a nice boy and goes back to serve her reformatory sentence and marry him when she gets out. Pleasant evening waster. ”

“ Very well-written novel of Paula Harman, young school-teacher coming to terms with her life as a lesbian through bitter experience. Don’t let the lurid paperback covers and blurb scare you off, this is a NOVEL—well worth hard covers and a steal at 35¢.
BROCK, LILYAN. Queer Patterns. Greenberg 1935, pbr Avon 1951, 1952. Purple-patched sloppily sentimental tale of Sheila, beautiful young actress with a perfect husband who nevertheless loses her heart to Nicoli, a stereotype lesbian complete with tuxedo. They part to avoid gossip and live unhappily ever after. ”