The Glory of Pulp
| 26 May 2010
Lesbian pulp parody author Monica Nolan spoke to Rachel Cook about the phenomenon of lesbian pulp fiction.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
How did your love of lesbian pulp fiction start?
My fascination with lesbian pulp fiction started when I discovered an Ann Bannon* – a Naiad reissue of Journey to a Woman – in the common room of my dorm in my junior year of college. A group of friends and I began reading it out loud, and then acting it out, as we thought it was unintentionally hilarious. My interest was reignited when I discovered that M. E. Kerr, whose YA books I'd enjoyed, had also written lesbian pulp. I was looking up a favourite YA novel – Is That You Miss Blue? – of hers in the library catalogue, and up popped her various pulp aliases. This led me to the Barbara Grier and Donna McBride lesbian pulp collection, fortuitously located in the San Francisco Public Library History Room. You can't take them out, but you can sit at a desk and the librarians will bring you whatever sleazy pulp you request for your reading pleasure. One of the many reasons I love the library.
Your first book was The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories, how did that come about?
That book was a joint inspiration between me and my co-author Alisa Surkis. I don't remember exactly how we came up with the idea, but I do remember that she and her girlfriend were visiting San Francisco and I called in sick to my temp job – I think I said I had food poisoning – so I could spend the day with them. The horse story genre, being so girl focused, just seemed ripe for conversion to lesbian fiction. Once we had the basic concept, we had a lot of fun imagining more and more ridiculous ways to work lesbians and horses into various scenarios. Colleen, Alisa's girlfriend, actually had ridden a great deal – unlike Alisa and myself – so she kept us somewhat grounded in reality. Then we wrote it on and off for a really long time, as we were both living in separate cities – she lives in New York – finishing graduate degrees, working various jobs.
You had a variety of jobs before you became a writer, was that something that was always there?
I had a variety of jobs before I became a writer, and indeed, still do. The necessity of non-writing work will always be with me, I suspect.
Your first novel in your career women series was, Lois Lenz – Lesbian Secretary, I know you had a background as a secretarial temp, so was this based on true stories or perhaps fantasies?
My career as a secretarial temp was very present in my mind when I wrote Lois. Some of Mrs Pierson's behavior was reminiscent of a boss I once had, a woman executive who had me fetch her shoes from a file drawer where she kept them, as she sat at her desk. Lois is in part the result of my imagining a character who, unlike me, was not bored silly by the mind-numbing minutia of office work. She's certainly a fantasy in that regard! Although I must admit her obsession with filing is something I share. I dream of the day I will put all my files in order and make a card catalog for my books.
How do you come up with your characters?
My characters generally start as amalgams, bits of me, bits of people I know, stereotypes, clichés, historical people I've read about, pieces that are completely unlike me or people I know; and then eventually the separate bits meld together and the character takes on a life of her own. It's important to me to pick the right name for each one – I find that very helpful, and I look in all sorts of different places for name ideas and keep lists on hand of first names and last names to play with.
It’s easy to see why lesbians in the 50s would have been attracted to lesbian pulp fiction such as Ann Bannon’s Odd Girl Out, obviously there wasn’t a lot of lesbian fiction around then. But why do you think lesbians today are still so attracted to the genre?
Lesbian pulp will always be enjoyed for its melodrama, its soap-opera, larger-than-life qualities, its campiness. The television series The L-Word was in many ways a classic lesbian pulp, and like lesbian pulp of the past, was popular with straights as well as gays. I have a straight friend who watched it when she was recovering from a surgical procedure and she called it ‘better than Vicodin’. On the other hand, when lesbians read the vintage pulps that have been reissued, like the Ann Bannons, and the Paula Christians, it's also a way of connecting with our history. When I read a book like The Third Sex, which describes different lesbian bars, I'm thinking, "Is that what it was like, really?" even though I know it’s fiction. I love reading the pseudo-sociological books by Ann Aldrich (another pen name for M. E. Kerr), where she details the various lesbian subcultures in New York, down to the kinds of cars they drove, their various styles of dress, almost as if they were high school cliques. And many of the pulps are still so entertaining! What I've tried to do with my books is keep the entertainment factor and lose the angst and homophobia that were a product of more repressed times.
Why do you think lesbianism lends itself to pulp so well?
That is a very good question! And not easy to answer. I would speculate that the shadowy twilight world of the lesbian, the necessity for dual identities – secretary by day, lesbian party girl at night – the sense that there is a secret community present right alongside "normal" life, is attractive to readers of pulp fiction. Pulp is about a romantic interest in underworlds, forbidden communities, whether criminal – as in most straight pulp – or sexual, as in lesbian pulp. It's a way of exploring the boundaries of what's normal, which even the most seemingly normal people in the world wonder about. And of course a big part of the pulps' attraction was that you could count on some juicy sex scenes. For whatever reason, erotic attraction between two women seems to have appealed to readers from all walks of life. Don't even ask me to explain that.
How would you say lesbian pulp fiction has changed over the decades?
I'm not sure that lesbian pulp fiction still exists. I call what I write pulp parody; other than that, what I see on the shelves these days is lesbian genre fiction – romance and mysteries. Not the same thing, in my book. There's not much genuine pulp in straight fiction, either. Maybe the era of pulp is just over. Maybe pulp depended on the forbidden quality of the worlds it explored, a quality that just doesn't have the same force today as it did in the fifties.
You collect vintage pulp fiction and the titles are always so brilliant. Can you tell us a few of your favourite titles?
There are so many good ones. I love The Girls In 3B, so evocative of the urban working girl of the fifties. I'm also a fan of Valerie Taylor's pulps (of which The Girls in 3B is the first). I like the titles that seem to be interchangeable, like Another Kind of Love and Edge of Twilight. Those two could work for most lesbian pulps. I like titles with the word ‘strange’ in them: Strange Delights, Strange Embrace, and my favorite, Strange Nurse. That’s who I want taking care of me.
What do you do when you’re not writing lesbian pulp parody?
When I'm not writing I explore many, many other wonderful career options. A little video editing, a little teaching, helping my girlfriend when she gets buried with graphic design work, odd jobs to fill in – like the time I spent two days sitting in a hotel lobby as casting assistant for a reality TV show. In my leisure time I garden, read, cook, make things, go to the movies, play bike polo. The usual.
You’re also a filmmaker, you did World of Women, a parody of film noir. Will we ever see Lois Lenz or Bobby Blanchard on the big screen?
It would be fun to see Lois Lenz or Bobby on the big screen, but I will not be the person to make that happen. Filmmaking is way too exhausting! Besides, I think it's usually better when someone else adapts a book you've written. There are films I want to make, but the stories in those books feel finished to me.
Is there another in your career women series already underway, if so, can you tell us a little about it?
I have begun thinking about the next Lesbian Career Girl book – it's a good distraction from publicizing Bobby. I'd like to return to Maxie, a secondary character in Lois. Maxie is a dilettante society girl and I think in the next book she'll be discovered in a compromising position and her family will cut her off financially. Without an allowance she’ll have to go to work in earnest to support herself – perhaps in newspapers or publishing, since that's what she was moving towards in Lois. Perhaps I will write about the writing of lesbian pulp within a lesbian pulp. That would be fun.
Bobby Blanchard – Lesbian Gym Teacher is out now through Kensington Books.
* Ann Bannon – American author who wrote six lesbian pulp fiction novels from 1957 to 1962 known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
