A few weekends ago I found myself in a used bookstore. This is not a particularly infrequent occurrence in my life, but I can’t say that most of the used bookstores I’ve been in feature volumes with such titles as The Third Sex, Satan was a Lesbian, and A Shameless Need. Clearly I haven’t been shopping in the right places.

These books are pulp fiction-scare novels published in the 1950s and 1960s about the scandalous lives and bad endings of anyone who deviated from social norms, be it via interracial relationships, adultery, homosexuality, or other social perversion. Magnets and books with reprints of their covers are found relatively easily (and are fun to look at; a standard cover is a women in lingerie with a predatory girl in the background and a man to one side-these people are not big with subtleties), but obtaining the books themselves seems to require a lot more time examining dusty shelves. In keeping with the morality codes of the time, they are lurid, sensationalistic, and tend to have high body counts. In keeping with my particular interests, I bought several about scantily-clad women “seduced into the evil web of the sexual inversion of the isle of Lesbos.”

My favorite of the five I’ve read so far is The Silken Underground by Vicki Spain. The protagonist is a woman driven to the Sapphic side as a result of a bad first experience with a man. Her girlfriend is a large-breasted German girl who can charitably be described as a leech. A rich and petty gay man with an Oedipus complex decides to prove that he is straight, and guess who looks just like his mother? The protagonist’s girlfriend ends up stealing money and running back to Germany, only to be followed by the screaming queen and his pseudo-mother. Screaming queen is of course impotent and unable to satisfy his bride sexually.

The ending is perfectly predictable. Heterosexuality prevails in all its righteousness, everyone else is killed off, and straight readers can be content in the knowledge that all of the immoral homosexuals got what was coming to them. It’s not hard to understand why the book was popular-with sex scenes that contain such phrases as “her creamy rippling buttocks rose” and “she hungered for her seductive flesh” what’s not to love?

Even more amusing are some of the books that claim to be nonfiction. ”We, too, must love,” Ann Aldrich’s book about “Lesbian life in New York City-As I have known it!” That line, as well as essentially every other page in the book, could use a good horror movie soundtrack with minor chords to heighten its effect. It’s a truly masterful bit of “real life”-Aldrich expounds on such subjects as how many lesbians are alcoholics because they can only steel themselves to make love to another woman after tossing back a few beers and how most lesbian relationships are based on how much material wealth the dominant partner possesses. She also notes that many lesbian circles are fairly incestuous. (Okay, so not everything in the book is completely off base.)

These pulp novels enjoyed popularity among both the straight and queer populations. Even the most self-hating and offensive among them provided a refuge of sorts-at least they were mentioning queers at all, however negatively. (This idea of supporting queer presence regardless of quality and portrayal has carried over to modern times, which is the only way that the enduring popularity of movies like Claire of the Moon can be explained.)

Many of these books, particularly the more sympathetic ones, were written by actual gays and lesbians. The most famous of these authors, Ann Bannon, wrote a series of novels that started with Beebo Brinker, a girl so butch she verges on parody and then went on to pick up two lesbian sorority girls (if only there were more of them, alas) in Odd Girl Out. She follows these characters over a series of novels that has them end up as relatively well-adjusted queers in the Village, a Mecca for gay people. They are boozy and depressing, but these novels were groundbreaking on account of not sucking as well as being far more realistic than most of the genre. Here were books that lesbians could actively identify with, characters that could be emulated. Many of Bannon’s novels, which sadly lack rippling creamy buttocks, have been reprinted and are in current circulation, which should make any gay historian or voyeuristic romance lover joyous. I’m looking forward to expanding my collection of these novels. It’s also a comfort that they are history now, and none of us have to face the scrutiny of a 1950s sales clerk examining us for signs of immorality.