In the 1940s and 1950s, lesbian butch culture was a vibrant and thriving subculture. Butch women, who typically wore masculine clothing and adopted masculine mannerisms, were a visible presence in lesbian bars and other social spaces. They were also active in the early gay rights movement.
Butch culture was a way for lesbian women to express their identity and to find community with other like-minded women. It was also a way to challenge traditional gender roles and to assert their independence.
Butch culture was not without its challenges. Lesbian women faced discrimination and harassment from both the heterosexual and homosexual communities. They were also at risk of being arrested and imprisoned for their sexual orientation.
Despite the challenges, butch culture thrived in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a time of great creativity and innovation, and it helped to lay the foundation for the modern lesbian rights movement.
The Origins of Butch Culture
The origins of butch culture can be traced back to the early 20th century. At that time, lesbian women began to develop their own unique subculture, with its own language, customs, and fashion. Butch women were a visible presence in lesbian bars and other social spaces. They were also active in the early gay rights movement.
Butch Culture in the 1940s and 1950s
Butch culture reached its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. During this time, butch women were a visible presence in lesbian bars and other social spaces. They were also active in the early gay rights movement.
Butch culture was a way for lesbian women to express their identity and to find community with other like-minded women. It was also a way to challenge traditional gender roles and to assert their independence.
Butch women typically wore masculine clothing and adopted masculine mannerisms. They often cut their hair short, wore pants and suits, and smoked cigarettes. They also spoke in a deep voice and used masculine pronouns.
Butch women were not all the same. There were many different styles of butch, ranging from the more traditional "butch" to the more feminine "soft butch." There were also butch women who identified as transgender men.
The Challenges of Butch Culture
Butch culture was not without its challenges. Lesbian women faced discrimination and harassment from both the heterosexual and homosexual communities. They were also at risk of being arrested and imprisoned for their sexual orientation.
In the 1940s and 1950s, homosexuality was illegal in many states. Lesbian women who were arrested for their sexual orientation could be sentenced to prison time. They could also lose their jobs, their homes, and their families.
Butch women were also at risk of violence from the heterosexual community. They were often called names, spat upon, and physically assaulted. In some cases, they were even murdered.
Despite the challenges, butch culture thrived in the 1940s and 1950s. It was a time of great creativity and innovation, and it helped to lay the foundation for the modern lesbian rights movement.
The Legacy of Butch Culture
Butch culture has had a lasting impact on lesbian culture. It has helped to create a space for lesbian women to express their identity and to find community with other like-minded women. It has also helped to challenge traditional gender roles and to assert the independence of lesbian women.
Butch culture is a rich and vibrant part of lesbian history. It is a reminder of the strength and resilience of lesbian women, and it is a source of inspiration for future generations of lesbian activists.
San Francisco welcomed Dorothy Emma Arzner to the world in 1897. Her father purchased a restaurant when she was a child and they relocated to Los Angeles. The business was quite the hangout for Hollywood actors, celebrities, and creative spirits of all kinds, so Dorothy had early access to the movie crowd. Gender wasn’t seen as a deterrent in her eyes, and she grew up believing that if you were to do something it should be done well.
She finished high school and went to the University of Southern California with aspirations of becoming a doctor. She even spent two years in pre-med and went overseas with the ambulance corps during World War 1. But after returning stateside, a visit to a local movie studio changed her life forever. In a later interview she recollected that she realized if she were to enter the movie business, she should become a director since that person gets to tell everyone else what to do. So that’s precisely what she did.
Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that. Hollywood didn’t view women as industry leaders. Hiring females as secretaries and stenographers was completely acceptable as long as they had the skills and a connection to get them in the door. Dorothy just happened to know director William C. DeMille. Name dropping such a main player in 1919 got her in on the ground floor at Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, before it turned into Paramount Pictures. She wasn’t a stenographer for long though. Within six months, she was promoted to screenwriter and then editor when she easily mastered the tasks assigned to her.
Her first editing assignment was for the 1022 classic Blood and Sand starring Rudolph Valentino. Immediately, accolades and requests for more work started rolling in under famous directors such as James Cruze. He hired her as his personal writer and director for several of his films including Old Ironsides. Between his work and her other 50 films at Paramount, Dorothy had quite the career and ego boost. She wasn’t just seen as a woman behind the scenes anymore. But she hadn’t reached the top yet, and that needed to change.
Dorothy knew her credibility was cemented in Hollywood, so she did what any other top level male professional would have done. She walked right into Paramount’s head office and demanded for a contract as a director. If they refused, she threatened to go right over to their main rival, Columbia Studios. In 1927, Paramount did the only thing they could… and Dorothy’s first directorial debut was for the box office smash Fashions for Women. In her years at Paramount, Dorothy Arzner directed 11 movies, including feminist-forward shockers like Anybody’s Woman (1930), and Honor Among Lovers (1931). She moved on as a freelancer in 1932 and directed at RKO, Columbia, MGM, and United Pictures during her 25-year career.
Dorothy Arzner launched the careers of Tinsel Town staples such as Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russel, and Lucille Ball. She directed women to play unusually strong and complex characters with actual minds of their own as seen in Christopher Strong (1933) and The Bride Wore Red (1937). Many of Dorothy’s movies had underlying homosexual themes which depicted her own personal leanings.
Arzner is noted as the first woman to make a “talkie” and the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America. She left the director’s chair in 1943 following rumored bouts of illness. But she directed Army training films and national commercials. Her last years before her death in 1970 were devoted to teaching young film students like Francis Ford Coppola at UCLA’s film school. Dorothy Emma Arzner’s golden touch was far more than just a “woman in Hollywood”. She was a pioneer for successful women everywhere.
In 1957, Harry Shorten sought a way to invest the money he made from his comic strip, and ended up settling on a paperback book publishing company with an interesting gimmick. Naming the company "Midwood Books" after his neighborhood in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, New York, his gimmick was simple – give the “average American slob” what he liked.
No, Midwood wasn’t known for its classy titles or high literature, and it was definitely no Random House, but it succeeded pretty well. That just goes to show that the mosaic that makes up the American population has always had varied tastes. In order to be a success, a publisher need only discover and capitalize on a niche.
In addition to finding his niche in what the average guy liked, Shorten’s business practices broke down some gender barriers. A gay man from New York, he clearly understood the need to make a place in the literary world for the oppressed sexual minority. It is interesting to note that some of the lesbian titles Midwood churned out, and there were many, were written by men. But don’t be fooled ‒ he was no sexist. Shorten employed women writers and editors ‒ an unheard of practice at the time. He didn’t employ people on the basis of gender at all, but purely on the basis of their talent in the industry. A truly revolutionary act in the 50s and 60s.
While many of the titles Midwood published were admittedly aimed at men’s pleasure, Shorten wasn’t afraid to address the lesbian subculture. The cover art of Midwood’s titles was one of the primary things the company counted on to sell their titles. Employing artists like Robert Maguire, Rudy Nappi, and Paul Rader, many of these covers were racy enough to catch the eye of someone looking to indulge in a guilty pleasure. Some might even say that Midwood was known for its sleazy titles, given the conservative times. Shorten’s willingness to address a multitude of sexuality issues, however, advanced the paperback industry in its own little way.
There was a small group of men that wrote for him at the start of his company, and each took on several pen names – many of them, female names. This tactic was undoubtedly designed to make Midwood appear to be a much larger company to its readers than it actually was. Shorten also added women to his staff not long after he started. Elaine Williams, an editor and author (author of First Person, 3rd Sex) and Julie Ellis (writing as Joan Ellis) were two of Midwood's hottest writers.
Marijane Meaker published Spring Fire, the lesbian pulp fiction novel that launched the genre, under the pen name, Vin Packer. In fact, she had several pseudonyms including Ann Aldrich and M.E Kerr. I am willing to bet that most lesbian pulp fiction novelists from the 50s had at least one. It would have been more than just bold for authors of this genre to use their real names; it would have been the death of their writing career.
The hallmark of pulp fiction was never quality literature, but rather a source of entertainment that spoke to a vast audience. Meaker’s writing was different. She not only depicted lesbians as everyday people, giving them a face in a society that otherwise made them invisible, she also turned out quality writing that came to win awards.
Spring Fire was published in 1952 by Gold Medal Books. This was a time when society still rejected homosexuality and, in fact, criminalized it. The literary world and larger public could, and often did, reject the theme in writing. Loosely based on Meaker’s own experiences at boarding school, the novel’s plot revolves around Leda and Mitch, two women who meet as sorority sisters and fall in love. (Meaker originally planned to call the novel Sorority Girls, but her editor thought it would be a bad choice. Instead, she chose a title that could easily be confused with a novel that had recently been published and was doing well, Spring Fires.)
Though she represented the characters in an honest way and depicted a passionate affair, Meaker was forced to end the story with Leda and Mitch unhappily parting. This move was a means of appeasing an antigay media and even the postal inspectors, who had the right not to deliver anything they found "offensive." Despite the need to write her characters into a tragic ending, Meaker opened the genre of lesbian pulp fiction for others to expand upon.
Mystery novels and Young Adult novels were among some of the other genres that Meaker penned. In fact, it was in the Young Adult genre that she originally wanted to make a name for herself. This was surely one of the reasons she used a pseudonym for Spring Fire. Coming out or even writing about lesbian lifestyles would certainly have prevented her from marketing books to young adults. She was encouraged to continue in Mystery, when an early novel that she wrote, Come Destroy Me, was reviewed favorably by the New York Times. It was a lucky stroke for a paperback book in that era of publishing to be afforded such a review, so Meaker decided she would create a Mystery brand under Vin Packer’s name. Other titles she published under this name include Dark Don't Catch Me, Young and Violent, and The Twisted Ones.
Meaker found creative ways to navigate the publishing industry. Her pen names were a tool she used in her favor. After unsuccessfully finding an agent in New York, and facing the difficulty of being taken seriously by publishers ( she had a double deficit in the field in the 1950s - she was a woman AND a lesbian), she decided not only to represent herself, but to create her own small publishing house. This is when she got the idea to use pen names. She went on to represent and publish each of her own pen names as clients, and finally found some success in publishing.
Later in life, Meaker opened up about having a love affair with Patricia Highsmith, another lesbian novelist. They met at a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, New York in the late 1950s. They shared a passion for words, which alone can be a powerful seduction. One has to wonder if Meaker, as a budding author, was at least partly attracted to Highsmith because Pat was already a successful and published writer. In addition to the physical attraction Meaker has admitted to in interviews, might she have seen in Highsmith what she aspired to be?
She confesses she didn’t feel worthy of being Highsmith’s lover. Early in their relationship, their differences caused Meaker to consider breaking off the relationship several times despite the fact that Highsmith was equally enamored with her. Meaker was more uncomfortable with her sexuality than Highsmith, who openly showed affection in public. Insecurities and jealousy caused the two women’s relationship to be rocky. Several times they parted ways, only to get back together again. Two years after first becoming involved, they finally broke off their relationship for good when Meaker had an affair. She saw Highsmith once after their breakup, but it was as if the heartbreak had turned Pat into someone else - a cold, miserable woman. Meaker's relationship with Highsmith made such an impact on her, however, she titled her own memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950’s.
Paving the way for other writers in the lesbian pulp fiction genre, Marijane Meaker holds an important place in the publishing world. Though she was forced to write her lesbian heroines into despair in order to get such a tale published, the success of Spring Fire helped open the paperback publishing industry's eyes to the potential of this new genre. Her love affair with Patricia Highsmith had a great impact upon her. Was it fate that brought them together? There might be something to that saying that we meet everyone for an important reason.
In our modern culture, we are used to hearing the term Girl Power. It tends to define the resiliency of girls who have the strength and courage to break out of the limitations of gender that lingering patriarchal notions try to apply to them. In short, the term refers to females who break rules and make their own rules.
When we look back in history, we see that Girl Power existed long before the term came along. It is notable that so many of these women throughout history were writers. It seems they not only wanted to pave their own way, but leave something of themselves behind for future generations. They wanted their messages to live on after they were gone. Patricia Highsmith was one of those women who created a Girl Power culture before a term existed to celebrate it.
Born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith spent most of her childhood in New York City, except for a year in which she lived with her grandmother in Texas. She graduated from Barnard College in 1942 where she studied English, Latin, and Greek. After graduation, she began her literary career by writing scripts for comic books. Since the publishing world was extremely male-dominated, and comic books depicted primarily male characters, it can be assumed that Highsmith had to break some barriers to attain this position. She quickly learned she could earn more money working on a freelance basis in the comic book industry, and so supported herself by maintaining this career from 1942 until 1948. Some of the comic books she wrote script for include Real Heroes, Real Fact, and True Comics.
Her fiction, starting with her first novel, Strangers on a Train, demonstrates how much her creative work with comic books inspired her later craft. The character development skills she practiced at the start of her literary career and the real-life “characters” she worked with on the comic books are often clearly present in her novels. With her first novel she also established a mood that would come to define her work, one of dark, hidden, psychological places.
Indeed, Highsmith’s childhood makes it clear why themes of a disturbed soul keep resurfacing. Raised by her mother and stepfather in New York, she didn’t find out the man was not her biological father until she was 12. Highsmith has stated she discovered some harsh truths about her existence that year, and that it was one of the worst years of her life. Her biological father hadn't wanted her to be born, and left her mother not long before her birth. Some reports also say her mother felt the same, and even tried to cause a miscarriage. Not surprisingly, Highsmith had an unstable relationship with both her mother and her stepfather. During the same year these facts were revealed to her, Highsmith went to live with her grandmother in Texas. Interestingly enough, she often said her grandmother encouraged and improved her literacy, and that her grandmother’s vast library provided her with a great deal of reading. She admits that some of the books she found the most fascinating were those about psychological disorders.
Highsmith was not widely known for her work until after her death in 1995, though she did attain a degree of success and sustainability from her writing career. She won numerous awards for her novels and short fiction, and several of her titles were purchased by filmmakers. Strangers on a Train, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was the first to be made into a film. She admits she was paid very little, despite the film’s success.
Two of Highsmith’s other well-known novels are The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Price of Salt. The former was made into a film starring Matt Damon and Jude Law and was released in 1999,. The latter will be released as a film in November, 2015. The Price of Salt is a lesbian novel published under the pseudonym, Claire Morgan, no doubt because, once again, she had used her Girl Power to break a societal taboo. Nonetheless, the novel sold over a million copies. Though she included homosexual undertones in her other novels as freely as she presented violence and mentally disturbed characters, none had focused so closely on an openly gay relationship. Highsmith admitted that one of the main characters in the novel, Carol, was based on a woman she encountered when working in Bloomingdales..
The Price of Salt is the story of Therese and Carol. Therese is trapped in a mundane existence until she meets Carol. After initially questioning what kind of relationship they have, the two finally embrace their love and travel across the United States, though Carol is a mother in the middle of a divorce. The women are pursued by a private investigator, which leads to some adventure. In the end, Carol must eventually choose between her child and her lover.
Both Highsmith’s fiction and her life defied the societal conventions of her time. Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt, and The Talented Mr. Ripley were published in the 1950’s, a time in which women were expected to take their place in the home and raise children. Instead, she completely ignored the prescribed expectations, and defined her own reality. She wrote about taboo topics and even began to redefine pulp fiction with the characters and plot in The Price of Salt. Expressing both a homosexual voice, and one that reveled a dark and disturbed inner world with which so many undoubtedly live, Patricia Highsmith knew all about Girl Power.
One of the trademarks, the unwritten rules, of lesbian pulp fiction back in the '50s and '60s was that the stories often ended unhappily. This was just one of the rules, however, that Julie Ellis insisted on breaking when she began writing and publishing in the genre.
A single mother living in New York City, Ellis forged ahead and built a successful writing career that supported her family. Although a heterosexual woman, Ellis was dedicated to social causes and made the decision to write and publish lesbian fiction… perhaps because such characters were still under-represented in paperback fiction at the time. (more…)
During the first half of the 20th century, the written word was the king of popular entertainment. Although radio was growing in popularity, movies were developing quickly, and television was on the horizon, reading still remained a common pastime for people of all classes and levels of education. Writers and publishers recognized the breadth of their audience, and produced fiction for every taste.
One new taste that rapidly exploded in popularity was that of the working-class individual. People of that era relied on fiction for the kind of vicarious, entertaining thrills that television provides today. Writers soon identified the interests of their audience and began to cater to them. They started producing stories that were shocking and exciting. This had not really been seen prior to this time in literary history.
Publishers soon jumped into the game. They began collecting and publishing these lurid stories in small, cheap magazines, released monthly. To keep costs down, these magazines were printed on the lowest-quality paper, made from wood pulp. The only place the publishers splurged on money was on the covers: The new magazines featured bright, memorable artwork designed to shock and entice. Pulp fiction was born.
Over the span of decades, the content of the pulps became highly refined and highly diversified. Magazines started to specialize in genres, and the newsstands offered readers mystery pulps, science fiction pulps, and hardboiled detective pulps. Across all of the different genres, pulp authors cultivated a certain tone and style that became synonymous with pulp fiction. Their writing was powerful and direct. Their stories were complex, if sometimes roughly put together. Their morality was clear-cut into "good" and "bad" - although readers delighted in darker stories that concentrated on the bad guys. Excitement was the watchword of the pulps.
The Second World War signaled the end of the pulps. Paper grew more expensive, and the audience had less time for reading. By the time the war was over, television was on the rise, and paperback novels captured the attention of the nation's readers. The pulp magazines died out as pulp paperbacks took over, but their legacy lived on. The action-packed, thrilling, morally-challenging style that was born in their pages had a lasting influence on future writers - and on Americans' taste in entertainment, no matter what its medium was. We can even see hints of pulp fiction today in movies and TV from time to time. The era may have ended a long time ago, but the legacy lives on in other mediums.
Not intended to launch an entire lesbian fiction genre, it was a story about women during wartime, some of whom happened to be romantically involved with other women. Women's Barracks, though, resonated with men and women alike—both straight and gay. In its first year, the book sold over 1 million copies and allowed Gold Medal Books to... well, strike gold.
Women’s Barracks also caught the attention of the government, unfortunately, and was singled out by the Gathings Committee as an example of how the paperback industry was subverting the morals of America. The threat of fines and incarceration made the paperback industry skittish about publishing anything that could be considered “indecent” and before long, a sort of self-censorship was in full swing.
Many stories featuring characters that lived their lives outside the rules of the prevailing morality of the times soon became dark and punishing, as there could be no happy endings for those who defied convention. Still, the lesbian pulp fiction novels were enormously popular and soon paperback publishers—beginning with Gold Medal—realized sales would skyrocket if they moved from reprints to “paperback originals.”
This move toward of the publication of original fiction by paperback companies created an immediate and strong demand for writers and provided unprecedented opportunities for women writers in particular. While it is true that some of the lesbian pulp fiction novels during the 1950s were written by men using female pseudonyms, a good number were written by women, many of whom were lesbians themselves. (Patricia Highsmith and Marijane Meaker top this list.) And although they were still required to write within the prescribed moral guidelines set by their editors, quite a few were able to portray the lesbian lives of their characters with a significant degree of honesty and compassion. The Golden Age of Lesbian Pulp Fiction had arrived.
One of the most interesting periods in literary history was the day of pulp fiction. The kind of books and magazines created during this era were not only different in appearance, but also quite unique in their subject matter and delivery of the stories found inside. Even all these years later, talk of pulp cover artists is still a popular topic because of how different the artwork was for that time.
The first pulp fiction publication to feature color cover illustrations was The Popular Magazine, founded in 1903. The pulp cover artists were often established painters; artists like Edgar Franklin Wittmack made oil paintings for The Argosy and Short Stories, as well as for non-pulp magazines like Popular Science; N. C. Wyeth was a distinguished book illustrator who also contributed to The Popular Magazine.
Pulp fiction reached its golden age before the start of World War II and the ensuing paper shortage. During the early thirties, the industry reached its peak, and artists would paint on average one cover a week. As many new magazines emerged, publishers recognized the cover illustrations as a big selling point and started emphasizing eye-catching motifs. Thence were born the staples of pulp fiction covers, such as voluptuous femme-fatales, damsels in distress, lantern-jawed action heroes, stalking shadows and skeletal horrors.
As pulp fiction became increasingly popular, a new generation of illustrators pursued their careers exclusively as cover artists, including Earl Mayan (The Shadow), Frank R. Paul (Amazing Stories), Walter Baumhofer (Doc Savage and The Spider) and Margaret Brundage (Weird Tales). The magazines demanded quick turnaround, and artists often struggled to finish their work on time - a fact visible in the prominent brush strokes and "unpolished" looks of many cover illustrations. Illustrators could make around $50 per cover, which was a decent wage during the great depression.
The end of World War II saw many publications bankrupt because of the paper shortage during the war and the reduced demand for escapism in popular fiction during the post-war period. Some artists continued to illustrate pulp annuals and other magazines, while others, like Dick Sprang, moved on to other types of publications that were gaining momentum, namely comics. Their art also graced the covers of pulp novels - dime store paperbacks that dominated the mass-market landscape of the '50s and '60s. Artists like Robert A. McGuire, Barye Phillips, Rudolph Belarski, and Paul Rader painted hundreds of covers during the Golden Age of Lesbian Pulps.
The great legacy of pulp artists is still visible in comics to this day. Many people collect original and reprint images from the age of pulp fiction simply because of the cover artwork. In fact, the style of the artwork has become a jumping off point for many modern artists today.