In a way I much prefer the 1950s and 60s pulp fiction (even the sadder ones) to (most) modern lesbian fiction where romance can be over the top (and unrequited love always turns out to be requited), every woman the main character meets (even in a small town) just happens to also be a lesbian (statistically, that's almost impossible) and being gay is no big deal (how nice that would be.)
The older I get, the more I realize reality is better for your heart than daydreaming ever could be. And in pulp fiction, there is very little daydreaming going on.
It often has a much more steady grasp of how hard it is to meet someone who would be a true kindred spirit in love and friendship. And the inner struggles (substitute the much smaller society of a conservative family for early 1960s America) echo the circumstances some women still find themselves in, even here in 2014. That alone can be comforting.
Another useful dose of reality with the pulps is how one-sided love is treated. The futility of it is eventually exposed, as is the idea that it's more like illness than love…to like someone until your
heart aches…especially when that someone doesn’t even know you beyond a name and a
face and you are absolutely meaningless to them in any way that counts.
Sloane Britain, who edited and wrote for a small publishing company called Midwood Tower in the early 1960s, did this very well in These Curious Pleasures. Her main character not only gets over her unrequited feelings, she goes on to meet someone who is able to love her back.
The writing is crisper, less nauseating in its sentimentality and more sincere, plus the universality (straight or gay, man or woman can relate) of feelings is pleasantly surprising. Some of the best passages from one particularly strong example (Valerie Taylor's Unlike Others) include:
-There’s no point in owning a double bed if you have to sleep alone.
-But she knew better. You couldn't tell the
truth to straight people, ever; the best you could hope for was
tolerance without understanding. They saw the different ones as
emotionally retarded or, worse, guilty of some nameless sin against society.
-Still vivid in her own mind were the twelve
years of her misery: guilt, worry, daydreaming, trying to find out from
books what no one would tell her.
-She unbuttoned her blouse and tossed it into the
hamper. I don't seduce teen-agers, she continued her mental inventory, I
don't pick people up, I'm not promiscuous. I tell the truth and pay my
bills promptly. I do an honest day's work in return for my pay. They
ought to have a better name for people like me.
-If you have enough love, you don't need psychiatry.
-...but there were things that friendship didn't
cover. She needed someone to dedicate herself to, someone to become
involved with. She needed to be first with someone.
-An office, like a home, has a climate of its
own. It's dominated by the emotional content of the people who spend
their time there.
- But even more than any physical relationship she
wanted somebody who would come first in her life. A girl who would be
more important to her than anything else in the world, a love that was
emotional and spiritual as well as physical
-You've got it bad, she thought scornfully. Where
do you think it'll get you? Carrying the torch for a girl who doesn't
even know the score. How adolescent can you get?
-The solution was to find a good steady girl, who
wasn't frigid or alcoholic or any more neurotic than the average run of
human beings. Somebody warm and intelligent who would be glad to settle down and make a home. This would be about as easy as finding uranium in the back yard.
Valerie Taylor's novels ended up happily more than not, especially compared to her contemporaries at the time she was writing. She became instrumental in helping start one of the first equality rights groups in the country and in 1965 she met and fell in love with the woman with whom she'd spend the next decade.
When her partner wound up seriously ill in the hospital, Taylor was not allowed to visit her and never got to say goodbye to her before she died. Heartbreaking incidents like that still happen to this day and is one reason gay people fight so hard for the most basic of rights. I can think of fewer things more tragic than to be denied the chance to be with your loved one when you most need each other.
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