If you take away the horrible title and the oddly positioned figures on the cover, you've got the potential for a great book in The Sex Between. If you visit websites like Strange Sisters you'll notice that dozens upon dozens of lesbian pulp fiction titles were published in the 50s and 60s, most of them with the most outrageously lurid covers you could ever imagine, many of them actually written by straight men rather than genuine lesbians. If you go to the Kindle store, you'll also note that just a fraction of those have survived as bona fide worthwhile reads, written by women who truly understood what it meant to be gay in an era that condemned them as "perverts" or worse.
Though Randy Salem's T.S.B. is not the best "pulp fiction" I've read, it certainly is not the worst...and better yet, it speaks to the experience of being so different in the time of "love that dare not speak its name." I'm not sure which surprises me more about this book...the fact that the cover does not speak to its contents at all or that there is a happy ending. Maybe, in some way, the cover art was meant to throw people off from the fact neither woman is doomed to a life of unhappiness? I doubt it, but surely back then publishers did their best to titillate rather than educate readers on what it's actually like being gay.
Here Randy Salem introduces you to Lee and Maggie, two women who have known each other pretty much their entire lives yet have never told each other how they really feel. Lee, older and supposedly wiser, is sure Maggie would never return her feelings so she tries to be as content as possible with their roommate situation. Maggie also helps Lee with secretarial work and they live a fairly comfortable life together as friends and employer/employee. Lee is a love 'em and leave 'em type girl while Maggie has never been in love or in any kind of relationship, physical or otherwise.
Lee may be a jerk to all the other women in her life, but to Maggie she is quietly devoted, suffering in love from afar. Maggie looks up to Lee and discreetly manages to keep the chaos in Lee's life from snowballing. Only when intense meddling, in the form of family matriarch Kate, comes storming into their lives do things take a dramatic turn. What seems like tragedy that can only be met with futile resistance becomes so much more...with Lee and Maggie discovering things about themselves and family dynamics that are both terrifying and life-changing.
Having found much more substance and reflection in this genre by Ann Bannon or Sloane Britain, I couldn't quite warm to this 100 percent...nevertheless its ending had its own kind of power and Randy Salem chose wisely in having both characters become more than just stereotypes.
Bad title and out-of-place cover aside (Maggie is nothing like the brunette on the cover), The Sex Between definitely deserved to be "rescued" by Cleis Press. The way each woman feels about the other and how everyone in their lives disapproves and tries to demonize their love deeply spoke to me, both the first and second time I read the novel.
You could ask what need is there these days for such books, but I'd have to counter: we very much still live in a world where gay people are demonized and lesbians suffer in silence with no family or friends to talk about things like this.
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