with literally thousands of titles published in the decades between 1930 - 1970, I always knew when I set out to collect lesbian pulps, some twenty odd years ago, that I would have to be selective in my efforts. building a complete collection was unlikely to be possible - for so many reasons.
my ambition became to collect only the most unique, beautiful and significant covers - and all the ones depicting butch-fem dynamics that I could find.
this isn’t easy! pulp fiction was a primarily American phenomenon and isn’t likely to be found at collectors’ fairs and vintage markets here. for a long time, an easily accessible archive or list of titles wasn’t available. and even now, those archives can be difficult to sort through without having a title or author to go by - if they’re not categorised, or do not have accompanying images. considering there are thousands of titles just in the lesbian subgenre… it can be a daunting task.
one aid I used in my earliest pursuits was Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction by Jaye Zimet. this precious book, at a time when the internet was in its infancy and the scope of information available at the touch of a key now simply wasn’t there, was an invaluable resource to me in identifying the titles I hoped to one day make my own.
Warped Desire was one of them.
the cover is so provocatively erotic that I was desperate to know what sort of story lay within. the jaded, yet commanding, stare of the fully-clothed and dissolute butch as she watches the pretty, vulnerable - yet clearly very aroused (um, check out that groin tilt) young fem undress before her - ooh! maybe this poor, frigid dear was compelled to offer herself, over and over, to older, experienced butches to do whatever they wanted with, just in hopes one more orgasm might finally cure her! and what could they want? how desperate could she be? just how warped was it going to get? I was keen to find out…
well, it got warped all right. just not the way I’d hoped.
the dissonance between the cover art and the stories they contained can be jarring. this is the same old story done time and time again in the genre: naive college girl who is terrified of men (usually because of some trauma in childhood followed by repeated experiences of assault and predation, so - understandable) is seduced by her roommate. for a while she lives in blissful lesbian sin, until some sort of family catastrophe occurs and she undergoes a figurative brainwashing after which she abruptly believes she was heterosexual all along, she just needed the love of a good man to realise it - the “good man” is usually one of the men who terrorised her, if not just straight up raped her, in the past. she marries him and lives out her days in stepford delusion. a real horror story.
it frames lesbianism according to what the medical profession believed at the time: the result of sexual trauma at the hands of men, that could be “corrected” if properly treated. that being - finding the right man. many of these books professed a veneer of psychological legitimacy, though many were much more overt in the way they depicted the “analysis”. as an aside - date rape is something the women just expect to happen to them, and blame themselves for. the central character, Doris, passionately enjoyed the sex she has with women (after having regarded men as repulsive and threatening her whole life) and finds the relationships emotionally fulfilling. but after she marries a man who tried to rape her once, and actually did rape her another time during their previous relationship in disregarding her failure to be aroused and her pain and distress during sex, she regards one of her former lovers, still living as a lesbian, as pitiful and delusional. depressing, to say the least.
I’m sure she sheds a tear for you after nights of “complete satisfaction” with her new lover, Doris
but the cover! the cover, as always, is the real reason these books continue to capture the contemporary imagination. and this cover is evocative to me of some of the most erotic moments of my own life. the best part is - we have the power to tell those stories now. in a weird way - a warped way - these books had a role to play in making that happen - in inspiring the lesbians who read them to start telling the stories they wanted, the stories of their real lives. lives that were full of intense love and passion for other lesbians, who built and broke homes together, of the powerful eroticism of their butch-fem relationships and the devotion that bound them together through so much adversity. of lives lived full of desire and autonomy and fierce defiance, that experienced lesbian sex as beautiful, liberating and anything but warped - even if it did get kinky sometimes.
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