#vin packer

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Vin Packer (pseudonym of Marijane Meaker) - Don’t Rely on Gemini - Dell - 1970

[cantsayidont]

Barye Phillips cover for the original 1952 edition of SPRING FIRE, a lesbian novel by Marijane Meaker. ("Vin Packer" was one of several noms de plume she used throughout her career, which also included "Ann Aldrich" and "M.E. Kerr.")

[uwmspeccoll]

Steamy Saturday

Spring Fire by Vin Packer, the pen name of American writer Marijane Meaker (1927-2022), was the first lesbian paperback novel and was published in New York by Gold Medal Books in 1952. It was an instant bestseller, outselling other popular titles of that year, including James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice and Daphne du Maurier's  My Cousin Rachel, and its publication marks the beginning of the lesbian pulp fiction genre.

The story, based on Meaker's own experience, revolves around the relationship between the shy and awkward, freshman sorority sister Susan ("Mitch") Mitchell and her more experienced roommate Leda Taylor. Both play at heterosexual "normality," while engaging in and at the same time questioning their same-sex attraction. Unfortunately, because it's the early 1950s, the relationship had to end in tragedy, with Leda bound for an insane asylum and Mitch denying to herself that she ever loved Leda.

Meaker was always distressed about having to write that ending. When Cleis Press approached her to republish the novel, she was very reticent. But the project went forward, and according to Wikipedia, Meaker wrote about this in the introduction to that reissue:

"I still cringe when I think about it. I never wanted it republished. It was too embarrassing." Meaker explained in the 2004 foreword that Dick Carroll, her editor at Gold Medal Books, told her that because the book would be sent through the mail, no references to homosexuality as an attractive life could be portrayed or postal inspectors would send it back to the publishing house. He said that one character must acknowledge that she is not a lesbian, and the other she's involved with "must be sick or crazy."

Beside lesbian romances, Marijane Meaker also wrote mystery and crime novels, nonfiction books about lesbians (as Ann Aldrich), children's books (as Mary James), and young adult fiction (as M. E. Kerr), for which she received the 1993 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association. The butch/fem cover illustration is by noted American artist and pulp-fiction cover illustrator Barye Phillips.

View more posts on lesbian romance fiction.

View more LGBTQ+ posts.

View other pulp fiction posts.

[everythingsecondhand]

Something In The Shadows, by Vin Packer (Gold Medal, 1961).

From eBay.

[dirtyriver]

RIP Marijane Meaker aka Vin Packer (27 May 1927 - 21 November 2022)

From her obit in The Guardian:

Fan mail from a generation of closeted women flooded the offices of Gold Medal Books after the 1952 publication of Spring Fire – a novel about a lesbian affair among a college sisterhood – from unlikely fans of its author, Marijane Meaker, who has died aged 95.

Unlikely, not only because of the male pseudonym used by Meaker – Vin Packer – but also because its heroine is “saved” from the clutches of a nymphomanical lesbian seducer, who winds up committed to a psychiatric hospital. Although the men who wrote Gold Medal’s hard-boiled crime fiction specialised in exploitation, the daring Spring Fire sold 1.5m copies in its first edition.

Meaker was an editorial assistant at Gold Medal at the time, and a lesbian. “We were floored by the mail that poured in,” she said. “This was the first time anyone was aware there was a gay audience out there.” She was prompted to write, as Ann Aldrich, a series of pseudo-sociological studies of lesbians, starting with We Walk Alone Through Lesbos’ Lonely Groves (1955), which became a kind of Lonely Planet guide for women who had yet to come out.

She wrote 20 books as Packer, starting with a thriller, Dark Intruder (1952), and nearly 40 others under a variety of names, including her own. Packer’s psychological crime novels were praised by the New York Times reviewer Anthony Boucher, and drew favourable comparisons to Patricia Highsmith, who, also in 1952, published her own “serious” lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, using the pseudonym Claire Morgan.

In a case of life imitating art, Meaker and Highsmith became lovers, a relationship detailed in Meaker’s acute 2003 memoir, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s.

[pulpnoire]

Robert McGinnis, cover art for The Damnation of Adam Blessing, 1961

[yourdailyqueer]

Marijane Meaker (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 27 May 1927  

RIP: 21 November 2022

Ethnicity: White - American

Occupation: Writer

Note 1: She wrote a series of nonfiction books about lesbians under the pen name Ann Aldrich from 1955 to 1972.

Note 2: Her alias’ for when writing books other than Marijane Meaker have been Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, M.E. Kerr,  M. J. Meaker and Mary James. In total she’s written 60+ books not including short stories.

[raoulgoldenlake]

Recsmas Day 2

A Short Book

Spring Fire, by Vin Packer aka M.E. Kerr, aka Marijane Meaker. It’s the CLASSIC pulp novel and SURE it ends in one of them going to an insane asylum but that’s just par for the 1950s course.

Published: 1952

My Rating: 4.5/5

Gay?: Yes