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 US author Ann Bannon, the doyenne of lesbian pulp fiction, created one of the most memorable characters in modern literature. She spoke with John Harrison.
In the 1950s and 1960s, numerous writers in Australia and overseas worked feverishly to fill the pages of cheap, mass-market paperbacks known as ‘pulp’ novels, whose often racy and risqué plotlines about ‘sexual deviants’ and ‘the twilight world of the homosexual’ were matched by beautifully lurid and wildly exploitative cover art.
In fact, it is often the cover art – not the subject matter – that most appeals to 95 per cent of the people who collect vintage adult paperbacks today.
Thus, the fact that the pulp novels of US author Ann Bannon are appreciated more for their plotlines – and their social impact – makes her writing career all the more remarkable.
Born Ann Welby in 1932, Ann Bannon was raised in Joliet, Illinois, where she says she often felt like an outsider.
“I always felt profoundly different from the other kids – and indeed was – but found ways to look, talk, dress and act like the rest. It was a survival strategy, which gave me a secure cover, but always made me feel like a spy among my age-mates,” Bannon explains.
Introduced to the lesbian-themed novels of ‘Vin Packer’ (one of the many pseudonyms of author Marijane Meaker) and Radclyffe Hall while still in college, Bannon was inspired to write herself. Integrating observations she had made about a lesbian relationship taking place between her two college roommates with the popular pulp fiction format, Bannon authored her first novel, Odd Girl Out (1957).
While the idea of publication is the Holy Grail to which many writers aspire, for Bannon, successfully placing the novel with a publisher was a fraught experience.
“I was both afraid that what I was writing would never find an audience, and afraid that it would,” she says.
 Such fears were well-founded. Her husband – who she married soon after graduating from college – had already forbidden her from using his surname for the book. His decision led to Ann choosing the pen name of ‘Bannon’, under which Odd Girl Out was eventually published by Gold Medal Books.
Even so, the possibility that others would react badly to the novel was an ever-present threat.
“I didn’t want to fail, but I didn’t want to become a pariah among family and friends for writing on such a controversial subject, either. And it was very difficult for me to judge my own work. Was it good enough to hold a readership? I honestly didn’t know until Odd Girl Out was published and became a hit.”
After giving birth to two daughters, Bannon earned her Ph.D in linguistics at Stanford University, before divorcing and moving to California, where between 1959 and 1962 she wrote her next five (and best remembered) novels. Carrying the lives of her major characters over from one novel to the next, Bannon created fully-developed characters that existed within plausible story lines.
And unlike the tackier, lesbian-themed paperbacks that were being churned out to satiate a mostly-straight male audience (“None of the sleaze folk ever came courting, probably because I was doing so well at Gold Medal and they just figured I couldn’t be pried loose, which was in fact the case.”)
Bannon’s novels were an accurate and insightful depiction of lesbian life during this period of social and sexual repression. Not that the cover art and photographs designed by the publishers attempted to illustrate this fact!
Of Bannon’s lesbian works, Beebo Brinker (published by Gold Medal in 1962) is the best-known. A prequel to her other works, it establishes the popular character featured in her earlier novels – a naïve 18-year-old woman who arrives in Greenwich Village fresh off the farm, her worldly possessions carried in an old wicker suitcase, and a worn old copy of the Guide to Greenwich Village clutched in her hand.
Stuck firmly in the closet for the first third of the book, Beebo finally comes out to her gay roommate, Jack, after which she quickly makes the transition from shy farm girl to dominating butch. She falls into bed with Mona, then Paula, before finally getting snared by Venus, a glamorous film star.
Bannon’s final novel for Gold Medal, Beebo Brinker, was originally issued with a cover painting that plainly illustrated the publisher’s and artist’s misconception of (or total disregard for) the content of the book.
Conceived by Bannon as “tall, strong, handsome and blue-jeaned,” the character was instead presented on the cover by artist Robert McGinnis as a nerdy private school girl type, standing under a sign subtlety marked ‘Gay Street’ (and in case we miss the point, another street sign above her head reads ‘One Way’).
“The books gave me an incredible following – something I really never anticipated,” Bannon recalls today. “I heard from hundreds of women all over the country – thousands, actually. Many of them were isolated, scared, ashamed and convinced that there were no other human beings on the planet who shared their feelings. I had no idea how much angst there was out there.
“I’m delighted and a little overwhelmed by the attention my books are getting now,” she adds, when asked about her gradual recognition as a pioneer of lesbian fiction, and the emergence of Beebo Brinker as a gay icon of her times.
“Surprised, grateful, and still wondering what the girl I was all those years ago would have made of it, if there had been any way for her to peer into the future. It’s an extraordinary validation of the lives and loves of the women I was writing about, and even of the pulp medium itself. How good to know, after all these years, that our once-scorned genre was capable of producing works with staying power and enduring interest for succeeding generations of readers.”
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