The Girls in 3B

When I first came up with the concept for my latest novel, The Woman in 3B, I knew a couple of things: that the passenger the main character eventually fell for would be sitting in the First Class cabin, that it would be an aisle seat, and that my main character would spill a glass of water on herself as their meet cute. All I needed was a seat number. The situation was too good to pass up. It had to be seat 3B. And the book had to be called The Woman in 3B.

I’ve written here about lesbian pulp fiction novels from the post-World War II era before. And I’ve name-dropped Valerie Taylor (born Velma Young) as one of the authentic queer authors of the period. Her first lesbian title, Whisper Their Love (1957) sold more than 2 million copies. Taylor, looking back at her decision to write for the genre, had this to say: “I began writing gay novels around 1957. There was suddenly a plethora of them on sale in drugstores and bookstores … many written by men who had never knowingly spoken to a lesbian. Wish fulfillment stuff, pure erotic daydreaming. I wanted to make some money, of course, but I also thought that we should have some stories about real people.”

She wrote about the male-authored lesbian novel in a 1967 issue of The Ladder, the Daughter of Bilitis’ literary magazine. In her satirical story, “The ‘Realistic’ Novel,” she writes as if she herself is the male author. The fake novel’s main character, the beautiful Broccoli Cavendish, runs away from her roommate, Precious Signoret. Taylor writes that Precious is “Outwardly feminine, with a size 44 bust and an inexhaustible supply of black nylon lingerie, she is really a vicious butch who snarls ‘I am the man!’ when in the throes of passion.” Later in the story, Broccoli decides she’s really a “good girl” and wants to find a “normal life.”

Taylor’s second lesbian novel, The Girls in 3B, provided the inspiration for my book’s title, although they’re completely different stories. In Taylor’s 1959 story, three young women pool their resources to afford their Chicago apartment, unit 3B. This was common practice at the time for unmarried women looking to make it in the professional world. The gender pay gap made it unlikely that a single woman could afford an apartment in a big city on her own.

The back of the paperback describes the novel as this: “They came to the city fascinated, frightened – hungering after life with that desperate, head-long impatience of the very young. There was Annice - Bright, curious full of untried passion, she let Alan drag her into his beat-generation world of parties, jazz, booze, marijuana and sex. And Pat - she was big and blonde and built for love, but she was saving herself for marriage. Until she met her boss. Right from the beginning Pat knew she’d do anything for him – anything. And Barby - She was the most vulnerable. Men terrified her and for a good reason. When she finally fell in love it was with a woman.”

Unusual for its time, the story has a happy ending for Barby, although she spends the bulk of the novel being sexually abused by men. Traditionally, in order to escape publication censorship, the lesbians in these books go crazy, marry a man, go to jail, or end up dead by the final pages of the novel. Very rarely do they get the girl and get to keep the girl.

Although lesbian pulp stories from this era rarely had a happy ending in the way we would interpret one today, I still think of them as a hopeful medium.

Lesbianism was disguised in postwar America. Ann Aldrich, one of the many pen names of novelist Marijane Meaker argued in 1955 that Alfred Kinsey’s population estimates for lesbians was mistakenly low because “the lesbian is better at camouflage.”  The Ladder, the literary mouthpiece for the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian rights organization in the country, similarly described, “the lesbian is a very elusive creature. She burrows underground in her fear of identification.” In a culture where homosexuality was hidden and demonized, lesbian pulps became a resource for women searching for an identity. And for unsatisfied housewives living in suburban America, to rurally located and isolated women who didn’t have the benefit of stumbling into a gay bar, to a college student crushing on her roommate, the pulps reassured her that she was not alone.

Happy Pride, everyone.

Eliza