Strange Sisters: The Art of Lesbian Pulp Fiction 1949-1969

Do you walk alone, a twilight lover? Odd one out? Warped? Troubled? Twisted? Jaye Zimet, a Brooklyn book designer and collector, has filled Strange Sisters with over 200 sleazily appealing book covers from the boom years of the lesbian pulp novel, arranging them in groups from "Positive Portraits" and more ambitious "Cliterature" to "Psycho-Babble" and an entire section devoted to cleavage. Although large numbers of their original readers in the '50s and '60s were lesbians or protolesbians hoping for a glimpse of themselves or for some tenuous connection to an almost mythical community of "unnatural lovers," the covers of these books were clearly targeted to a primary audience of furtive young men. Scantily clad, buxom blondes simper under the gaze of older, "experienced" brunettes sometimes wearing trousers or short hair but never without lipstick. To the eye of Ann Bannon and her contemporaries, these women seemed as "straight as a pine tree." But "despite the almost comical distance between the covers and the contents," Bannon concludes in her foreword, "the books found both their intended audiences.... If there was a solitary woman on the cover, provocatively dressed, and the title conveyed her rejection by society or her self-loathing, it was a lesbian book." --Regina Marler