My friend recommend Pulp by Robin Talley to me when I started brainstorming about writing a story set in the ’50s. As she rattled off the post-WWII, early 50’s sentiment, and facts about the Lavender Scare, she pointed to this young adult novel.
Pulp tells the story of two queer teens — one living in 1955 and one living in 2017. They are connected by storytelling and lesbian pulp fiction — a genre of novels I had no idea existed. Apparently, lesbian erotic novels were a thing in the 50s and ’60s, slipping by the censors because the characters had to die, renounce their wicked ways and suddenly fall for a man, or some other tragedy at the end of the novel.
The Price of Salt was one of them, the book the film Carol is based on.
I might check a couple of these books out myself — it’s hard to believe they were published in an era with gay people were actively investigated, fired and sometimes worse . . . in the era of McCarthyism, homosexuality equated with communism. I remember learning about the Red Scare in schools, but not the Lavender Scare which happened around the same time.
From this Time article: “Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, the investigation, interrogation and systematic removal of gay men and lesbians from the federal government became policy. Known as the “Lavender Scare,” the policy was based on the unfounded fear that gay men and lesbians “posed a threat to national security because they were vulnerable to blackmail and were considered to have weak moral characters,”
Pulp was a great YA book that opened my eyes to a new side of history. It also continues to be incredibly gratifying to find queerness in history — we’ve always been here.
With Love,
Natalie