5/26/2023 0 Comments I Am a Woman by Ann Bannon![]() ![]() The seventies feminist cover I saw when I pulled the book off the shelf of my dorm common room in 1985 did not prepare me for the heavy-breathing soap opera I found inside, a style so foreign to our irony-heavy 80s sensibility that my friends and I passed it around, reading bits aloud, snorting with laughter. ![]() It was the Naiad edition of Journey to a Women that introduced me not only to Ann Bannon but also to the world of lesbian pulp. Naiad Press (founded by Barbara Grier, a Bannon fan from her book review days at The Ladder) reissued the whole series starting in 1975, replacing the original lurid covers with blue-on-white silhouettes of women wearing seventies hairstyles. Although Bannon stopped writing as her daughters grew up–yes, the Queen of Lesbian Pulp was a married woman when she penned her tales of twilight love–her books lived on. ![]() The books made her the community’s best known lesbian pulp writer, and an acquaintance with her books is as much a requirement for lesbians as is knowing about The Well of Loneliness (we may not actually read these books, but we recognize the references). Bannon wrote five pulps between 19, linked novels that tell the intertwined, melodramatic adventures of Laura, Beth, and Beebo. It took me many years to appreciate Ann Bannon’s contribution to lesbian literature. Journey to a Woman, by Ann Bannon, Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960Ĭlassic Line: “All the dormant fires of her younger days had sprung to life and they burned in her still, tempting her, torturing her until she knew she would have to find release somewhere or die of it.” ![]()
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