"Was It Right to Love Her Brother's Wife so Passionately?": Lesbian Pulp Novels and U.S. Lesbian Identity, 1950-1965

Keller gives a brief history of lesbian pulps, defines the genre, and argues for pulps' importance as a readily available, popular discourse, particularly from 1950-1965, that put the word lesbian in mass circulation as never before. Despite the ambivalence lesbian pulps have often evoked, they are important to lesbian studies because their truly impressive quantities helped create the largest generation of self-defined lesbians up to that point, a group of women who would go on to make history as they, alongside others of nondominant sexuality, midwifed the largest gay/lesbian/queer movement in the US to date.