Interview with Ann Bannon
Ann Bannon in 1955 as she was writing Odd Girl Out
An Interview with lesbian pulp author Ann Bannon
by Jennifer Worley
Jennifer Worley: Brava Theater is about to premier a play – The Beebo Brinker Chronicles — based on your novels. This play seems to be part of a queer resurgence of interest in the 50s and in the pulps as a genre, seen also in “neo-pulp” novels like Monica Nolan’s Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary. Why do you think people are interested in this genre now?
Ann Bannon: Well, it’s been long enough so we can have fun with it. Younger authors, who didn’t live through this time, can look back and take inspiration instead of rejecting this time as the dark ages. Twenty years afterwards, the 1950s looked so bad, but now, younger people have gained perspective on the heavy lifting we were doing. Under heavy fire, we were preparing a foundation for the movements that followed.
And perhaps in an age with so many liberties, we have become fascinated by an age that had so few. We also see this in the larger popular culture, in TV shows like Madmen, which reflect the way we were living our lives, and are a real eye-opener for younger viewers.
JW: Your first lesbian-themed pulp novel was Odd Girl Out. What motivated you to write the book?
AB: Well, in college I had done a lot of writing, including some creative writing on my own, but I would get distracted by life and schoolwork. I had just graduated and was newly married and coming to the realization that I could have taken, well, a better path. This was the mid 50s, and my husband was firm about his wife not working. This meant I had the time, and my husband had an old typewriter, so when he went to work, I sat down and started writing. At the same time, I was picking up pulps in drugstores, science fiction, westerns, detective novels, and lesbian novels. I found a paperback reprint of The Well of Loneliness, and a copy of Spring Fire, the first original lesbian pulp paperback, by Vin Packer (pen name of Marijane Meaker), a lesbian novel about college girls. I thought, “I lived this, and I can write about this!”
While living in Philadelphia, I wrote to Marijane Meaker in New York for advice and guidance. I knew her only as her pen name, Vin Packer—a name ambiguous enough to leave me in doubt as to whether the author was male or female. As the correspondence between us blossomed, she invited me to New York with a promise to introduce me to her editor-in-chief. Once Marijane had shown my novel – a story about my college years and the goings on in my sorority house — to her editor, Dick Carroll, he was interested. He asked me to rewrite it, focusing on the affair between two of the girls in the sorority house. Well, I did rewrite it, and I gave it to him, and he finished it the next day and said he wanted to publish it. I assumed there would be galleys and proofs and such, but no! They published it just as it was.
JW: In your later novel, Journey to a Woman, you depict a brief affair between the housewife Beth and the lesbian author Nina Spicer. Was your relationship with Marijane similar to this one?
AB: Yes, it got a bit romantic, but only very briefly. Marijane had just met Patricia Highsmith, and the rest is history.
JW: A number of other lesbian authors wrote pulp novels – often under pseudonyms. Did you ever meet any of the others?
AB: Oh, I wish I had! There were, maybe, 15-18 women authors of lesbian pulps. Me, Marijane, Patricia Highsmith, Valerie Taylor, Paula Christian, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sarah Aldrich. There were men, too, but they were writing much more trashy stuff – just going from one sex scene to the next – but the women were writing real characters and plots. Marijane and I are still in touch. We are the only two survivors.
JW: Why do you think this market appealed to so many talented writers?
AB: The lesbian pulp market was able to attract so many excellent writers then because royalties were so good compared to hardcovers. For hardcovers, you got 8% royalties on a $2-5 book. For paperbacks, you got 15%, and although that was sometimes 15% of two bits, paperback sold more. If a hardcover sold 5000 copies it was considered a hit. A successful paperback sold 30,000 copies, at least. My books got up into the hundred thousands. At 15% of the cover, that was a 10-12K year salary, which in 1960 was worth almost ten times what it would be now. So if your books sold well, it could be very renumerative.
My husband told me years later that he never read my books, because when he saw the cover blurbs and realized what they were about, he didn’t want to read any more. But he loved the money they brought in!
JW: When you were writing in the 1950s and early 60s, what sort of restrictions did publishers place upon your work?
AB: Well, pulp novels were distributed through the networks used for magazines, and these networks relied upon the postal service, who answered to a conservative Congress. So the postal inspectors read all the books and censored them for two things: vocabulary – the seven specific “obscene” words — and for homosexual plots with happy endings, because they thought that just reading a book portraying homosexuality without punishment could turn a straight teenager gay. So you had to end the books with suicide or death of some kind, or one woman leaving for a man.
JW: Your most disturbing novel, Women in the Shadows, depicts an abusive relationship between the butch Beebo and the femme Laura, in which Beebo kills her own dog in an effort to get Laura to stay with her. This seems to go even beyond the mandate against happy endings. Why was this novel so very dark?
AB: Well, I had just written I Am a Woman, which is a much lighter, happier book. But spending more time in Greenwich Village, I was able to see the dark side that resulted from the world dictating how this nascent community had to live in shame. Political, medical, educational establishments, work, family, friends – there was not a smiling face in the bunch. For a gay person, there was not one single person saying “you’re okay the way you are.” And if you were really different so you couldn’t pass, couldn’t hide – like Beebo — you could be broken down, and I was trying to show that in this novel. Beebo had a total breakdown in this book, in part because I felt like I was heading for a breakdown myself, so I made her have it for me. I wish sometimes I hadn’t written that one, because it was a hurtful book, and people needed, at the time, to see something more hopeful. But it did give a glimpse of what people could be brought to in desperation.
JW: Was there a sense, during the repressive, homophobic period of the 1950s, that things would ever change, or did it seem like things would just stay this way and you would have to survive it?
AB: Nobody foresaw the civil rights movement, or the gay liberation movement, but we did feel that somehow, it would change. One thing about this oppressive environment: it tightened the community – an injury to one was an injury to all – and it brought out a really wry humor. We did have fun and people were hilarious! The oppression really forced us to find the good things, the funny stuff, as a way to survive.
JW: The Ladder [published by the lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis between 1957 and 1972] was the only publication that reviewed lesbian pulps, evaluating them primarily on whether they portrayed lesbians in a positive or a negative light. Were you aware of these reviews at the time you were writing? How did they influence you?
AB: Yes, I was aware of them. I subscribed to The Ladder for a while, and when we moved to California in 1957, I attended DOB meetings in LA, and I spoke at Mattachine Society meetings. Barbara Grier wrote those reviews [under the pen name Gene Damon]. I did see some of Barbara’s reviews. In fact, she thought Ann Bannon was another pen name of the person writing as Ann Aldrich, who had written two books very critical of the New York City lesbian scene: We Walk Alone and We Too, Must Love. The Ladder was unhappy with these books, and because Barbara was convinced my books were by the same person, she attacked some of my work. In one issue of The Ladder, she even wrote, “Ann Bannon I’m onto you!” In reality, Ann Aldrich was yet another pen name of Marijane Meaker, the lesbian pulp writer who helped me so much as I was getting started! The other irony of this is that much later, in the 1980s, when she was running Naiad Press, Barbara reissued my books, beginning the revival of interest in my work.
JW: Your novel “Journey to a Woman” depicts a woman desperately struggling to free herself from marriage, motherhood and the nuclear family, and it represents the gay life as freedom from these institutions. Today, the gay rights movement seems to be turning back to, even valorizing those institutions (I’m thinking in particular of the gay marriage movement). What do you think about this shift?
AB: I, of course, support gay marriage, but my reason has more to do with complete recognition of all rights citizenship. There are many who are getting along without it, but marriage is one of the last ways to deny full humanity to the gay community. If you want to be married, you ought to be able to. Having been through [a marriage], though, I’m terribly glad to be out of it and I’m not even slightly tempted! But if I were younger and just starting out, I think I would want to have that option.
The implications of this issue stretch so far beyond what we imagine right now. This could be part of the reason why religious communities have fought so hard – they don’t want to lose control over people’s lives, and control over sexuality is the most intimate form of control over people. By making us feel that we are in the wrong, leaving us haunted by a feeling of not quite doing right, religions exercise tremendous control over all facets of our lives. If they can control your sexuality, they’ve got you by the short hairs.
JW: Which of your characters are your favorites?
AB: The characters for whom I have the most affection are Beebo and Jack Mann. Jack is based in part on a real-life friend. He had all the qualities of kindness and self-deprecating humor that endear our most valued friends to us, and a drive to protect and support young LGBT newcomers to the community — a wonderful aspect of his personality. He was generous and funny.
Beebo, of course, is — or was at the time — sui generis. I had a lot of fun with her, and only wish now that I’d shown more of her humorous side. She had strength and courage, and when she finally settled down and grew up, she showed a talent for real love and sly wit. And she was gorgeous.
JW: Where did Beebo’s name come from, by the way?
AB: In the hope she will never know of this, I will say I had a childhood friend, Beverly B., who is still living in the town where I grew up. She struggled to pronounce her name as a little girl – and ended up called herself Beebo. When I was coming up with this wonderful superbutch character, my old friend came back to my mind and I though, “That’s it! It’s perfect!”
JW: And it’s become so iconic – people name their dogs after her now . . .
AB: Oh yes! I’ve met several charming canine Beebos.
JW: Did the writers of the play “Beebo Brinker Chronicles” consult with you?
AB: Yes, the gals who wrote it got in touch with me and said they wanted to take three of my books — Journey to a Woman, I am a Woman and Women in the Shadows – and dramatize them. [Playwrights] Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman have worked miracles, as has Raelle Myrick-Hodges, the artistic director. I really feel the play laughs with the novels, not at them. They saved so much of the original dialogue – and created such a respectful, affectionate, campy version.
The West Coast premier of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles opens Friday, February 26, 2010 and runs through March 13 at Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street. Special receptions with Ann Bannon Friday, February 26, 6:30–7:30 pm; Sunday, February 28, 1:00–2:30 pm and Thursday, March 11, 6:30–7:30 pm. Tickets for performances and receptions available at brava.org or 415-641-7657.
Jennifer Worley teaches English, LGBT Studies and Women’s Studies at City College of San Francisco. She is the author of “The Mid-century Pulp Novel and the Imagining of Lesbian Community.” (in Invisible Suburbs, Josh Lukin, ed.) and “’Street Power’: San Francisco’s Vanguard Youth Group and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism (in Captive Genders, Nat Smith and Eric Stanley, ed.s). She is currently working on a documentary film: “Sex on Wheels: A Secret History of San Francisco’s Sex Workers.”