A complete, cumulative Checklist of lesbian, variant and homosexual fiction by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

[Transcriber's note: Extensive research found no evidence that the copyright for this book had been renewed.]

Marion Zimmer Bradley

CHECKLIST

Edited and Published by: MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
Associate Editor: GENE DAMON
Cover design and layouts by Kerry Dame

editorial

THE PURPOSE AND HISTORY OF THE CHECKLIST

Here, in a single volume, it has been our intention to list, document and review every novel dealing, however slightly, with female variance, lesbianism or intense emotional relationships between women. We have also included a majority of the better known novels which, dealing primarily with male homosexuality, are of interest to the collector of variant fiction in general.

In related supplements we have compiled lists of variant poetry, variant films, of the major book services and publishing houses where these books can be obtained, and of the homosexual press.

The titles in the major portion of the Checklist are listed in a single comprehensive index by author. Information includes date published, number of reprints and publisher’s name. Brief reviews are included of most titles. An effort has been made in each case to distinguish whether the work under discussion is a novel about lesbianism, whether the variant content has been included mostly for shock effect, or whether (as in some excellent modern novels) homosexual characters appear incidentally to the other main themes of action in the book.

In such a comprehensive listing, reviews must of necessity be brief. For further discussion of many of the titles listed here, with excellent and complete critical analysis of their variant content, the serious student or collector is earnestly urged to invest in the definitive and major work on the subject:

FOSTER, Jeannette Howard; Sex Variant Women in Literature. N. Y. Vantage Press, 1956.

Although now officially out of print, this book can occasionally be obtained second hand, and copies will soon be offered for sale through the Daughters of Bilitis publication, THE LADDER. (See appendix.) We have made no effort to give more than cursory reviews of titles which are discussed at length in Dr. Foster’s work. However, since the publication of the Foster book, many new novels of lesbianism have been published, and the diligent search of many collectors, working with the Checklist editors, has brought many old ones to light.

We have tried to review in some detail the novels which were omitted from Dr. Foster’s work, and to strive for completeness, even at the expense of discriminatory judgment about the excellence or otherwise of the works included. Therefore this Checklist includes many works whose lesbian content was too slight, too subtle—or too “trashy”—to have come within the scope of the scholarly studies of Dr. Foster or the running column, Lesbiana, conducted by junior editor Gene Damon in the3 pages of THE LADDER.

It is our further contention that many novels dealing with male homosexuality come also within the province of the serious collector of lesbiana. We make, however, no claim for completeness for novels which fall within the homosexual, rather than the lesbian province. In general, the male titles included in this list—clearly defined, in each case, by the sign (m)—have been included because they were of special interest to the editors and therefore are presumably of interest to other collectors of lesbiana.

For those who wish a complete list of works dealing with male homosexuality, we suggest the comprehensive bibliography compiled by Noel I. Garde, discussed in the Appendix of Related Publications. Mr. Garde has indexed virtually every homosexual work from antiquity to the latest paperback shocker, and has also performed the mighty task of separating them into categories ... a task from which the Checklist editors have shrunk, though we have made some attempt at classification in our reviews and by awarding a plus sign to books of exceptional value. (For further discussion of this division, please consult the “List of Symbols and Abbreviations” on page 2.)

Most of the reviews in the present listing were written by one of the editors; no attempt has been made to divide the reviews written by MZB from those written by Damon. In general, these reviews have been gathered from so many sources that the awarding of individual credit would be impossible.

This Checklist, 1960, is the last of the cumulative Checklists. Plans at present are to publish brief supplements annually, listing only new titles, new reprints of old titles, or new discoveries of overlooked titles. Since this is the case, we feel that some brief history of the Checklist might be of interest to the readers.

Nearly 10 years ago, in the mailing of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, a very bitter discussion was raging on the subject of censorship—pro and con. Complicating this discussion, a man who is now dead, and shall therefore be nameless, published a scathing attack on homosexuals. By way of subtle reproof, and partially as a deadpan joke on this man, your senior editor, with Royal Drummond (whose “Digression” was highly praised by Checklist readers last year ...) published a 12-page offset leaflet, with editorials attacking censorship, and extensive reviews of perhaps a dozen of the best known homosexual novels. This leaflet had a cartoon cover and the general light-hearted tone of the publication was indicated by the title, which was Fairy Tales for Fabulous Faps. Reaction to this leaflet was mixed, but in general the readers enjoyed it, and said, “Do this again some time—”. However, soon after this, Mr. Drummond dropped out of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association, and your present editor had no impetus to continue the series single-handed.4

Early in the history of the publication known as THE LADDER, your senior editor had the privilege of reviewing the Foster book mentioned above, while the junior editor was in charge of the Lesbiana column. After reading the Foster work, your editor (MZB) resolved to publish a list of the omitted titles; when I began cutting the mimeograph stencils, however, I resolved to review not only the titles which Dr. Foster had omitted, but all of those which I had read, for the purpose of putting into print my own personal opinions and reactions. This first Checklist was called Astra’s Tower #2, and the number 2 seems to have baffled a good many people—they all wrote in, inquiring about #1. Number 1, however, was a mimeographed booklet of my own fiction, published during my late teens for the FAPA, mentioned above.

Through this first Checklist, I came into contact with Miss Damon, and because paperback lesbiana was blossoming on all the stands, we quickly resolved to publish another Checklist. I had fully intended to give Miss Damon full credit for her work last year; however, the mimeograph work on last year’s list was so poor, the quality of the paper so bad, and some unreliable reviewers fouled me up so badly on data, that I refused to foist off any portion of the blame on other shoulders.

The relaxing of censorship of recent years—as documented in the Supreme Court judgment relevant to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, etc.—has meant, in recent fiction, fewer taboos and in general a franker treatment of sexual themes. On the whole this is a good thing. However and unfortunately, it has also released a flood of trash and borderline erotica, of no literary worth and “interesting” only for the sexual content. Your editors have conscientiously waded through all this newsstand slush (and believe me, we get no kick out of it) because experience has taught us that even the worst peddlers of commercialized sex-trash sometimes come up with exceptionally well-written, honest and sincere work. For instance, Beacon Books (a subsidiary of Universal Publishing and Distributing Company)—some of whose paperback originals can be called printable only by the uttermost charity,—are currently also publishing the work of Artemis Smith, one of the major writers in the variant field today.

However, actually reviewing the majority of this stuff is impossible. Most of these books are not novels at all. They have impossibly complex plots—or no plots at all—since the story exists only as an excuse for the characters to jump into amorous exercise with the closest male, or female, or sometimes both. This sort of thing, “lesbian” only remotely, belongs more properly to the field of curiosa. One can, of course, display a Place Pigalle post card in a gallery with the Botticelli Venus, and classify them both as “nudes”. I personally consider this an insult to the Venus, and the devotee of “feelthy peectures” will find the restraint and taste of fine art too tame for his jaded tastes.

We are unalterably opposed to most censorship—but after5 wading through almost a hundred books whose only excuse for existence is to provide phony “thrills” for people too inhibited, too ignorant or too fearful to provide their own, well—- we think wistfully of some self-imposed standards of taste.

We also realize, flatly and realistically, that too much license in this stuff is going to bring on a wave of public reaction which may impose a sure-enough censorship—making the standards of the 1940s and 1950s look liberal.

Now obviously the field of homosexual literature is going to place a certain emphasis on the sexual problems of humanity which will be quantitatively greater than that of—say—the Western novel, or the detective story. Sex alone has not been made an excuse for consigning any novel to the trashbin. If the treatment is honest, the characters even remotely believable and the purpose of the book seems reasonably genuine, then the quantity of sex is purely a matter for the author’s discretion; and be it much, as in the works of March Hastings, Artemis Smith or Henry Miller, or little, as in Iris Murdoch’s delicate and subtle THE BELL, or Shirley Jackson’s THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE,—- we give the book judgment only on its merits as a book.

However, in self-defense, we have had to find a way to dispose of the more repetitive rubbish. Allowing for differences in taste, and granting that many people like their books well-spiced, if there is a reasonably well-written story along with the sex we have called it “Evening waster”—on the grounds that it may very well provide pleasant entertainment for anyone not a hopeless prude. But if the story is just a peg on which to hang up a lot of poorly written, gamy erotic episodes, with no literary value, and just evasive enough to keep the printer out of jail, then we have given it short shrift with the abbreviation “scv”—which cryptic letters are editorial shorthand for “Short Course in Voyeurism”—and have been the basis of a lot of jokes in the tedious business of passing reviews around the editorial staff (The junior and senior editors live a thousand miles apart and have never met; the others who occasionally contribute reviews are scattered from Alabama to Oregon.). So we have to have some fun in the endless correspondence—and “scv” books are fair game.

Regrettably, we are well aware that some people are going to use this designation in precisely the opposite fashion than we intended—- go through the list picking out the sexy books and carefully avoiding the others. Well—we shan’t spoil your fun. Each to her own taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow.

We wish here to give some slight acknowledgment to all those who, over the years since the initiation of this endeavor, have contributed overlooked titles, pointed out our errors, sent comments, criticisms and sometimes cash, laboriously tracked down elusive data, worked as unpaid researchers and stencil-cutters, and in general helped us to feel we were not working in a vacuum.

Special acknowledgments are due to Dr. Jeannette Howard Foster, unfailingly generous and gracious in allowing us to pick her brains; to Leslie Laird Winston, of the Winston Book Service; to the editors of THE LADDER, Del Martin in particular, for helping us to publicize our Checklist, and for allowing us to use reviews run in the Lesbiana column; to Forrest Ackerman, for endless help and encouragement; and to Kerry Dame, whose generous gift of stamps proved invaluable to the heavy load of correspondence necessary to keep this one-woman publishing house rolling. And to all those others, anonymous by choice, who have sent small gifts of cash and stamps, turned up elusive paperbacks for me in news-standless West Texas, contributed reviews and data, and, above all, provided cheer and encouraging support. We hope this Checklist is half as much fun for you to read as it was for us—all things considered—to prepare.

And here at the end I take off my editorial “We” for a special, personal THANK YOU to my collaborator and co-editor, GENE DAMON.

And now, until the first Supplement time, it’s time to turn the Checklist over to you. Comments and criticisms are invited.

List of Symbols and Abbreviations

THE COMPLETE, CUMULATIVE CHECKLIST OF LESBIAN FICTION

ACKWORTH, ROBERT C. The Moments Between. pbo, Hillman Books 1959. Characters in a college novel include an instructor—male—who is homosexual, very sympathetically portrayed. Also a subtle, but sympathetic attachment between an unlovely, unloved student and an older woman; the relationship is shown as constructive for both in the end.

+ ADAMS, FAY. Appointment in Paris. pbo, N. Y., Gold Medal 1952. An American girl in Paris has a brief affair with a French woman and is thereby enabled to break the hold of her old-maid aunt. She later marries.

ADDAMS, KAY. Queer Patterns. pbo, Beacon, 1959. scv. Trashy shocker about young Nora Card, who briefly forsakes her boy friend, Roger, for a corrupt lesbian employer.

Warped Desires. pbo, Beacon, 1960. scv. Teenage Doris goes to a boarding school and is seduced by everyone on the premises, male and female.

Non-fiction studies of the lesbian world, highly subjective, mostly vignettes of gay life in and around Greenwich Village, with some added data about the manners, customs and language of the “gay” world. Good reading, if somewhat biased.

ALEXANDER, DAVID. Madhouse in Washington Square. Lippincott, 1958. Mystery novel of high quality, introducing a pair of lesbians for window-dressing.

ANDERSON, HELEN. Pity for Women. N. Y., Doubleday, 1937. An unhappy and tense relationship among three women, inhabitants of a women’s residence club in New York.

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD. Dark Laughter. N. Y., Boni & Liveright, 1925, pbr Pocket Books, 1952. Very slight.

Poor White; N. Y., B. W. Huebsch, 1920, hcr in The Portable Sherwood Anderson, qpb Viking Press P42. In the course of a novel about the rise of a “shantytown boy’s” rise to prosperity, there is a brief but extremely sympathetic portrait of the lesbian, Kate Chancellor; the hero’s wife, Clara, is briefly captivated by Kate during her college days.

ANONYMOUS. Adam and Two Eves. Macauley Co, N. Y., 1934, pbr Beacon Books 1956. Evening waster. Neurotically heartbroken woman mourning her dead lover becomes entangled with a married woman because a woman’s love does not constitute infidelity to the dead; once initiated she becomes entangled in a long affair a trois, from which she is eventually extricated (somewhat the worse for wear) by a man she later marries.

ANTHOLZ, PEYSON. All Shook Up. pbo, Ace Books, 1958, (m). Alan, small-town teen-age rowdy, fights against his friendship with newcomer Howard Sirche, because it is rumored that Howard, who avoids women, is homosexual. Very good of its kind.

ANTON, CAL. The Private Life of a Strip Tease Girl. pbo, Beacon 1959, scv. Just what it sounds like. Among her many “affairs” is a brief episode with another girl.

ASQUITH, CYNTHIA. “The Lovely Voice”. ss, in This Mortal Coil. Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisconsin. Fantasy, 1947

BAKER, DENYS VAL. A Journey With Love. Bridgehead Books, 1955, pbr Crest Books 1956. fco. The hero’s first marriage fails because of his wife’s insistence that a woman friend shall share their home. Nothing is explicit.

BAKER, DOROTHY. Trio. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co, 1943, hcr Sun Dial 1945, pbr Penguin Books 1946. Tells of the captivation of a young woman by an unscrupulous literary agent who also happens to be a lesbian. Highly defamatory.

Young Man with A Horn. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1938, pbr Signet 1953. Very minor lesbian incident in a jazz novel.

+ BALDWIN, JAMES. Giovanni’s Room. Dial 1956, pbr Signet 1959, (m). An American boy in Paris fights against his affair with a young Italian, Giovanni; his fear and resistance to this relationship leads to separation, tragedy and their separate destruction. A powerful, tender and tragic book.

BALDWIN, MONICA. The Called and the Chosen. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, N. Y., 1957, pbr Signet 1958. A good study of repression and frustration in convent life, containing passim the story of Sister Helena, novice-mistress; although her behavior was strictly correct even for a nun, she once inspired such violent passions in her juniors that she was removed from this office. The heroine refers to Sister Helena, after her death, as “the one human being I ever loved”.

BALZAC, HONORE DE. Cousin Bette. Classic; many standard editions and translations. The story of a neurotic spinster’s half-realised passion for a woman friend.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Many standard editions and translations, including; pbr Avon Books 1957, (trans. Ernest Dowson.) Shocker of the 19th century, dealing with the passion of the Chevalier de Marsay for a strange, unspoilt girl, Paquita—who is virtually enslaved to a sinister lesbian Countess.

Seraphita. London, J.W. Dent & Sons, 1897; also as above. A romance of an angelic hermaphrodite. All of these are classics of world literature, as well as the literature of variance, and are apt to be available even in small libraries.

These three form a single, connected narrative, although any of the three novels can be read as a self-contained story. The first volume introduces the heroine of the series, Laura Landon, at college; where, in undergoing an affair with her room-mate, lovely but frigid Beth, she discovers her homosexuality. Softened by the affair, Beth marries, and Laura runs away. In the second book, Laura, in Greenwich Village, is sharing an apartment, with Marcie, a divorcee, entirely “straight” who plays Laura along strictly for kicks; Laura suffers under this treatment for a long time, then runs away again to shack up with a butch-type Village character, Beebo. In the third book, Laura and Beebo have been living together for two years; Laura is tiring of this lengthy affair and cheats on Beebo with a colored dancer named Tris, while Beebo, to win Laura back, resorts to such trickery as staging a phony “rape” ... inflicting wounds on herself in search of sympathy. Tiring of this life, Laura runs away again, this, time to marry a male homosexual friend, Jack, in a search for stability and permanence. The whole story invites comparison with Weiraugh’s THE SCORPION: homosexuality per se is not attacked, but the drawbacks of the life, and the dangers and difficulties to anyone trying to adjust him-or-herself to that life, are frankly and brutally delineated; there is a pervasive air of dissatisfaction, or resignation, and gradual withdrawal; and the ending of the third book is unsatisfactory and hardly complete. Nevertheless, the impact of these books, particularly when read all together, is considerable; Miss Bannon’s grasp of character, technique and construction improve with each novel. Despite wild improbabilities and gimmicky, contrived situations, these are perhaps the major contribution to lesbian literature in the paperback field anywhere.

+ BARNES, DJUNA. “Dusie”, ss in American Esoterica, NY, Macy-Masius, 1927. This collection also contains short stories of (m) interest.

Nightwood. N. Y., Harcourt 1937, her New Directions n. d. A well-known and excellent lesbian novel laid in Paris.

+ BARR, JAMES. Derricks. NY, Greenberg 1951, (m) hcr Pan, 1957. Although those short stories all deal with male homosexuality, their coherent, fresh and constructive philosophy make this a book of primary importance for every reader.

BARRY, JEROME. Malignant Stars. N. Y., Doubleday, 1960. Signe, a handsome Valkyrie-type girl, is found dead, and the note beside her body is apparently a love letter from her roommate Lyn; the suspicion that Lyn is her lover and murderer forms the main theme of the plot. Well done.

BAUM, VICKI. Theme for Ballet. N. Y., Doubleday 1958, pbr Dell 1959, (m). Minor but excellent.

BEER, THOMAS. Mrs Egg and Other Barbarians. Knopf, 1933. Rarer than hen’s teeth—lesbian humor.

BELOT, ADOLPHE. Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife. Paris, Dentu 1870, Chicago, Laird & Lee 1891. The wife remains a “miss”, refusing her husband’s approaches because of her attachment to another woman. Typically the husband drowns this monstrous creature (other woman) during an ostensible seaside rescue.

BENNETT, ARNOLD. Elsie and the Child. N. Y., Doran, 1924. “Common sense” treatment of an attachment between Elsie the housemaid, and a girl of twelve, which subsides when the little girl is sent to school.

The Pretty Lady. N. Y., Doran 1918. A subtle picture of indirect variance between two women in wartorn Paris.

BERKMAN, SYLVIA. Blackberry Wilderness. N. Y., Doubleday, 1959. Esoteric, melancholy, beautifully written short stories, of which two are overtly lesbian in content.

BERTIN, SYLVIA. The Last Innocence. (Trans. by Marjorie Dean). N. Y. McGraw Hill, 1955. Story of Paula, a member of a French provincial family. “The refreshing thing is that Paula is treated as a matter of course ... that she wears trousers, hates men, etc. is presented with no more excuse or explanation than the individual foibles of the rest of the family.”

BESTER, ALFRED. Who He? N. Y., Doubleday 1955, pbr Berkley 1956, (m) tct. The Rat Race. Tense, tightly plotted novel of split personality. The hero’s housemate is a deeply sublimated homosexual who cracks up when Jake gets a girl; this episode snaps the high pitch of tightrope tension and precipitates the denouement of the novel. Excellent.

BISHOP, LEONARD. Creep Into thy Narrow Bed. Dial 1954, pbr Pyramid 1956. Story of a vicious abortion racket; woven into the story is the sympathetically treated story of a young lesbian’s self-realization. Very good of kind.

BODIN, PAUL. All Woman’s Flesh (trans. from the French of Le Voyage Sentimental, by Lowell Bair.) pbo Berkley 1957.

Both of these involve a man’s attachment to two women who have some homosexual contact, but the emphasis is heterosexual, rather than lesbian.

BOLTON, ISABEL. “Ruth and Irma”, ss in The New Yorker, Jan 26, 1947; also in Donald Webster Cory’s 21 Variations on a Theme.

BOTTOME, PHYLLIS. Jane. Vanguard, 1957. Story of a street urchin, including lesbian episodes in a girl’s reformatory.

BOURDET, EDOUARD. The Captive. N. Y., Brentano’s 1926. Drama based on a triangle—man, wife, and a woman who is winning the affections of the latter.

BOURJAILY, VANCE. The End of My Life. Scribner’s 1947, pbr Bantam 1952, (m).

The Hound of Earth. Scribner 1955, pbr Permabooks, 1956, (m). Also includes a minor, and unsympathetic lesbian character.

BOWEN, ELIZABETH. The Hotel. N. Y. Dial 1928. A shy young girl sent to catch a husband at a fashionable hotel is, instead, captivated by a sophisticated woman.

BOWLES, JANE. Two Serious Ladies. N. Y.. Knopf, 1943. The emancipation of an inhibited American housewife.

BOYLE, KAY. “The Bridegroom’s Body” ss in The Crazy Hunter, Harcourt 1938, 1940. Also qpb, Beacon Press, 1958, (m).

Monday Night. N. Y. Harcourt 1938, her New Directions. n.d. Brief account of a lesbian affair through the eyes of a child.

BRADLEY, MARION Z. “Centaurus Changeling” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April, 1954. Science Fiction novel; intensely emotional relationship between three wives of alien bureaucrat leads to jealousy and12 tragedy when the eldest, Cassiana, takes an outsider into their home and makes a favorite of her.

The Planet Savers, in Amazing Stories, Dec. 1958, (m). Science fiction of split personality, one equivocally homosexual.

BRAND, MAX. (pseud of Frederick Faust). The Night Horseman. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920, hcr Dodd, Mead 1952, pbr Pocket Books 1954, (m). Unusual Western story of a strange cowboy who has an almost supernatural influence on horses and other men; his foster father mysteriously declines when he leaves, makes a miraculous recovery when he returns home. Subtle and good of its kind.

BRINIG, MYRON. The Looking Glass Heart. Sagamore, 1958. One lesbian episode, treated vaguely. (Minority report says that nevertheless it is so clearly and well done that the book is worth anyone’s reading.)

BRITAIN, SLOAN. The Needle. pbo Beacon Books, 1959. Overly contrived shocker about Gina, a young girl who falls simultaneously into narcotics, lesbianism, prostitution and the hands of a weird couple dabbling in incest. Evening waster, rather better than most but leaves a bitter taste.

+ First Person, Third Sex. pbo Newsstand.Library 1959. Very well-written novel of Paula Harman, young school-teacher coming to terms with her life as a lesbian through bitter experience. Don’t let the lurid paperback covers and blurb scare you off, this is a NOVEL—well worth hard covers and a steal at 35¢.

BROCK, LILYAN. Queer Patterns. Greenberg 1935, pbr Avon 1951, 1952. Purple-patched sloppily sentimental tale of Sheila, beautiful young actress with a perfect husband who nevertheless loses her heart to Nicoli, a stereotype lesbian complete with tuxedo. They part to avoid gossip and live unhappily ever after.

BROMFIELD, LOUIS. The Rains Came. N. Y. Collier 1937, pbr Bantam 1952. In a long novel of India there is a brief but important episode involving two old missionary ladies. The elder, an engaging old battleax, muses as she tucks the younger and sillier into bed that her friend had never understood why they had been driven out of the school where they had, as young girls, been teaching. Ironically, the nice old grim one is killed in a flood while the silly one remains to pester everybody.

Mister Smith, Harper, 1951; no pbr oh record, but your editor has owned one—perhaps an “Armed Forces” edition? (m). Four men, marooned on a desert island in WW2.

+ BROPHY, BRIGID. King of a Rainy Country. Knopf. 1957. Poignant novel of a young girl who lives with Neale, a young male homosexual, out of wedlock. They both become enamored with a portrait of Cynthia, a girl out of the childhood of the heroine....

BROWN, WENZELL. Prison Girl. pbo, Pyramid, 1958. One of many books documenting in painful detail the abuses prevalent in the women’s prison system, with special attention to the undeniable fact that the system breeds various sexual aberrations. A few of these books are excellent. This one isn’t.

BROWNRIGG, GAWEN. Star Against Star. N. Y., Macaulay, 1936. Story of a girl conditioned from childhood to lesbian affairs, first by an overly seductive mother, then by a school friend. The book has the doom-ridden atmosphere of its day, and is emotional and somewhat over-written.

BURNS, VINCENT G. Female Convict. Macaulay 1934, pbr Pyramid 1959. More women in prison and the unfortunate relationships developing among them.

BURT, STRUTHERS. Entertaining the Islanders. N. Y. Scribners, 1933. Sophisticated, satirical, novel in which a man becomes aware that his ex-sweetheart has been captivated by another woman.

+ BUSSY, DOROTHY. Olivia. (by Olivia). Wm. Sloane Associates, 1949, Berkley pbr 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959. An English schoolgirl, sent to boarding school in Paris, becomes an unwitting third party to a long-standing affair between Julie and Cara, the two schoolmistresses. Julie’s response to the girl, and Cara’s jealousy, and suicide, form the main events of the story, which is told with delicate restraint, after a retrospect of many years, as Olivia, now herself a lesbian, has come to understand the procession of events.

CAINE, HALL. The Bondsman. R.F. Fenno & Co., ca. 1890; other editions available, frequently very cheap secondhand. Called a “Modern Saga”, this is laid in 18th-Century Iceland. Two half-brothers, Jason the Red and Michael Sunlocks, sons of the same man by different mothers, grow up knowing of one another’s existence, but unknown to each other personally. Through a series of saga-like coincidences, they fall in love with the same woman, and are eventually exiled together to the sulphur mines—Iceland’s prison colony—still unaware of each other’s real identity. There Jason undergoes a psychological and emotional upheaval which can only be described as “falling in love” with Michael, who is still known to him only as Prisoner A-25, not as his hated brother. This story is probably more explicit, emotionally, than14 anything written before the 20th century and the freedom given by Freud to the emotions of novelists. Recommended.

The Deemster. Rand McNally, 1888, Chicago; D. Appleton, 1888; numerous other editions. (m). A glorified friendship between two cousins ends in murder.

CALDWELL, ERSKINE. Tragic Ground. Little, Brown & Co, 1944, pbr Signet 1948, fco.

CAPOTE, TRUMAN. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Random House 1958, pbr Signet 1959. In the story of a promiscuous, rather pathetic girl, a sadistic lesbian neighbor brings on violent events. Everything very subtle and indirect.

Other Voices, Other Rooms. Random House 1948, pbr Signet 1959. Young boy slowly falling under the influence of a decadent uncle who is a transvestite. Macabre.

Both, of these books hint at lesbianism on the cover blurbs, but are, rather, highly risque French novels with brief, irrelevant and heterosexually oriented contact between women characters strictly for voyeuristic effect.

CARPENTER, EDWARD. Iolaus; an Anthology of Friendship. N. Y., Albert & Charles Boni, 1935, (m). Listed as “the first of its kind” this is said also to be “very vague and old-fashioned.”

+ CASAL, MARY. The Stone Wall. An Autobiography. Chicago, Eyncourt, Press, 1930. In casual, conversational and entirely frank form, a woman born in 1865 (and therefore, at the time of writing, in her sixties) tells the story of her entire life as a lesbian. With the exception of “slightly autobiographical”—and always greatly disguised—fiction, this is probably the earliest such memoir in the literature. The writing is highly competent and professional, (subtly denying the author’s insistence that she was not a writer;) and filled with most interesting revelations about the lesbian world of New York and Paris at the turn of this century. Unfortunately the book is rare and expensive, but it stands alone as a classic of its kind.

CHAMALES, TOM T. Go Naked in the World. N. Y. Scribners 1959. Nick Stratton, wounded veteran, returns to find that his girl friend is a call-girl and a lesbian.

CHANDLER, RAYMOND. The Big Sleep. Knopf 1939, pbr Pocket Books 1950, and others. (m) The bizarre murder of a homosexual hoodlum, and the interrogation of his boy friend, form important sequences in this hard-boiled murder mystery.

CHEEVER, JOHN. “Clancy in the Tower of Babel”, ss in The Enormous Radio, Funk 1953, pbr Berkley 1958, (m).

+ CHRISTIAN, PAULA. The Edge of Twilight. pbo Crest 1959. Airline stewardess Val, in an alcoholic haze, allows herself to make love to a young girl friend, Toni. Fearing her own response to this “abnormal” love, she redoubles her promiscuous sleeping-around, but the girls end up together. The treatment, though sensational, is honest and constructive; the book will win no literary prizes, but whatever the reader’s sympathies and prejudices, he will approve the stand that happy adjustment to love and affection—even homosexual—is a more constructive solution than promiscuity. Very good of its kind.

CHRISTIE, AGATHA. A Murder is Announced. Dodd, Mead 1950, fco. Suspects include a pair of problematical lesbians.

CLARK, DORENE. The Exotic Affair. Magnet Books, 1959, scv. “I really think this one should be Maggot Books,” wrote my reviewer. “One of those fastmoving sloppy jobs where two men and two women on an exotic cruise complete with mis-spelled and misapplied foreign phrases spend most of their time trying all of the printable and some of the unprintable variations on an old old theme. All sex and no sentiment makes Jack and Jill sickening (and the reviewer sick) or, for that matter, Jack and Jack or Jill and Jill.”

+ CLAYTON, JOHN. Dew in April. Kendall & Sharpe, 1935. Romance of the Middle Ages, laid in the Convent of St. Lazarus of the Butterflies. Dolores, a homeless vagabond, is given shelter by Mother Leonor, a mystic, repressed, white-hot and deeply tender woman whose passionate emotional attachments to her young novices are never explicit but pervade the entire book. Much of the story is concerned with a subtle, sweet and innocently sensual blossoming of adolescent emotions into homo-erotic form under the pressures of convent life; the interplay of delicate love relationships between Dolores, Mother Leonor, and the young novices Dezirada and Clarisse, and their fluctuation between despair, self-sacrifice and compassionate love when Dolores finds a knightly lover, Pedro, is probably unmatched in studies of feminine variance.

Gold of Toulouse. Kendall & Sharpe, 1935. Sequel to Dew in April, but laid chronologically six or seven years earlier. Though mostly concerned with the adventures of Don Marcos, the Spanish knight, it also tells the story of Leonor, and shows the beginning of her relationship with Dezirada.

CLIFTON, BUD. Muscle Boy. pbo Ace Books, 1958, (m). Teen-age athlete inveigled into posing for dirty pictures. Good evening waster.

COLE, JERRY. Secrets of a Society Doctor. Greenberg, 1935. pbr Universal Publishing & Distributing, ca. 1953, (m).

+ COLEMAN, LONNIE. Ship’s Company. Little, Brown & Co, 1955, pbr Dell, 1957. Collection of short stories, of which two are homosexual.

Sam. David McKay, 1959, pbr Pyramid, 1960, (m). Major, excellent, important. Don’t waste time reading reviews, just go out and buy it.

The Indulgent Husband (in The Short Novels of Colette). “Bella Vista” in The Tender Shoot. “Gitanette” in Music Hall Sidelights.

All of these are currently in print in excellent, uniform English translation of the standard “Fleuron” edition of Colette’s complete works, from Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, of recent date. The two “Claudine” novels have had recent Avon pbr editions under the titles of Diary of a 15 Year Old French Girl, and Claudine.

Much of the work of this important French novelist was variant. Only the most explicit are named above. The first three form a connected narrative, telling of Claudine’s school crushes, her friendship with a male-homosexual cousin, and her “indulgent husband” who connives at her lesbian affair with a woman friend, in order to enjoy it secondhand. “Bella Vista” tells of a vacation spent, at a hotel managed by two middle-aged lesbians; the narrator’s fascinated interest in the couple vanishes when one of the “ladies” turns out to be, actually, a disguised man.

CONNOLLY, CYRIL. The Rock Pool. Scribner 1936, her New Directions n. d. Very well written novel of a group of expatriates in the South of France. Nearly all are homosexuals; the story is told without comment or judgment.

CONSTANTINE, MURRAY, and Margaret Goldsmith. Venus in Scorpio. John Lane, 1940. Heavily fictionalized biography, (erroneously listed elsewhere as a novel) of Marie Antoinette, suggesting lesbianism in her adolescence.

+ CORY, DONALD WEBSTER. 21 Variations on a Theme. N. Y., Greenberg 1953. The classic anthology of short stories about homosexuals; four deal with feminine variance.

COUPEROUS, LOUIS. The Comedians, N. Y. Doran 1926. Variant couple in a novel of Imperial Rome.

COWLIN, DOROTHY. Winter Solstice. Macmillan, 1943. A brief variant relationship proves beneficial to a hysterical invalid.

CRADOCK, PHYLLIS. Gateway to Remembrance. Andrew Dakers, London 1950. fco. Very brief mention of a lesbian couple in a sappy metaphysical novel about Lost Atlantis.

CRAIG, JONATHAN. Case of the Village Tramp. pbo Gold Medal 1959. Fast, well-written mystery introduces a pair of lesbians among the suspects; good entertainment.

+ CRAIGIN, ELISABETH. Either is Love. Harcourt, Brace, 1937, pbr Lion Books, 1952, 1956, Pyramid 1960. After the death of her husband the narrator re-reads the letters she had written him about her intense love affair with another woman. Almost unequalled treatment of a lesbian romance.

CREAL, MARGARET. A Lesson in Love. Simon & Schuster 1957. A Canadian orphan’s passion for a beautiful schoolmate ends in disillusion when the older girl, Tammy, tries to force Nicola into a distasteful affair with a boy, the better to deceive her mother about a similar affair of her own.

CROUZAT, HENRI. The Island at the End of the World. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1959. An ex-schoolteacher, Patrice, is marooned on a sub-Antarctic island with three nurses; Joan, a nymphomanic; Victoria, a lesbian, and Kathleen, a quite ordinary girl. Due to fortuitous circumstances, they manage to assure themselves the necessities of life, and between Robinson-Crusoe-ish struggles, embark on a round of excesses gradually diminished by the horrible deaths of Kathleen, then Victoria. Fascinating, slightly macabre.

+ CUSHING, MARY WATKINS. The Rainbow Bridge. G P Putnam’s Sons, 1954. This book is included for the light it sheds on another novel in this list, Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer, and not for the sake of any impertinent conclusions about the real people involved. Mrs. Cushing served for seven years as companion and buffer against the world for the famous prima donna, Olive Fremstad, and Mme. Fremstad’s reclusive, fantastically disciplined personality seems to have served, at least in part, as model for Lena Geyer. At any rate, both books become more interesting when read together.

DANE, CLEMENCE. (pseud. of Winifred Ashton); Regiment of Women. Macmillan, 1917. Possibly the earliest novel of variance. A lengthy book of the subtle sadism of the domineering headmistress of a girl’s school.

DARIUS, MICHEL. I, Sappho of Lesbos. Castle Books, May 1960. Supposedly translated from a Medieval Latin manuscript conveniently lost on the Andrea Doria. In first-person, this weaves the better-known traditions about Sappho into a racy, fast-moving novel. The lesbian content is not emphasized,18 unduly. Writing-wise, this invites comparison with the work of Pierre Louys. The “scholarship” is completely tongue-in-cheekish, of course, as with the Songs of Bilitis. In general, this should prove the Title of the Year for those who wonder why they don’t write like Pierre Louys anymore. (Department of Unpaid Advertising; this one can NOW be ordered through Winston Book Service; see Appendix.)

DAVENPORT, MARCIA. Of Lena Geyer. Scribner, 1936. Well-known novel of the life of an opera singer. Lena has a young satellite and adorer, but Elsie is careful to say that while “gossip has had many cruel things to say of this friendship ... there was, needless to say, not a word of truth in the essential accusation.” The two women remain together, even after Lena’s marriage, until her death.

DAVEY, WILLIAM. Dawn Breaks the Heart. Howell Soskin & Co, 1941. A lengthy episode involves the sensitive hero’s elopement with Vivian, an irresponsible girl who turns out to be a lesbian and leaves him for another woman. Excellent.

DAVIES, RHYS. “Orestes”, ss in The Trip to London. N. Y. Howell Soskin & Co, 1946. A lesbian manages to free the protagonist of a mother-complex, because her attitude is free of feminine seductiveness.

+ DAVIS, FITZROY. Quicksilver. Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Hilarious novel of the theatre, supposedly based on actual personalities recognizable to the initiate; my reviewer wrote that some theatrical people “literally turn purple at the mere mention of this book ... most real pro actors detest portrayal of homosexuality in theatre fiction, bad publicity and all that ... can’t say I blame them much.”

DAY, MAX. So Nice, So Wild. pbo, Stanley Library Inc, 1959. Evening waster; an impossibly complicated murder-story plot with a hero who, trying to prove he didn’t murder his own uncle, is pestered by all sorts of girls crawling into his bunk, blondes, brunettes and a few lesbians trying hard to convert themselves to heterosexuality. Funny, real fun.

These are all hardcover risque novels retailing for about $3 in bookstores which deal in that sort of thing for the adult trade only; I don’t know, not being a postal inspector, whether they19 can legally be sent through the U S Mails. On the whole I would think not. They are all fairly well written for books of their kind, amusing and entertaining, and bear about the same relationship to the paperback scv—evening wasters that ESQUIRE does to the average cheaper girly magazine. They are, however, strictly for a male audience; the “lesbian” content in all of them is presented from a strip-tease point of view and in every case the girl involved is “cured” of this perversion by male seduction—in some cases, by brutality. The plot of Non Stop Flight is typical; hero Eric Leighton discovers his wife dallying with a lesbian, so he beats up and rapes the lesbian (juicily described) whereupon his wife commits suicide. Then Eric gets involved with Celia, a stereotype “dish” with an ineffectual husband; when Celia tires of him he beats her up and rapes her (juicily described) then runs across the lesbian who has seduced his wife and Celia, so he beats her up and rapes her again (juicily described) after which Eric and the lesbian get married and live very happily forever after. I don’t know precisely what to call these books, but lesbiana is hardly descriptive. You have been warned.

DEISS, JAY. The Blue Chips. Simon & Schuster 1957, pbr Bantam 1958. fco. In an excellent novel of medical laboratory workers, a very very minor lesbian character.

DE FORREST, MICHAEL. The Gay Year. N. Y., Woodford Press, 1949, (m). Happily untypical of this publisher’s racy trash, this story of a young man searching for self-knowledge in New York’s Bohemias is very good of its’ kind.

DELL, FLOYD. Diana Stair. Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. Long novel of the early 19th century. Diana is a woman writer, but also explores life as mill-girl, school-teacher and abolitionist. Though attracted to, and attractive to men, she is never without “some older woman to adore and emulate, or some younger woman to teach and inspire.” Delightful, ironic novel of the trouble women can get into when they refuse to fall neatly into the ruts laid down by conventional society for women’s lives.

DE MEJO, OSCAR. Diary of a Nun. pbo Pyramid 1955. Just what it sounds like—fictional diary of a young girl in a convent warding off scandalous advances. Mediocre.

+ DENNIS, NIGEL FORBES. Cards of Identity. Vanguard, 1955. Hilarious novel of confused identity, dealing with both male and female homosexuality.

DES CARS, GUY. The Damned One. pbo Pyramid, 1956. A member of French aristocracy, ambiguously sexed enough to be classified as female at birth, grows up unequivocally male but retains the name, dress and character of a female to avoid scandal—which comes anyhow when she carries on with an eccentric Englishwoman.

Moon Kissed. Green Farms, Conn. Modern Pubs 1957, Vixen Press 1953, pbr tct Forbidden Pleasures Beacon Books 1959.

These are all the same sort of thing, evening wasters or scv, depending on taste. Big handsome men of incredible stamina, engaging incessantly in that one activity besides which all else, is as naught, with a succession of beautiful women, blonde, brunette and redhead. Now and then this procession of affairs is varied a little by letting the girls sport with one another to give the heroes a breathing spell. In short sexy books for people who like reading sexy books. Adults only, please.

DE VOTO, BERNARD. Mountain Time. Little, Brown & Co 1946—47, fco. One very brief overt lesbian episode.

DE VRIES, PETER. The Tents of Wickedness. Little, Brown & Co, 1959, Minor episode in a very funny literary satire—Army colonel who talks pure Hemingway turns out to be a WAC in disguise.

DIDEROT, DENIS. Memoirs of a Nun. (trans from French by Frances Birrell). London, Rutledge & Sons 1928, hcr London, Elek Books, Book Centre Ltd, N. Circular Road, Neasdon, London, N. T. 10, England. Classic French novel La Religieuse, written in 1760, published in 1796, Reflects the very bitter anti-clerical sentiment of the times just before the Revolution. A “cornerstone” title.

DINESEN, ISAK. Seven Gothic Tales. N. Y., Smith & Haas, 1943, hcr Modern Library n.d.

“The Invincible Slave Owners”, ss in A Winter’s Tales, Random House 1942.

DIXON, CLARISSA. Janet and her dear Phebe. Stokes, 1909. Girls story of two loving little chums, separated by a misunderstanding between their families, and re-united as women. Though never explicit, the story is emotional and intense. It is highly unlikely the author was quite, aware of the type of attachment she was portraying.

DJEBAR, ASSIA. The Mischief. Simon & Schuster 1958, pbr Avon 1959 tct Nadia. Very brief but well-written novel of a young girl who falls in love with a former schoolgirl friend, now married.

+ DONISTHORPE, SHEILA. Loveliest of Friends, Claude Kendall 1931, pbr Berkley 1956, 1957, 1958, due for another. Boyish Kim captivates young happy-housewife Audrey and wrecks her life. Preachy outburst against lesbians toward the end. Read it with a hanky handy. (Curiously enough, in spite of the anti-lesbian bias of the ending, and the overdone sentimentality of the Swinburnian writing, everybody seems to enjoy this one—all the Checklist editors included.)

DRESSER, DAVID. Mardigras Madness. Godwin 1934. One lesbian episode in an evening waster about Carnival.

DRUON, MAURICE. The Rise of Simon Lachaume. Dutton, 1952; hcr as part of the trilogy The Curtain Falls, Scribner 1960. One episode in lengthy novel of a French family involves the duping of an elderly roue by a pair of young lesbians.

+ DU MAURIER, ANGELA. The Little Legs. Doubleday, 1941. Sad and devastating results from a long variant enslavement. “This is a lovely book if you enjoy crying, and I do,” says one reviewer.

Clea. N. Y. Dutton, 1960. The last volume of now-famous tetralogy, just released, winds up all of the loose ends of the other three. The lesbian element is minor, but all four novels are excellent.

EICHRODT, JOHN. “Nadia Devereaux”, ss in Sextet, ed by Whit & Hallie Burnett. N. Y., McKay Co. 1951.

EISNER, SIMON. (pseud of Cyril Kornbluth). The Naked Storm. pbo, Lion Library, 1952, 1956. Mixed bag of passengers on a transcontinental train, including a lesbian who tries to captivate a young girl and is murdered by another passenger to give her intended victim “a chance at real happiness with a man.”

ENGSTRAND, STUART. More Deaths than One. Julian Messner 1955, pbr Signet 1957. Mannish woman defending effeminate husband against charge of rape by kidnapping his victim and hiding her out, goes through a nervous breakdown involving a morbid and macabre attachment to the girl; horrible.

Sling and the Arrow. Creative Age 1947, hcr Sun Dial n.d., pbr Signet ca. 1951, (m).

EMERY, CAROL. Queer Affair. pbo Beacon Books, 1957. Dancer Draga moves in with mannish Jo, runs into complications when she tries to desert Jo for a man. Evening waster but very good nevertheless ... the author got in some good attitudes and philosophies when the publisher wasn’t looking.

ENTERS, ANGNA. Among the Daughters. Coward McCann, 1955. Autobiographical novel of a girl who, like the author, finally becomes a dancer and choreographer. A good deal of space is devoted to a friendship between Lucy and another girl; the story is tinged with variance but never explicit.

ESTEY, NORBERT. All My Sins. A. A. Wyn, 1954. pbr Crest 1956. fco. Few very minor variant episodes in a long novel of the French courtesan Ninon l’Enclos.

EUSTIS, HELEN. The Horizontal Man. Harper 1946, pbr Pocket Books 1955. Offbeat psychological murder mystery.

EVANS, LESLEY. Strange are the Ways of Love. pbo Crest 1959. Love among the guitar-playing, folk-songing beatniks, with the lesbians playing Musical Beds. Evening waster.

EVANS, JOHN (pseud. of Howard Browne). Halo in Brass. Bobbs-Merrill 1949, pbr Bantam 1958. Hardboiled detective story; private eye Paul Pine is hired to locate runaway girl with no boy friends and many girl friends. Suspenseful, nice way to spend (not waste) a lazy evening.

EWERS, HANNS HEINZ. Alraune. John Day, 1929. Alraune is Evil incarnate—symbol of the Mandrake Root, destroying love in everyone with whom she comes in contact, bringing out their innate evil. Among those destroyed by Alraune are a pair of lesbian lovers. High-quality fantasy, unfortunately rare and rather expensive.

FADIMAN, EDWIN JR. The 21 Inch Screen. Doubleday 1958, pbr Signet 1960. TV bigshot Rex Lundy has woman trouble—his wife, his mistress, and his teen-age daughter. The latter is seeking the love she doesn’t get at home from a Greenwich Village lesbian friend. Excellent modern fiction.

The Glass Play Pen. pbo Signet 1956. Rich girl loses her parents, loses her money, and turns expensive call girl. One lesbian episode, treated with tenderness and sympathy.

FAIR, ELIZABETH. Bramton Wick. Funk & Wagnalls 1954. fco. Cozy little story of cozy little English village, including two maiden ladies who have lived together for many years. “It is all very light and airy and your old-maid aunt wouldn’t think it at all odd.” Apt to be in libraries.

FAREWELL, NINA. Someone to Love. Messner 1959, pbr Popular Library, 1960. One brief, incomplete lesbian episode in a long, interesting novel of a woman’s continual search for real love in a life filled with fleeting liaisons.

+ FERGUSON, MARGARET. The Sign of the Ram. London, Philadelphia, The Blakiston Co, 1944-45. Sherida comes as companion-secretary to crippled Leah, passionately adored by her whole family including sixteen-year-old Christine. Subtly playing on Christine’s emotions, Leah spurs her to the point where she attempts to murder Sherida. On the surface, the motivation is simply the love of power, but Christine’s emotions are clearly variant; when the book was filmed, they carefully cast Christine as a girl of eleven, to make it unmistakable that her adoration was only “childish.”

FIRBANK, RONALD. The Flower Beneath the Foot. in Five Novels, New Directions, 1949. “Light and fluffy ... pure fun”.

FITZROY, A.T. Despised and Rejected. London, C W Daniel, 1918. Lesbian incidents in a novel which is, however, mainly about persecution of Conscientious Objectors in World War I.

FISHER, MARY (PARRISH). Not Now but NOW. Viking 1947. Novel of an ageless, ruthless woman. A long episode on a college campus is lesbian in emphasis.

FISHER, VARDIS. The Darkness and the Deep. Vanguard, 1943, fco, a novel of the Stone Age.

Both of these are fast-moving mysteries, in Mediterranean setting, both involving lesbian characters.

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE. Salammbo. Classic French Novel in many editions and translations. A very long novel of a Babylonian High Priestess; some psychological and literary authorities consider it variant. The editors all say with one voice that it isn’t. BAYOR.

FLORA, FLETCHER. Desperate Asylum. pbo Lion Library 1955, pbr Pyramid 1959, tct Whisper of Love. An unhappy lesbian and a neurotic man who hates women because his mother was promiscuous, marry to find a mutual “asylum”. Predictably the marriage is unsuccessful, ending in murder and suicide.

Strange Sisters, pbo Lion Library 1954, pbr Pyramid 1960. Weird novel of a girl’s mental breakdown, indirectly blamed on her affairs with three cruel and sadistic women.

Take me Home. Monarch Books, pbo 1959. A young writer’s slow captivation with a strange girl just escaping from the domination of an evil lesbian cousin. All three of these books, though anti-lesbian in bias, are very well and slickly written, and entertaining.

FORREST, FELIX. Carola. Duell, 1948. Brief recall of a lesbian episode in the heroine’s girlhood.

FORTUNE, DION. (pseud. of Violet B. Firth). Moon Magic. London, Aquarian Press, 1958, fco. Fascinating, funny novel of a modern sorceress and an inhibited, bad-tempered doctor. It is implied that his marriage failed because his wife, a hysteric shamming invalidism, prefers being cosseted by her faithful companion to reassuming marital duties.

FOSTER, GERALD. Strange Marriage. N. Y., Godwin 1943. Transvestite, rather than lesbian; heroine in man’s clothing actually marries a fantastically naive girl.

FOWLER, ELLEN T. The Farringdons. N. Y., Appleton, 1900. Three intense variant attachments by a motherless girl under twenty, which subside when she falls in love with a man.

FRANKEN, ROSE. Intimate Story. Doubleday, 1955. A novel by the author of the popular Claudia series.

+ FREDERICS, DIANA. (pseud); Diana, a Strange Autobiography. Dial 1939, pbr Berkley Books 1955, 1957, 1958. Well known story of a young musician/teacher’s discovery and slow acceptance and adjustment to her lesbian personality.

FRANK, WALDO. The Dark Mother. N. Y., Boni & Liveright, 1920, (m). A too-possessive mother ruins her son’s life.

The Revolt of Jill Braddock. Monarch Books 1960. scv. Male and female homosexuality in a ballet company, with Jill in the middle. “Not as bad as Nikki, but still a pretty raw evening waster.”

GARLAND, RODNEY. The Heart in Exile. Coward McCann 1954, pbr Lion 1956, (m). Because of courageous approach to the basic problem of relations between the homosexual and his family, this story of a young homosexual in an unconventional household deserves shelfspace everywhere.

GARNETT, DAVID. A Shot in the Dark. Little, Brown 1959, pbr tct The Ways of Desire. Popular Library 1960. Complex, fast-moving adventure story, involving a great number of lesbians.

GARRETT, ZENA. The House in the Mulberry Tree. Random House, 1959 Sensitive story of a girl of eleven, fascinated by an innocently appealing neighbor, a married woman. The mother, observing, innocent caresses between the two, separates them.

+ GARRIGUE, JEAN. “The Other One” ss in Cross Section, ed. by E. Seaver, Simon & Schuster, 1947.

GAUTIER, THEOPHILE. Mademoiselle de Maupin. Many editions, including Modern Library, n. d. also pbr Pyramid Books 1956, 1957, 1958. Classic novel of lesbianism.

GENET, JEAN. The Maids. Grove Press qpb 1954. Offbeat existentialist drama; involuted love among women.

GEORGIE, LEYLA. The Establishment of Madame Antonia. Liveright, 1932. Light entertainment about inhabitants of a high-class European bordello, including a young recruit protected by an older woman.

See How They Burn, Popular Library, 1959, (m). Minor and subtle homosexual overtones in a novel of jazz musicians.

GOLDMAN, WILLIAM. The Temple of Gold. Knopf 1957, pbr Bantam 1958, (m) minor fco.

GOLDSTON, ROBERT. The Catafalque. Rinehart 1957, 1958. High-quality thriller about ill-fated archaeological expedition to Spain; crisis precipitated when a sinister Countess takes young Stephanie, the expedition leader’s daughter, to a grotto where a pagan goddess has been worshipped with lesbian rites and attempts to seduce her there.

GREENE, GRAHAM. The Orient Express. Doubleday 1933, pbr Bantam 1955. Trainful of mixed adventurers includes a lesbian between girl-friends but still trying.

GUDMUNDSSON, KRISTMANN. Winged Citadel. Holt, 1940, (m). Brief but very explicit homosexual interlude in a fine historical novel of Crete and the Bull-dancers.

GUNTER, ARCHIBALD. A Florida Enchantment. Home Pubs 1892. No data available, BAYOR.

HACKETT, PAUL. Children of the Stone Lions. G. P. Putnam 1955. An important lesbian character in a novel which has had good reviews.

+ HAGGARD, SIR HENRY RIDER. Allan’s Wife. First published, 1889; now in print in Five Novels of H. Rider Haggard, Dover Press, 1951. A strange story, and this year’s special “find”. Allan, hero of the famous adventure-novelist’s KING SOLOMON’S MINES, is here shown as a young man, in love with Stella Carson—an English girl reared in the unspoilt beauty of a lost valley in Darkest Africa. The romance is complicated by the passionate jealousy of Hendrika—stolen in infancy by gorillas, reared as a female Tarzan, and rescued to be Stella’s companion, foster-sister and adorer. Hendrika first attempts to murder Allan; the scene in which she rages insanely at Allan for stealing Stella’s love, and Allan’s quiet acceptance of the “curious” fact that the strongest loves are not always between those of different sexes, places this book almost alone in forthright English treatment of variance for its date. From this high level of psychological realism, the story reverts to Haggard-type melodrama; Stella is kidnapped by Hendrika’s gorilla friends; dramatically rescued in a thrilling jungle battle; her death from exposure and Hendrika’s remorseful suicide complete the story. Strange, romantic, and quite in a class by itself.

HALES, CAROL. Wind Woman. Woodford Press 1953, pbr tct Such is My Beloved, Berkley 1958. Sad, sad, sad story of the psychoanalysis of a young lesbian such as was never seen on sea or land. Harmless and nitwitted ... read it and weep, or giggle.

+ HALL, RADCLYFFE. The Well of Loneliness. Many editions, some cheap hcr (Sun Dial ed, still in print, n. d.) also Permabooks pbr n. d. The classic first novel of a lesbian, written soon after WWI. Stephen Gordon, male in physique, temperament and character, seeks for lasting love and some measure of acceptance from a rejecting world.

The Unlit Lamp. N. Y., Jonathan Cape 1924; the endless sacrifice of a daughter into a sterile, wasted life because her mother cannot accept her right to live her own life.

Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. Harcourt, Brace 1934. A lesbian finds her true destiny after a lifetime of serving her country. Overtones of science fiction.

A Saturday Life. London, Falcon Press, 1952 (orig. pub 1925). An attempt at farce, not overt anywhere.

HALL, OAKLEY M. Corpus of Joe Bailey. Viking 1953, Permabooks 1955, (m). Also contains a pathetic pair of lesbians, one camouflaging her true leanings by pretending to be the campus whore.

HARDY, THOMAS. Desperate Remedies. Harper 1896; still in print, London, the Macmillan Co, 1951 ($3.00). Brief but relevant episode in a novel by a classic English novelist.

+ HARRIS, SARA. The Wayward Ones. Crown 1952, pbr Signet 1956,57 One of the few really good treatments of lesbian attachments in a girl’s reform school. Bessie, a wayward girl, is sent to a “good” reform school; at this stage she is naive, fairly innocent and presumably redeemable. The loneliness, the sadistic persecution by the corrupt or hardened matrons, and the “racket”—the enforced division of the school into “moms” and “pops”, by hardened young girl hooligans who like the power it gives them, and permitted by the matrons under the self-deception that these attachments are normal, schoolgirlish crushes—finally complete the girl’s corruption until it is certain that she will come out of school a confirmed young criminal, Sara Harris is herself a social worker; this painfully accurate picture of what our juvenile authorities contend with may, at least, give some insight into why the police and social agencies tend to be so violently anti-lesbian, It is hard to forget the picture painted in this book of the frightened Bessie insisting “I don’t never do no lovin’ with girls.’”—and the threats made to her. An absolute MUST book—on the other side.

HARRIS, WILLIAM HOWARD. The Golden Jungle. Doubleday 1957, pbr Berkley 1958. Brittle novel about a wall street banker; his beautiful wife is a lesbian, but he naively believes her faithful because she prefers the company of women.

+ HASTINGS, MARCH. Demands of the Flesh. Newsstand Library pbo, 1959. Ellen, a young widow suffering from physical frustration, goes through a period of promiscuity involving several men and a brief affair with a lesbian, Nita. Oddly enough for this sort of borderline-risque stuff, the lesbian character is well and realistically drawn; realizing that Ellen is basically normal, she helps keep her on an even keel until she remarries. Good of kind.

Three Women. pbo Beacon Books 1958. Good and sympathetic story of a young girl involved with a basically decent older woman, a lesbian, Byrne. Unfortunately Byrne is deeply involved with, and obligated to, her Insane cousin Greta, and the affair ends in tragedy, leaving young Paula to marry her faithful boy friend. The lesbian interlude, however, is treated not as a “twisted love in the shadows” or any such cliche matter, but simply as a human relationship, in its' total effect on Paula’s personality; and she always remembers Byrne with affectionate regret. Excellent of kind.

The Obsessed. Newstand Library Magenta Books, 1959. The psychoanalysis of a nymphomaniac, including an affair with her boy-friend’s lesbian sister. Not nearly as good as March Hastings’other books, and much more dedicated to sexy scenes at the expense of character and situation. Evening waster—almost scv. (It should be noted that some paperback publishers insist on a specified number of sex scenes, and in such a book as this one can almost hear the weary sigh with which the author abandons his story, which is going well, and stops everything for another measured dose of sexy writing for the nitwit audience.)

HECHT, BEN. The Sensualists. Messner, 1959, pbr Dell 1959. A great deal of advance publicity built this up to a best-seller. Highly sensational shock-stuff; a supposedly happily-married woman discovers her husband is having an affair with a singer, Liza. When she comes in contact with Liza, however, she realizes that Liza is a lesbian, having affairs with men for camouflage purposes, and is soon herself captivated by Liza. From here events build up to highly shocking climaxes, including a ghastly murder. Not to be read after dark.

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. “The Sea Change” ss in The Fifth Column and the First 49 Stories, P. F. Collier & Son, 1938. This volume also contains two stories dealing with male homosexuality; “A Simple Inquiry” and “Mother of a Queen.”

HELLMAN, LILLIAN. The Children’s Hour. Knopf, 1934. Also Random House 1942; also in Burns-Mantle, Best Plays of 1934-35. A rumor of lesbianism (unfounded) wrecks a school, and the lives of the women who own and manage it.

HENRY, JOAN. Women in Prison. Doubleday 1952, pbr Permabooks 1953. This is nonfiction, autobiographical account of a woman’s experience in two English prisons. Very good.

HEPPENSTALL, RAYNER. The Blaze Of Noon. Alliance 1940, pbr Berkley 1956, (m). Minor, fco and BAYOR.

HESSE, HERMAN. Steppenwolf. Henry Holt 1929. qpb Frederick Ungar, 1960. Symbolic (and classic) novel of man’s disintegration, caused by society’s ignorance. Contains highly sympathetic homosexual characters (male and female).

HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA. The Talented Mr. Ripley. Coward, 1955, pbr Dell 1959. (m, minor)

HILL, PATI. The Nine Mile Circle. Houghton, Mifflin 1957 fco. Dreamy story of two teenage girls and an idyllic summer during which they constantly pretend to be man and wife, on a girlish, unerotic level. Very nice.

The Shame, 1959, (m). No masterpiece but an interesting story about a man spending a week with his dead Army friend’s wife and recalling his long relationship with the dead man; over the week he slowly comes to acknowledge, and come to terms with the fact that their relationship had had overtones of homosexuality.

HOLK, AGNETE. The Straggler. (Trans, from the Danish by Anthony Hinton). London, Arco Pub. 1954, pbr tct.

Strange Friends, Pyramid Books 1955, very slightly abridged. Boyish Scandinavian Vita adopts a “little sister” but is quite unaware of the nature of her attraction to Hilda. In her late teens Hilda, stirred but unsatisfied by this attachment, makes an unwise marriage, and Vita undergoes a period of rootless drifting, a brief affair ending in separation, and finally makes a permanent arrangement with Hilda, whose unsuccessful marriage ended in divorce. Valuable for a portrait of European gay life, very unlike the American.

HOLLIDAY, DON. The Wild Night. Nightstand Books 1960 (no publisher’s address listed). Composite novel of six lives which converge on New Year’s Eve in a cheap Greenwich Village strip joint. “One of those unexpectedly good stories one finds among the floods of paperback trash.” One of the six characters is a lesbian.

HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL. Elsie Venner. Burt, 1859; many editions, a classic novel of a very strange girl, psychologically akin to poisonous snakes. In the course of this novel a curious and intense relationship develops between Elsie and a young schoolmistress named Helen; a compulsive domination, attraction and revulsion. One might suspect Dr. Holmes, whose medical writings and observations place him far ahead of his era psychologically, of gentelly camouflaging a portrait of variance, 100 years ago, by making the girl a creature of macabre fantasy.

+ HORNBLOW, LEONORA. The Love Seekers. Random 1957, pbr Signet 1958. The heroine’s hesitation between marriage with a steady and reliable man, and insecure excitement with a hoodlum, is resolved when her affairs are interrupted by concern for the daughter of a friend; the young lesbian, Mab, whose life has become entangled with some very shady characters.

+ HULL HELEN R. “The Fire” ss in Century Magazine, Nov 1917; Excellent story of a small-town girl’s love for a middle-*aged spinster who awakens her to a world beyond her small one.

“With One Coin for Fee”, novelette in Experiment, Coward-McCann 1938, 1939, 1940. An introspective spinster and a lifelong friend, trapped in a New England house during the 1939 hurricane; subtle but good.

The Quest. Macmillan, 1922. An over-emotional girl, seeking escape from home tensions, develops crushes on a classmate and on a teacher. her mother’s over-reaction turns the girl against variant attachments just as her30 unhappy home turned her against marriage.

The Labyrinth. Macmillan, 1923. Variant attachments, among others, in a novel of a woman unhappy in domesticity and trying to find creative outlets.

Landfall. N. Y. Coward-McCann 1953. In a brittle and sarcastic novel of a brittle and sarcastic woman, the heroine, a capable businesswoman, alternately repulses and warms toward her adoring secretary—though she secretly scorns the girl’s devotion, she feels it would be a nuisance to break in a new secretary, so wishes to keep her captivated.

HUNEKER, JAMES. Painted Veils. Liveright 1920 (still in print); pbr Avon 1928. Unpleasant novel of the theatrical and literary world of that day; the heroine, Easter, (an opera singer) has a mannish satellite.

HURST, FANNIE. The Lonely Parade. N. Y. Harper 1942. Very minor mention of lesbians in a novel of lonely women at hotels.

+ HUTCHINS, MAUDE PHELPS McVEIGH. A Diary of Love. New Directions, 1950, pbr Pyramid 1952, 1960. Weird stuff, written with a detachment and delicacy reminiscent of the Colette novels. A teen-age girl, Noel, goes through a bizarre series of experiences in a strange household where her grandfather seduces his (male) music pupils and a nymphomanic, neurotic housemaid, Freida, successively seduces everyone from Grandpa down to Noel. Beautifully done.

Georgiana. New Directions, 1948. The second section of a sensitive, well-written novel is laid in a girl’s school; there are three important variant attachments, and as a result one of Georgiana’s classmates is expelled. In later life Georgiana blames her failure to find happiness on a “lesbian complex.”

ILTON, PAUL. The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah. pbo, Signet, 1956, 1957, (m). Historical, Biblical setting.

JACKSON, CHARLES. The Fall of Valor. Rinehart & Co, 1946, pbr Signet, 1950, (m).

"Palm Sunday" ss in collection The Sunnier Side, pbr Berkley nd and others, also in Cory, 21 Variations.

+ JACKSON, SHIRLEY. Hangsaman. Farrar, 1951. Frightening, macabre story of a lonely girl who conjures up a thrilling companion—who looks and acts like a boy but is clearly a girl. They meet secretly and engage in wild conversation and loveplay, and only slowly, with dawning horror, does the reader realize that the child is a split personality and the two girls are one and the same.

The Haunting of Hill House. Viking, 1959. During the investigation of a reputed “haunted house”, two of the investigating party—Theo, an admitted lesbian, and Eleanor, a lonely, inhibited spinster—go through a curious, subtly delineated relationship wavering, with the intensity of the “haunting” of the house, from attraction to intense love to unexplained revulsion. Macabre; good of its kind.

JAMES, HENRY. Turn of the Screw. Macmillan 1898, hcr Modern Library n d, Pocket Books and other editions. Available everywhere. Some authorities consider subtle and understated lesbianism to be the mysterious motivations behind the scenes of this curious psychological ghost story of the struggle of a governess for the souls of two young children.

JOHNSON, KAY. My Name is Rusty. Castle Books, 1958. Allegedly a novel of a woman’s prison, complete with glossary of “prison slang”—but if the author has ever been inside a woman’s prison, or even done any authentic research, your editors will eat a copy of the book, complete with cover jackets. Brief plot; butchy Rusty makes a pass at prison newcomer Marcia, in order to share her commissary credits. When Rusty gets out of prison she marries and goes straight and Marcia kills herself. Read it and weep.

JONES, JAMES. From Here to Eternity. Scribners 1951, pbr Signet ca. 1952, (m).

KASTLE, HERBERT D. Koptic Court. Simon & Schuster 1958, pbr tct Seven Keys to Koptic Court, Crest 1959, (m).

KEENE, DAY and Leonard Pruyn. World Without Women. pbo Gold Medal, 1960, Science-fictional evening waster; all the women in the world die off, except a few, who must be carefully protected as potential mothers of the human race. One episode involves all the surviving lesbians, who barricade themselves in a prison. Good of type.

KENNEDY, JAY RICHARD. Short Term. World, 1959. This one is just out; reviews indicate some lesbian content, but this could be anything from a paragraph to three chapters. BAYOR.

KENT, JUSTIN. Mavis. Vixen Press 1953, pbr Beacon 1960. scv. “Mavis is married to a lush, so she dallies and so does he, and they are really a pair of dillies dallying....”

+ KENT, NIAL. (pseud of William LeRoy Thomas) The Divided Path. (m). Greenberg 1949, Pyramid pbr 1951, 1952, 1959. For once the plus is used to promote personal prejudice; various authorities call this book overly sentimental. But when this hardened reviewer finds herself in tears, she’s apt to think there must be something to it. Childhood, adolescence and manhood of Michael, a young homosexual, and his long-continued,32 scrupulously self-denying relationship with a boyhood friend who does not suspect his friend’s “difference”.

KENYON, THEDA. That Skipper from Stonington. Messner, 1946. A juvenile novel, strangely enough, found in a high school library. The hero runs away to sea as a small boy and is protected by a man who is obviously homosexual, though the boy does not know it; the other men on the ship, suspecting that this relationship is unhealthy (it isn’t) hound the boy’s protector to suicide.

KEOGH, THEODORA. Meg. Creative Age Press 1950, pbr Signet 1952, 1956. Sublimated lesbianism in a very young girl.

KESSEL, JOSEPH. The Lion. (trans. from French by Peter Green). N. Y. Knopf 1959. One editor saw subtle variant emotion in the mother’s attachment to a school friend.

KING, DON. The Bitter Love. Newsstand Library Magenta Book, 1959. Rather good evening waster about a supposed double murder, gradually solved by the slow revelation of the affair between Brenda and her 16 year old stepdaughter.

KING, MARY JACKSON. The Vine of Glory. Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. This won a prize as the best novel on race relations by a Southern writer for its year. A repressed, inhibited, small-town girl, Lavinia, at the mercy of elderly tyrannical relatives, forms a close friendship with a Negro man who was her only childhood friend. The friendship between Lavinia and Augustus is purely platonic; she attends a school he has set up for colored girls who wish to improve themselves, and he helps to find her a job; but enraged small-minded bigots bring on a lynching. Early in the book a preparation is laid for Lavinia’s lack of friends of her own sex and status by her unfortunate friendship with Dixie Murdoch, teen-age daughter of a Holy-roller preacher. While spending the night, Dixie attempts to make homosexual advances to the younger girl, and Lavinia becomes hysterical. The episode is brief, condemnatory and very realistic.

KIN, DAVID GEORGE. Women Without Men. Brookwood, 1958. The author calls this “True stories of lesbian life in Greenwich Village”. It represents a roundup of a dozen or so famous literary and artistic figures, presented as case histories. They are presented, picture after sordid picture, without a glimmer of understanding or real insight, though he sometimes shows smug sympathy for a few he claims to have reformed by something he calls “cultural therapy”. He baldly states in the preface; “I take my mental hygiene from Moses, rather than Freud, and have the Mosaic horror of homosexuality”. Despite this vicious slanting, the book is explicit, funny in places, and presumably verifiable—but certainly makes homosexuality look like a Fate Worse Than Death. The writing is straight from the tabloid newspapers.

KOESTLER, ARTHUR. Arrival and Departure. Macmillan 1943. A man makes the most important decision of his life on the rebound of disillusion after discovering that a woman who risked her life to save him is a lesbian.

+ KRAMER, N. MARTIN (pseud. of Beatrice Ann Wright). Hearth and The Strangeness. Macmillan 1956, pbr Pyramid 1957. An excellent novel of the fear of inherited insanity in a family. The youngest child, Aliciane, becomes a lesbian; this is one of the few realistic and unromanticized portraits of the factors in the development of homosexuality from childhood.

LACRETELLE, JACQUES DE. Marie Bonifas. (trans. from the French of La Bonifas) London & N. Y., G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929. Classic novel of feminine variance. Exclusively lesbian characters are rare in French literature (although bisexual women are relatively common), and this was one of the best known; it follows the heroine from childhood to old age.

LACY, ED. Room to Swing. Harper Bros. 1957, pbr Pyramid 1958, A colored detective is retained by a pair of lesbians to solve a murder; is instead accused of committing it. Good.

+ LANDON, MARGARET. Never Dies the Dream. Doubleday, 1949. An unmarried woman missionary in Siam incurs criticism and suspicion when she shows marked favor to an unfortunate American girl at the mercy of the Orient; later, when she risks her own life by isolating herself to nurse Angela through typhoid, she loses her own position. Neither the author nor the heroine of the novel admit the faintest tinge of lesbianism to the relationship, which is full of warmth and selfless sacrifice, and India angrily denies the accusation when it is made; but the high emotional intensity of the whole story bring it well within the boundaries of the field and place it high on the list.

LA FARGE, CHRISTOPHER. The Sudden Guest. Coward-McCann, 1946. The human driftwood blown up by a hurricane includes a pair of lesbians, stirring latent memories in the novel’s heroine—an embittered, abandoned spinster.

+ LAPSLEY, MARY. Parable of the Virgins. R. R. Smith, 1931. High-keyed novel of many emotional fevers, hetero and homosexual, in a woman’s college.

LAWRENCE, D. H. “The Fox”, ss in Dial Magazine 1922, also in hcr but NOT in pbr edition of The Captain’s Doll, Thomas Seltzer, 1923.

The Rainbow. Modern Library 1915, 1943, pbr Avon 1959, 1960. In a long, three-generation novel of the Brangwyn family, one variant episode between young Ursula and a teacher.

LAURENT-TAILHADE, MARIE LOUISE. Courtesans, Princesses, Lesbians. (Trans. from French by G. M. C.) Paris, Libraire Astra. Casanova-ish memoir; French pamphleteering of Pre-revolutionary days. Bitter, explicit and mildly disgusting; mentioned mostly to state emphatically that the French Libraire Astra, and the Astra’s Tower Checklist, have NO connection.

LE CLERQ, JACQUES. Show Cases. Macy-Masius, 1928. Offbeat short stories, dealing with male and female homo-*sexuality.

LEAR-HEAP, WINIFRED. The Shady Cloister. Macmillan, 1950. Quiet, understated and sympathetic story of feminine relationships in a school setting—but without the melodramatic atmosphere of tragedy which usually surrounds such stories.

+ LEE, MARJORIE. The Lion House. Rinehart, 1959. Well-written attempt to capture and document the confused and shifting morals of modern suburban living. Brad, husband of Jo, starts the story by flirting with Frannie; this backfires when Frannie and Jo become friends. As the relationship grows more intense, it proves so disturbing that even after Frannie has admitted its nature Jo cannot accept it; Frannie attempts to solve her problems via psychoanalysis, while Jo continues floundering in her unresolved conflicts. This year’s best new novel.

LEE, GYPSY ROSE. Gypsy, a Memoir. Harper Bros. 1959, pbr Dell 1959. In a fascinating, probably largely fictional autobiography, the ex-burlesque queen/novelist shows one thoroughly comical lesbian character. This is really minor, but marvelously funny, and anyone who plows through all the crud we mention will get a real break from this.

LE FANU, SHERIDAN. “Carmilla” in Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories. Also in Vol III of “The Forgotten Classics of Mystery”, entitled Sheridan Le Fanu, the Diabolical Genius. Also in Strange and Fantastic Stories, ed. by Joseph Margolies, McGraw Hill, 1946. Fantastic lesbian vampire.

LEIBER, FRITZ. “The Ship Sails at Midnight”, in The Outer Reaches, ed. August Derleth, Arkham House, Sauk City, Wisc. 1951. Science-fiction or fantasy of a strange, unusual woman who captivates a whole group of college students; tragedy is touched off by their jealous rage when it is discovered that she has been making love to all of them—not simultaneously of course. Extremely well done, hint of allegory.

LEGRAND, NADIA. The Rainbow Has Seven Colors. N. Y. St Martins, 1958. After the death of The heroine her life is reviewed by seven people who loved her (as with Of Lena Geyer) including a lesbian who loved her and a young girl who wanted to.

+ LEHMANN, ROSAMOND. Dusty Answer. N. Y., Holt, 1927. Still in print. Well-known novel in which the heroine’s whole life is conditioned by her love for a college classmate. Delicate, beautifully written.

LENGEL, FRANCES. Helen and Desire. Olympia Press, Paris, 1954. scv, and you can’t buy it in this country legally. If you locate a copy you’ll know why we say you aren’t missing a thing. Seamy novel of a nymphomanic—- ing her way around the world. (It’s not worth going to Paris to read.)

LEVAILLANT, MAURICE. The Passionate Exiles. (trans. Malcolm Barnes.) Farrar, Straus & Cudahy 1958. Historical “dual biography” of Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier.

+ LEVIN, MEYER. Compulsion. Simon & Schuster 1956. pbr Pocket Books 1958, (m).

LEWIS, SINCLAIR. Ann Vickers. Doubleday, 1933. One important lesbian episode in a novel of woman suffrage, viciously condemnatory.

LEVERIDGE, RALPH. Walk on the Water, Farrar, 1951, pbr tct The Last Combat, Signet 1952, Pyramid 1959, (m).

LEWIS, WYNDHAM. The Apes of God. N. Y. R. M. McBride & Co, 1932, London, Arthur Press 1950, London, Arco, 1955. Satire, including sharp studies of homosexuality, male and female.

LIN, HAZEL. The Moon Vow. Pageant Press, 1958. A Chinese woman psychiatrist, attempting to solve a patient’s problems, is led into seamy byways of Peking, including a somewhat gruesome lesbian cult.

LINDOPS, AUDREY ERSKINE. The Outer Ring. Appleton 1955, pbr Popular Library tct The Tormented, (m).

LINGSTROM, FREDA. Axel. Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1939. Wealthy man adopts two boys and a girl. One boy, Valentine, has homosexual affair with an older boy, Teddy, who later commits suicide; the girl, Auriol, studying music in Germany, lives with 2 older women, one of whom is very innocently but very ardently in love with her. Well-written.

LIPSKY, ELEAZAR. The Scientists. Appleton-Century-Crofts 1959, pbr Pocket Books, 1960. Minor character in a long novel is a vaguely treated, but explicit lesbian.

LIPTON, LAWRENCE. The Holy Barbarians. Messner, 1959. Love among the beat generation, including all kinds of homosexuality.

LITTLE, JAY. Somewhere between the Two. Pageant, 1956, (m). Maybe Tomorrow. Pageant, 1952, (m). Amusing

LIVINGSTON, MARJORIE. Delphic Echo. London, Andrew Dakers, 1948, (m). Minor, in a novel of ancient Greece.

LODGE, LOIS. Love Like a Shadow. Phoenix Press, 1935. Purple-passaged novel of a lesbian seeking true love.

+ LOFTS, NORAH. Jassy. Knopf 1945, pbr Signet 1948, others. Roughly a third of this novel, about a young English girl who, herself innocent, brings tragedy on everyone, is lesbian in emphasis. In a girl’s school she comes between Mrs. Twysdale, a rather slimy, neurotic woman who has adored her boyish cousin, Katherine, for years. Katherine, chafing at this adoration, turns to Jassy for undemanding friendship and Mrs, Twysdale connives to have her expelled—which spurs Katherine to precipitate a long-desired break with her.

The Lute Player. Doubleday, 1951; pbr Bantam 1951, (m). Fine historical of Richard III, based on the thesis that he was homosexual.

+ LONG, MARGARET. Louisville Saturday. Random 1950, pbr Bantam 1951, 53, 56, 57, 59. A study of women in wartime includes a brief study of a woman’s acceptance of a variant friendship (the sections titled GLADYS).

LORD, SHELDON. A Strange Kind of Love. N. Y., Midwood-Tower Pubs pbo 1959. Evening waster about a writer who discovers that two of his (dozens of) girl friends are involved with one another.

69 Barrow Street. Midwood-Tower pbo 1959, scv. Love, if you can call it that, in Greenwich Village.

+ LOUYS, PIERRE. Aphrodite. (Many editions, of which the standard English translation seems to be The Collected Works of Pierre Louys, Liveright, 1926, still in print. Also various Avon paperbacks.) The beautifully written story of an Alexandrian courtesan also includes the story of two young Greek girls, Rhodis and Myrtocleia, no more than children, who wish to marry one another.

The Adventures of King Pausole. As above. Fine, funny, highly risque story of the king of a strange country, who has a thousand wives, like Solomon, and believes in freedom for everybody except his daughter, Aline—who eventually runs away with a “boy” who is really a girl.

The Songs of Bilitis. As above. Prose or poetry, depending on translation, and perhaps the classic story of lesbianism in an ancient setting.

LYNDON, BAREE, and Jimmie Sangster. The Man who Could Cheat Death, based on the screenplay, for the recent movie, which in turn was based on a play, The Man in Half Moon Street.37 Without the fantastic photography which made the movie superb, this is a remarkably silly pseudo-science thing about a man who finds away to survive indefinitely by glandular transplants. To camouflage his deathlessness he pulls up his roots and moves every ten years and during one such interlude he falls for beautiful Avril Barnes, who turns out to be a lesbian. He converts her, and she becomes such a pest that he murders her. Shocker, silly.

MacCOWN, EUGENE. The Siege of Innocence. Doubleday, 1950, (m). And minor lesbian element.

MacKENZIE, COMPTON. Extraordinary Women. Martin Secker, London; Macy-Masius N. Y. 1928, hcr New Adelphi 1932. The Winston Book Service offered this for sale quite recently. Amusing, satirical and well-known novel of lesbians.

The Vestal Fire. N. Y. Doran, 1927, (m). However, in this novel of Americans living abroad, there are also important lesbian characters.

MacRAE, KEVIN. Nikki. Vantage. 1955. Not to be confused with the rubbishy book by the same title by Stuart Friedman, this is a story of Nikki, who loses her beloved in an air raid in London and nearly cracks up before finding a home in a lesbian “colony” in Southern California; silly, but a lot of fun.

+ MacINNES, COLIN. Absolute Beginners. London, MacGibbon & Rae, 1959. A novel about London teenagers, told in Soho idiom—a sort of bastard hip-talk. The characters in this novel include several male homosexuals, and one lesbian, Big Jill. Enough space is devoted to social problems, by an author who is quite obviously one of the “angry young men”, to give this novel real status.

McMINNIES, MARY. The Visitors. Harcourt, Brace 1958. A diplomat’s wife abroad, fancying herself as Madame Bovary, attempts to use everyone around her for her own purposes. She has an affair with an American correspondent and also captivates Sophie, a countess, and an extremely well-portrayed character. One of the most sympathetic portraits of a lesbian in recent fiction, as well as a ruthless portrayal of women who enjoy flirting in both fields.

+ MAHYERE, EVELINE. I Will not Serve. Dutton 1959, 1960. This book, boycotted by many major reviewers, was written by a young Frenchwoman who committed suicide before its publication. Precocious, nonconformist Sylvie has been expelled from a convent for writing, in a letter, that she loves one of the nuns. The story deals with the unfolding pattern of Sylvie’s meetings with Julienne, an older novice in the convent. The conflict is clear; Sylvie’s creed is “I will not serve”—a statement of her refusal to become a good wife and mother—and she wants nothing of life but Julienne. Julienne, has given herself38 to God. Refusing to accept this, Sylvie commits suicide. The book is profound and sincere, and on the basis of this one work the author’s premature death was a loss to the field of literature.

MAINE, CHARLES ERIC. World Without Men. pbo, Ave Books 1958. Science fiction of a world thousands of years in the future, where the men have all died out, reproduction is scientific and the women, having no one else to love, love one another. In defiance of all conceivable theories of heredity and environment, a few women still think this state of affairs is “unnatural” and band together to create a male birth, assuming everyone will turn normal overnight. Silly.

MALLET, FRANCOISE. The Illusionist. (Trans. by Herma Briffault). Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1952 tct The Loving and the Daring, Popular 1953. (pbr). Now well-known novel, by a young French writer, of a girl captivated by her father’s mistress.

The Red Room. (trans. by Herma Briffault). Farrar, Strauss & Cudahy 1956, pbr Popular 1958. Sequel to the above.

MALLOY, FRED. The End of the Road. Woodford Press 1952, pbr Berkley tct Wicked Woman, 1959. Good evening waster about a girl who is picked up by Charlotte, a truck-driver “dike” type; Charlotte gives Alice a home, but eventually Alice runs off with a man who is worse than she is. Surprisingly, for this type of thing, the author implies that there is a fate worse than lesbianism.

MANNING, BRUCE. Triangle of Sin. Intimate Novel (Universal Pub.) 1952, pbr Beacon Books 1959; same title, but author listed as Manning Stokes. Evening waster.

MARECHAL, LUCIE. The Mesh (trans, by Virgilia Peterson.) Appleton 1949, pbr Bantam, 1951, 1953, 1959. Excellent novel of a Belgian family; the weakling son marries, brings his bride into home dominated by his mother, shadowed by his lonely sister. Eventually sister takes the young woman away from her brother.

MARLOWE, STEPHEN. Homicide is My Game. Gold Medal 1959 pbo. Hardboiled murder mystery involving a teenage sex club—a businessman is involved of running it, but the real culprit is his daughter, Liz. She is also a lesbian. Evening waster.

MARK, EDWINA. (pseud of Edwin Fadiman jr). My Sister, my Beloved. Citadel 1955, pbr Berkley 1956. Two young sisters, daughters of a drunken lush of a mother, fall into a too-close relationship as Eve, the older, protects young Sheila from their mother’s beatings and tantrums.39 Sheila plays around and gets pregnant; mother, at the stage where alcohol will kill her, is given a big drink by Eve, who then arranges for Sheila to have an abortion and the two of them to live happily ever after; instead, Sheila marries the boy and Eve is whipped half to death by one of her mother’s gigolos. One of those books—where anything from abortion to rape is preferable to lesbianism.

+ The Odd Ones. Berkley pbo; 1959. Jean, smalltown girl running away, comes to New York and falls in with Sherri, tied to a crazy husband. Rather good and not condemnatory at all; rather restrained for a pbo, although of course it has the obligatory sexy stuff.

MARR, REED. Women without Men. Gold Medal pbo, 1956. Naive, if not too intelligent girl sent to a woman’s reformatory, encounters the usual hardening experiences—corrupt matrons, police-court-type lesbians, trusties and well-meaning officials who have their lives to live and can’t or won’t do anything to better conditions. Good of its kind.

MARSHE, RICHARD. A Woman Called Desire. (Orig. pub. 1950 under title of Wicked Woman) Berkley pbr 1959, scv.

MARSTON, JOHN. Venus With Us; a Tale of the Caesars. N. Y. Sears, 1932. pbr Universal Pub. 1953 tct The Private Life of Julius Caesar. Fast, funny, risque historical novel—or romance—with approximately six historical errors per chapter, but a lot of fun nevertheless. The scenes laid in the College of Vestals are exclusively lesbian; there are both serious, emotional affairs between women, and funny light-hearted ones in the manner of King Pausole. Good of kind.

MASSIE, CHRIS. The Incredible Truth. Random, N. Y. 1958, pbr Berkley 1959. Victorian husband narrates, many years afterward, his wife’s successive attachment to two woman friends.

MAUGHAM, SOMERSET. Theatre. Doubleday 1937, Bantam pbr tct Woman of the World, 1951, pbr Bantam tct Theatre 1959. Theatrical novel of a worldly actress, Julia, contains brief mention of a fat, elderly lesbian admirer who finances her works: one amusing scene where Julia’s husband advises her on how to manipulate Dolly’s feelings. Smart, brittle.

MAUPASSANT, GUY DE. Paul’s Mistress. ss in various collections including Cory, 21 Variations on a Theme.

MAYHALL, JANE. Cousin to Human. Harcourt, Brace 1960. Valeda, friend of the heroine, has a sad, depressing affair with an adolescent schoolgirl athlete friend, named Mildred.

MEAGHER, MAUDE. The Green Scamander. Houghton Mifflin, 1933. A novel of the Trojan war, largely concerned with the passionate friendship between Penthesilea, co-queen with the Amazon tribe, and her co-ruler Camilla. Beautifully written, available in most medium-sized libraries.

MEEKER, RICHARD. The Better Angel. Greenberg 1933, pbr Universal Pub. tct Torment ca. 1952, (m).

+ MEREZOWSKII, DMITRI. (Trans. from Russian by Natalia A. Duddington) London, J. M. Dent & Co, 1925, 1926. Birth of the Gods. A fine novel of Crete and the bull-dancers (and perhaps the first of its kind). Dio, a strangely bisexual young girl, priestess of the Great Mother, though attracted and attractive to men, is vowed to remain a virgin in the service of the Goddess; much of the novel is devoted to her passionate friendship for her young novice, Eoia. One of Dio’s rejected lovers, believing that the “little witch” has cast a spell on Dio to prevent her loving him, plots to have Eoia killed in the ring; instead Eoia’s death nearly destroys Dio as well.

Akhnaton, King of Egypt. (as above) London, Dent, 1927. Continues and concludes the story of Dio.

MERGENDAHL, CHARLES. The Girl Cage. pbo Gold Medal 1953, 1959. Brief, minor lesbian episode in a novel about war widows.

MERRITT, A(braham); The Metal Monster. Copyright Munsey Magazines, (this ran serially in Argosy ca. 1920) Revised version, Frank A. Munsey 1941, pbr Avon, 1946. Offbeat variant episode in an adventure-fantasy; Norhala, pagan slave of the “metal people” steals the explorer’s sister, Ruth, to “play with her”; after her death Ruth weeps, saying “she loved me dearly, dearly,” but significantly can remember nothing of their time together. Wildly fantastic, good of type.

METALIOUS, GRACE. Return to Peyton Place. Messner 1959, pbr Dell 1959. Another sexy “expose” of a small town. In one episode, the unpleasant wife of a local boy recalls her schooldays, when she taunted and enslaved a lesbian schoolmate.

MEYER, GLADYS ELEANOR, The Magic Circle. Knopf, 1944. fco Subtle novel of close friendship between two women; never explicit, and on the borderline for variant interest.

+ MILLAY, KATHLEEN. Against the Wall. Macaulay, 1929. College novel by the sister of the well-known poet (see poetry supplement).

MILLER, WALTER M. “The Lineman” ss in Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1957, (m). Excellent attitudes on homosexuality in general, in short story of isolated men.

MILLER, HENRY. Plexus. Paris, Olympia Press 1953, 2 vols. Chapter 16 of the 2nd Volume is supposed to be devoted to a variant affair. Most of Henry Miller’s books cannot be legally imported into the USA—this is one—and your editors haven’t been to Paris yet. When you go, tell us.

+ MITCHELL, S. WEIR. Constance Trescott. N. Y., Century 1900. The plus is to draw attention to an old, overlooked title. Major (for its date) treatment of variant enslavement between two half sisters.

+ MITCHISON, NAOMI. The Delicate Fire. Harcourt, N. Y. 1932. A major writer, and scholar, presents a collection of lovely short stories of ancient Greece; the title story deals with Sappho and her group of girl lovers.

MORAVIA, ALBERTO. The Conformist. Farrar, Straus & Young 1951, pbr Signet 1954. Penetrating study of a fascist whose compulsive drive for power destroys everyone he loves. An interlude between his wife and a friend provides a brief diversion before the macabre ending.

MOORE, PAMELA. Chocolates for Breakfast. Rinehart 1956, pbr Bantam 1957. Candid, shocking story of a young girl’s disintegration; the opening episodes involve her rejection by a teacher on whom she has a crush, and there are variant overtones in her prolonged friendship with a school roommate, Janet’s suicide being the spur which makes Courtney resolve to pull herself together.

MORELL, LEE. Mimi. pbo Beacon Books 1959. Unusually good evening waster about night-club and theatrical people, with both male and female homosexual episodes; handled with subtlety and lightness almost unknown in this publisher’s paperbacks.

+ MORGAN, CLAIRE. (pseud of Patricia Highsmith) The Price of Salt. Coward-McCann, 1952, pbr Bantam 1953, 1959. Fine novel of an affair between two very nice, very courageous, very well-adjusted women whose initial attraction becomes the mainspring of both their lives. The author does not use one single stereotype or cliche; this is probably the American novel of the lesbian.

MORGAN, NANCY. City of Women, pbo Gold Medal 1952, 1959. Lesbian episodes In a novel of women living in barracks at Pearl Harbor.

MORLEY, IRIS. The Proud Paladin. N. Y. Morrow 1936. Lesbian content vague and doubtful, BAYOR and fco.

MOSS, GEOFFREY. That Other Love. Doubleday, 1930. A long-continued affair between Phillida and an older friend breaks off because of the younger woman’s desire for children.

MOTLEY, WILLARD. Knock on Any Door. N. Y. Appleton-Century, 1947, pbr Signet 1953, (m).

+ MURDOCH, IRIS. The Bell. N. Y. Viking 1958, (m). A fine, occasionally funny novel of an Anglican lay church-community centers around Michael Meade, a man of honor, intelligence, and integrity—and a homosexual. His hopes of being ordained as a priest were destroyed when, as a schoolteacher, he became entangled with young Nick; Nick’s appearance at the community destroys Michael’s peace of mind thoroughly, and an obliquely handled relationship between Nick, Michael and a guileless youngster, Toby, spending the summer at the community, eventually destroys the community entirely. But it isn’t all gloom and doom; the level of the writing is highly competent, sometimes wildly hilarious, and through all his difficulties Michael is able to realize that eventually he will “experience again ... that infinitely extended requirement which one human being makes on another.” A book which emphasizes the triumph of love, and one of the recent best. ((Editor’s note; why are the best novels of male homosexuality written by women? Mesdames Renault and Murdoch are giving their best to the men. Is it a question of detachment?))

MURRAY, WILLIAM. The Fugitive Romans. pbo, Popular Library 1955. Brief variant episode among a Hollywood location crew abroad.

NEILSEN, HELEN. The Fifth Caller. Morrow, 1959. Dr. Lillian Whitehall, metaphysician, is murdered; as each of her five callers is interviewed to find the guilty party, it develops that the dead woman was a cruel, domineering repressed lesbian. Well written, though unsympathetic.

NEFF, WANDA FRAIKEN. We Sing Diana. Boston, Houghton 1928. Story of a girl too inhibited to face her own nature.

NILES, BLAIR. Strange Brother. N. Y. Liveright 1931, pbr Harris Publications 1949, pbr Avon 1952, 1958, 1959.

NIN, ANAIS. Winter of Artifice. Paris, Obelisk Press 1939, also in Under a Glass Bell, Dutton, 1948. The first edition has 100 pages or so, not included in later editions, in which she recounts her liaison with a famous American writer and43 his wife, all disguised, of course. (All of this writer’s work seems to be vaguely tinged with variance.)

NORDAY, MICHAEL. Stage for Fools. Vixen Press 1955. pbr tct Strange Thirsts, Beacon 1959. Evening waster about a lush actress making a comeback on a college campus, who revenges herself on an indifferent male by entrapping his girl into a drunken lesbian episode and inviting him to watch the show. A shocker.

Warped. Beacon pbo 1955, 1960. Very apt title; evening waster about a crooked fight game. One sympathetically portrayed lesbian character in the many mixed affairs.

+ O’BRIEN, KATE. As Music and Splendor. Harper. 1958. Novel of two very different young Irish girls sent to study music on the Continent during the great age of Italian opera; their personal lives differ as widely as their careers, One, Clare Halvey, drifts into a love affair with Luisa Carriaga, a Spanish contralto; their relationship is treated delicately, but with warmth and impersonal sympathy. Excellent for opera lovers and for those who are tired to death of books where every last detail is spelled out as frankly as the law allows.

+ O’DONOVAN, JOAN. Dangerous Worlds. Morrow, 1958. Collection of excellent short stories.

O’HIGGINS, HARVEY. The Story of Julie Cane. Harper, 1924. Explicit, for its day, story of an intense relationship between a schoolmistress and her ward.

O’NEILL, ROSE. The Goblin Woman. N. Y. Doubleday 1930. Fey, symbolic novel of Helga, the Goblin Woman (who represents purity) set down in a society far from pure. There are many lesbian episodes and references to inter-*feminine love. (see poetry supplement.)

O’HARA, NOEL. The Last Virgin. Chariot Books pb 1959. This is a reprint of David George Kin’s “Women Without Men”, containing six of the ten stories; new title, new author, even new copyright date—who’s kidding who? It does not contain the damning introduction, and without it, appears fairly sympathetic. Curious little item.

PACKER, VIN (pseud; see also ANN ALDRICH) Spring Fire. pbo Gold Medal 1952. Now well-known and rather gamy novel of sorority house life and an unhappy lesbian affair between naive freshman Mitch and neurotic Lana.

+ The Evil Friendship. pbo Crest 1958. Viciously condemnatory novel of two little girls of fourteen who, consequent to their lesbianish attachment, plot together and carry out “a murder club”. Shuddersome, but, alas, well written. (Editorial query; why must so many of the detractors of lesbianism write such good books, while those who defend it are, all to often, of the Carol Hales “quality”?)

PARK, JORDAN. (pseud of Cyril Kornbluth). Valerie. pbo, Lion, 1953, 1957. Minor lesbian episodes in a novel of witch-hunting; the episodes occur at a Witches Sabbat. Evening waster.

PARKER, DOROTHY: “Glory in the Daytime” in After Such Pleasures, N. Y., Viking 1934.

PATTON, MARION. Dance on the Tortoise. N. Y., Dial 1930. Boarding-school novel; the heroine, repelled by the emotional friendships around her, throws herself with relief into the arms of a man.

PAVESE, CESARE. Among Women Only. Noonday Press, qpb 1959 ($1.75). Recommended, highly tragic, novel by a writer considered, until his untimely death, one of Italy’s best.

+ PETRONIUS, The Satyricon. (the earliest known novel, written about the time of Christ; the last flush of the pagan world.) Trans. William Arrowsmith, University of Michigan Press, 1959. This is also available in a highly expurgated Modern Library edition, n. d. Male, of course, and the Arrowsmith translation is hilarious and very readable.

PEN, JOHN. Temptation. (trans. from the Hungarian by John Manheim,) Avon Red and Gold, 1959, (m). Fine picaresque.

+ PHELPS, ROBERT. Heroes and Orators. N. Y. McDowell & Oblensky 1958. Fine modern novel of family relationships, containing a lesbian character described as the most real, human and sympathetic in recent years; Margot, in love with her ex-husband’s sister Elizabeth. The two women live together, but any intimate relationship between them is disclaimed.

PHILLIPS, THOMAS HAL. The Bitterweed Path. Rinehart 1949, pbr Avon 1954, 1959, (m).

POWELL, DAWN. A Cage for Lovers. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1957. Mannish, wealthy hypochondriac keeps her nurse-companion in virtual slavery until the younger girl breaks away and marries. Competent novel by a popular author.

PRITCHARD, JANET. Warped Women. Beacon pbo 1951, 1956, 1959. Despite the lurid blurb and cover, this is a nice evening waster about an innocent young girl who goes to work for a woman’s health club which is, behind the scenes, an abortion mill run by gangsters. Fronting for the group, an attractive lesbian takes a fancy to the heroine, eventually protects her against the gangster boss at the risk of her own life. The heroine then marries a nice boy who’s been telling her all along that the place is rotten. Suspenseful, interesting.

PROUST, MARCEL. Remembrance of Things Past, the great work of the well-known French homosexual author, is available in many (virtually all except rural-provincial) libraries, numerous college editions, etc. Long sections are variant, male-homosexual or lesbian; bibliography would occupy entirely too much space. Try a stray volume in qpb and see if Proust is your cup of tea—he isn’t everyone’s.

PURTSCHER, NORA. Woman Astride. Appleton-Century, 1934. Woman spends almost her entire life in male disguise. Offbeat, variant rather than explicitly lesbian.

PYKE, RICHARD. The Lives and Deaths of Roland Greer. NY, Boni 1929, (m). Horrifying.

RAVEN, SIMON. The Feathers of Death. London, A. Blond, 1959, Simon & Schuster 1960, (m).

RAYTER, JOE (pseud. of Mary McChesney). Asking for Trouble. Morrow 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1959. Murder mystery. A mannish, hardboiled lesbian plays an important part.

REHDER, JESSIE. Remembrance Way. G P Putnam’s Sons 1956. Retrospective tale in which the heroine recalls a summer in girl’s camp, when she was enslaved simultaneously to a domineering director (woman) and her daughter.

+ RENAULT, MARY. Promise of Love. Morrow, 1939. Novel, in a hospital background, contains variant relationship, lightly treated.

The Middle Mist. Morrow, 1945. Excellent, humorous novel, featuring the boyish Leo (Leonora) who, with her 46 friend Helen, lives on a houseboat quite happily (“It only makes sense for the surplus women to arrange themselves one way or another.”) This is, beyond a doubt, the wittiest, most refreshing book on the list; the girls have problems, but they have them, and solve them, without any well-of-loneliness agonizing. The story is resolved in Leo’s gradual feminization and marriage.

The King Must Die. Pantheon 1958, pbr Pocket Books 1959. Minor male and female homosexuality in Cretan setting.

The Charioteer. Longmans, 1953, Pantheon hcr 1959. Male, major, femininely delicate. Virtually all of this writer’s work contains some reference, though sometimes remote and slight, to variance.

RENAULT, PAUL. Raw Interludes. Brookwood, 1957, scv. No relation to Mary Renault; since Renault, Mary, has a double plus, the editors agree we should invent a double minus.

RICE, CRAIG. Having Wonderful Crime. Simon & Schuster, 1943. Hilarious murder mystery leads into the byways and gay bars of Greenwich village.

RICHARDSON, HENRY HANDEL. The End of a Childhood. London, Reinemann, 1934, hcr N. Y. Norton.

The Getting of Wisdom. N. Y. Duffield, 1910. Both are volumes of loosely connected variant short stories.

ROLLAND, ROMAINE. Annette and Sylvie. Holt, 1925. The first volume of a trilogy, this deals with an intense attachment between two young (adolescent) half sisters who meet for the first time in their teens.

RONALD, JAMES. The Angry Woman. Lippincott 1948, Bantam pbr 1950. A businesswoman keeps a young girl reluctantly captivated until the girl commits suicide.

ROSMANITH, OLGA. Unholy Flame. pbo Gold Medal 1952, (m). fco (But I like this personally very much. A modern Svengali.)

+ ROSS, WALTER. The Immortal. Simon & Schuster 1958, Pocket Books Cardinal Edition 1959, (m).

ROYDE-SMITH, NAOMI. The Tortoiseshell Cat. Boni & Liveright 1925. An unworldly girl’s capture by a predatory lesbian.

The Island. Harper, 1930. Sad, tense book about an ugly, unhappy girl nicknamed “Goosey” and a clinging cousin who will neither love her nor let her go.

RUARK, ROBERT. Something of Value. Doubleday 1955, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Very minor.

SABATIER, ROBERT. Boulevard. (Prix de Paris award novel, trans. from French by Lowell Blair). David McKay 1958, pbr Dell 59, (m). Marginal.

SACKVILLE-WEST, VICTORIA. The Dark Island. Doubleday, 1934. Shirin is the over-emotional, unconventional wife of Venn, dour owner of the “dark island”, Storn. He treats Shirin so badly that she seeks companionship, love and affection from Christina, her husband’s secretary; through jealousy (not unmixed with pure sadism) Venn arranges for Christina to be drowned in a boating “accident”. Haunting.

+ SALEM, RANDY. Chris. Beacon pbo, 1959. The plus indicates good of kind, not intrinsic merit. An interesting story of a lesbian triangle—Chris, Dizz, and young Carol. One reader commented that this story was a sort of lesbian dreamworld—these women seemed to live in a society, and a world, completely unmixed with ordinary life at all. Certainly they are all treated as quite the ordinary thing, and there are almost no hints that there is a heterosexual world outside the gay one, which must be taken into account. Certainly it makes no incursions into the novel. Chris, a conchologist, her life complicated by her frigid girl-friend Dizz, suffers and drinks too much and sleeps around until Carol, one of her random pick-ups, decides to stick to her, and eventually frees Chris from this attachment. Good but unreal.

+ SANDBURG, HELGA. The Wheel of Earth. McDowell, Oblensky 1958. Roughly a third of a long novel of Midwestern rural life deals with the lengthy attachment between Frankie Gaddy and an older woman, Genevieve.

Baby Makes Three. Vixen, 1953. No reports on either of these, but in view of the publisher they are probably evening wasters at best.

+ SCHIDDEL, EDMUND. Girl with the Golden Yo-Yo. pbo Berkley 1955, 1959, (m). Also contains some brief analysis of lesbian jazz circles in Germany after WWI.

SCHMITT, GLADYS. Confessors of the Name. Dial, 1952, pbr Permabooks ca. 1953-55. A relatively minor lesbian character in a long novel of ancient Rome, with explicit48 lesbian scenes during a Saturnalia orgy.

Alexandra. Dial 1947, pbr Pocket Books 1949. Very vague and minor threads of contact in a novel of intense friendship between two women. Emotionally high.

SCOTT, LES. Twilight Women. Arco 1952, pbr Beacon 1956. Evening-waster suspenseful adventure story of a chase-type kidnapping: Rance, the hero, pleasantly entangled with two beautiful Polynesian girls, who eventually take him to a Utopian tropical island where he happily marries both of them. The contact between the girls is incidental and included simply to heighten excitement for male readers, but it’s good fun in a Sax Rohmerish way.

SCULLY, ROBERT. A Scarlet Pansy. N. Y. Faro, 1933, Hesor 1937 hcr, Reprinted and completely rewritten by Royal, no pub. no date, Baltimore, Oppenheimer, 30s and 40s. In 1950, D W Cory called this “the low point of the homosexual novel”. A lot of trash has been written since, which makes this look simply silly. (m). A confusing novel of the “gay” world, including some butchy and peculiar lesbians.

SELA, LORA. (pseud of Carol Hales) I Am a Lesbian. Saber pbo, 1959. Would-be shocker about a poor innocent girl being pushed into love affairs with brutal boys, raped, etc; by cruel relatives and friends, when all that God wants of her, according to the author, is for her to be a Happy Well-Adjusted Noble Lesbian. This isn’t even scv, since the writers of sexy trash usually know something about sex or trash or both. Read it and snicker.

SHAW, WILENE. The Fear and the Guilt. pbo, Ace, 1954. Softball-playing Ruby brings sweet-leech Christy to her Tobacco Road home. There, to disarm suspicion, Christy allows herself to be first seduced, then married, by Ruby’s father. Sympathetic for a shocker, but oh, my!

SIDGWICK, ETHEL. A Lady of Leisure. Boston, Small, 1914. A passionate, But quite innocent, attachment between women in their twenties.

SIMENON, GEORGES. In Case of Emergency. Doubleday 1958, pbr Dell 1959. A common theme—a good man enslaved by a worthless girl—is treated here by a very good European writer. A subplot deals with the attachment between the girl and her maidservant.

SINCLAIR, JO. (pseud. of Ruth Seid) Wasteland. Harper Bros. 1946. This is the excellent and heavily lauded Harper prize novel of that year. Told on the psychiatrist’s couch, it concerns the failure of Jewish Jake Braunowitz to live up to his manhood ... which forces this job onto the shoulders of his sister Debbie, a lesbian. The psychiatrist discovers that he ran from his responsibilities in the first place due to feeling weaker than the masterful intelligent Debbie; then, after forcing her to take a man’s role in the family, he turns around and feels guilt and shame at her adjustment to the situation. Excellently done.

SPEERS, MARY. We Are Fires Unquenchable. Murray and Gee, Hollywood 1946. fco. A badly written, almost illiterate novel, the first few scenes of which are laid in a girl’s college swarming with luridly treated lesbians and in an assortment of Bohemian settings.

+ SMITH, ARTEMIS. Odd Girl. Beacon pbo, 1959. The blurb reads “Life and love among warped women”, but don’t let it scare you. This is one of the better and more serious approaches to the writing of a serious novel of lesbians through the stereotyped pattern of the paperback novel. The basic plot concerns Anne, and her experiences in trying to find out for herself, the hard way, whether she is a lesbian or whether she can successfully adjust to life as a normal woman. The story ends with the surprising, but growingly popular affirmation that “adjustment” is not always to be desired at all costs. The cover also calls this a story of “society’s greatest curse”; meaning homosexuality; but for once it isn’t treated that way.

The Third Sex. pbo, Beacon, 1959. Most of the remarks made above also apply to this one, though the heroine is Joan, a college girl who fears that she is becoming a lesbian, and fights it by redoubling her affairs with men. Slightly more sensational than “Odd Girl”, but well written, well thought out and generally excellent.

SMITH, DOROTHY EVELYN. The Lovely Day. N. Y. Dutton, 1957. Interesting novel of an English village on a choir outing, contains a minor but funny account of an unconscious lesbian’s decisions.

SMITH, SHELLEY. (pseud. of Nancy Bodington.) The Lord Have Mercy, Harper 1956, pbr tct The Shrew is Dead, Dell 1959. English mystery story; a major subplot involves a pair of lesbians.

SNEDEKER, CAROLINE DALE. The Perilous Seat. Doubleday, Doran 1929, marginal (m) in a juvenile of ancient Greece; the hero, being sold into slavery, attempts to disfigure himself to escape “the fate of handsome boys among the Persians.”

STEIN, GERTRUDE. Things as They Are. Banyan Press, Pawlet, Vermont. (Very rare; $25 and up second hand.) A novel by the well-known surrealist poet ... possibly her only coherent work ... dealing with lesbianism.

STONE, SCOTT. The Divorcees. Beacon pbo 1955, released 1959 Evening waster about a racketeer who specializes in quick divorces, and his girlfriend who flirts with all the women as he disengages them from their husbands.

STONEBRAKER, FLORENCE. Sinful Desires. pbr Bedside Books, 1959. (previous paperback, publisher unknown, ca. 1951). Silly novel about a married woman briefly captivated by a stereotyped lesbian.

+ STURGEON, THEODORE. (pseud. of Edward Hamilton Waldo). “Affair with a Green Monkey”. Venture Science Fiction May 1957; also in A Touch of Strange, Doubleday 1959.

“The Sex Opposite”. in E. Pluribus Unicorn, Abelard 1952, Ballantine pbr 1953.

"The World Well Lost" in E Pluribus Unicorn. Many of Sturgeon’s other short stories and novelettes touch on extremely strange, offbeat relationships.

+ SWADOS, FELICE. House of Fury. Doubleday 1941, pbr Lion 1955, Berkley 1959. One of the better paperbacks, dealing with racial tensions and muted lesbian attachments in a girl’s reformatory.

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON. Lesbia Brandon. Falcon Press 1952, edited and annotated by Randolph Hughes. A famous incomplete novel by the well-known poet, for students rather than readers. Really only a handful of scattered chapters, too scrappy to judge; see also poetry supplement.

SYDNEY, GALE. Strange Circle. Beacon Books pbo 1959, 1960. Grace Garney, feeling unwanted, gets a job with Mrs. Flocke, a repulsive lesbian, and repels a pass; this, however, revives childhood memories, and during a rift in her affairs with a man, she has a brief affair with Inez, a friend with an unsatisfactory husband. Evening waster.

SYKES, GERALD. The Center of the Stage. N. Y., Farrar 1952, pbr Signet 1954. Witty novel of the theatre, with a minor lesbian character.

TAYLOR, VALERIE. Whisper Their Love. Crest pbo 1957. Unsympathetic college novel of a girl suffering through a lesbian affair while all around her the other girls suffer through rape, incest and abortion. Over-written.

Girls in 3-B. Crest pbo 1959. One of three young girls who come to the city to find jobs or careers. Barby, drifts into a lesbian relationship, mostly out of revulsion against two unfortunate experiences with men. Excellent, sympathetic.

+ Stranger on Lesbos. Crest pbo 1959. A married woman with a grown son and indifferent husband, returning to college for work on a college degree, is ripe for an affair with “Bake”, a confirmed lesbian. The affair is told with sufficient skill and restraint to make it believable; even Frankie’s eventual return to her old life is not a cliche “happy ending” but well prepared and well characterized. Remarkably good; the degree of progress from the first to the third of these novels makes your editors anxious to see where Miss Taylor goes from here.

TELLIER, ANDRE. Twilight Men. Greenberg 1931, pbr Lion 1950, 52, 56, Pyramid 1959, (m). Well known.

+ TEY, JOSEPHINE. (pseud. of Elizabeth MacKintosh.) Miss Pym Disposes. Macmillan 1948; also in Three by Tey, Macmillan 1954. Slowly built-up, excellently constructed mystery of a girl’s school, where a close attachment between two seniors provides solution and motivation for a murder. The level of mystification is so high that even on the last page the reader is gasping with the final, shocking surprise.

To Love and be Wise. Macmillan 1951. Another well done mystery, with a variant attachment also providing motive and solution and a high level of suspense and surprise.

TESCH, GERALD. Never The Same Again. G P Putnam’s Sons 1956, pbr Pyramid 1958, (m). Not for the squeamish, but a well-done novel of an affair between a teen age boy and an older man.

+ TIMPERLEY, ROSEMARY. Child in the Dark. Crowell 1956. Two of the three stories in this book involve intense attachments, variant but not explicitly lesbian, between an English schoolmistress and a young girl.

THAYER, TIFFANY. Thirteen Women. Claude Kendall, 1932. Mildly nasty shock-story of a murder, involving thirteen women, one mixed up with a lesbian; she eventually commits suicide.

Thirteen Men. Claude Kendall 1930, (m). Much the same stuff as above only masculine in emphasis. Thayer is a good writer, but not everyone’s choice.

THOMPSON, MORTON. Not as a Stranger. Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1954 pbr Pocket Books 1955. fco, very minor episodes.

+ THORNE, ANTHONY. Delay in the Sun. Literary Guild, 1934. A “heartening idyll” of two friends who, during a long stopover in Spain, resolve their relationship.

+ TORRES, TERESKA. Woman’s Barracks. Gold Medal pbo 1950, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and probably every year from now on, for a while anyhow. Gold Medal’s most popular title so far is the story of a group of women with the Free French women’s army, at loose ends and disassociated from family, friends and personal attachments. Among the many threads of the plot is the story of naive young Ursula, who, through her relationship with warm, tough, friendly Claude is helped to maturity and eventually to readjustment to normal life.

Dangerous Games. Dial 1957, pbr Crest 1958. A married woman, discovering her husband is having an affair with her closest friend, briefly becomes infatuated with her too.

Not Yet. Crown 1957, pbr Crest 1958. The story of four young girls in a French school; not children but “not yet” women, and their adjustment to life and love. The narrator, the least mature, is as yet infatuated only with Mother Nathalie, her teacher; no overt behavior is implied except kisses, but the nun’s reaction when the heroine begins to be interested in boys brings this under the scope of the study.

The Golden Cage. Dial 1959. (trans. from French by Meyer Levin). A group of refugees in wartime, waiting for visas in Portugal, undergo various transient attachments. Among the group are several lesbians, treated with sympathy and sensitivity.

TRAVIS, BEN. The Strange Ones. Beacon pbo 1959, (m). Evening waster about a young no-good who earns his living as a paid escort/gigolo and relaxes with boy friends but still loudly insists he is normal. Your editor enjoyed this out of sheer perversity; usually novels treating of male homosexuality engage the subject with deadly seriousness, while the paperback originals reek with drooling voyeuristic strip-teases about lesbians, for the sake of men who like to enjoy pipe-dreams about lesbians making love, and about some Big Handsome Hero who eventually converts the girls to “normality” with some secret formula of caresses. So it is a nice change to see the gay BOYS getting the in-and-out-of-the-sheets treatment for once.

UNTERMEYER, LOUIS. (Editor). The Treasury of Ribaldry. Doubleday 1956, pbr Popular Library 1959 (v. 1). This contains Lucian’s “Dialogues of Courtesans”, entitled in this translation “The Lesbian” and “A Curious Deception”. The hardcover edition also contains some of the Songs of Bilitis.

VAIL, AMANDA (pseud. of Warren Miller). The Bright Young Things. Little, Brown, 1958. pbr Crest 1960.

In a story of two worldly young college girls experimenting with life and love, a subplot involves two of their friends, lesbians. Minor but fun.

VAN HELLER, MARCUS. The House of Borgia, Paris, Olympia Press, 1957. Volume #16 in The Traveler’s Companion, straight scv.

VAN ROYEN, ASTRID. Awake, Monique. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1957, pbr Crest 1958. Astrid, an orphaned child in some unnamed European country (Holland, Belgium, Sweden?) is sent to live with her uncle Rainier; she lives upstairs with Rainier (eventually with a Lolita-like intimacy) while Rainier’s wife lives downstairs with a lesbian friend, Dini. Despite a “broadminded” plea for understanding, Rainier strictly forbids Astrid to have anything to do with the girls. The book is well-written, tasteful, and certainly candid.

VAUGHAN, HILDA. The Curtain Rises. N. Y. Chas Scribner 1935. A young girl, Nest, in London, falls in with a fiftyish spinster with a reputation for aiding young and pretty girls who also have talent. Miss Fremlyn invites Nest to live with her as her companion, showering her with education, attention and restrictions; Nest is naive, Miss Fremlyn unaware, at least consciously, of her own emotions. They travel and live together for some time, but the affair breaks up when Nest, who has always kept in touch with her boy friend, is discovered with him and Miss Fremlyn, considering this a betrayal, dismisses her. Explicit, well done.

VIDAL, GORE. The City and the Pillar. E P Dutton 1948, pbr Signet ca. 1950, (m).

WAHL, LOREN. The Invisible Glass. Greenberg, 1950, pbr tct If This be Sin, Avon 1952, pbr tct Take Me as I Am, Berkley 1959, (m).

WALFORD, FRANK. Twisted Clay. Claude Kendall, 1934. fco. A young girl, a psychotic sadist ... is bisexual and has one big affair with an older woman. It must be marked for people with very complete collections only; it is depressing, inaccurate, etc. “The writing, etc, are excellent, but oh my, what a plot!”

+ WARD, ERIC. Uncharted Seas. Paris, Obelisk Press 1937, (Fairly easy to obtain second hand, and not at all like most of the sexy trash tagged Paris elsewhere in this list.) An excellent, perceptive and controlled story of Diana Bellew, a young married woman with children, a childish husband and too much money and time on her hands, and her successive54 affairs with three women. The writing is unusually good for male authorship.

WEBB, JON EDGAR. Four Steps to the Wall. Dial 1948, pbr Bantam 1953, (m). Prison novel.

+ WEIRAUGH, ANNA ELISABET. The Scorpion. Greenberg 1932, Willey Book co, 1948, pbr Avon Books 1957, complete; pbr tct Of Love Forbidden, greatly abridged, 1958. Well-known novel of well-bred German girl, Metta (in some translations, Myra) who, in her late teens, falls in love with a worldly lesbian, Olga, who does much to free her from her stuffy background, but repudiates her painfully in a family crisis. After Olga’s suicide Metta seeks for her real self and real destiny, first in the Bohemian drink-drugs-sex merrygoround of Berlin between the wars, then hides from life in a stuffy middle-class setting; when even here she finds herself pursued by a lesbian tease, Gwen, who flirts with Metta to inveigle her into a sordid party a trois, Metta resolves to go away and come to terms with her own soul.

The Outcast. Greenberg 1933, Willey Book Co 1948. The sequel to the above, this finds the heroine of The Scorpion living quietly in the country. She undergoes a painful and unsatisfactory affair with Fiametta, a dancer, but when this proves unsatisfactory settles down sadly but peacefully with a couple of sexless men friends.

WEISS, JOE, and Ralph Dean. Anything Goes. Bedside Books pbo, 1959. Fast-moving evening waster with a minor lesbian angle.

+ WELLS, CATHERINE: “The Beautiful House” Harpers, March 1912. An idyll of two women ends tragically with the marriage of the younger.

WELLS, KERMIT. Reformatory Women. Bedside Books pbo 1959. Surprisingly good for this publisher of rubbish. After escaping from a sadistic lesbian matron in the reformatory, Noreen works as a fake butch in a Greenwich Village Gay bar and tourist trap; later goes to work for gangsters in a roadhouse, falls for a nice boy and goes back to serve her reformatory sentence and marry him when she gets out. Pleasant evening waster.

WETHERELL, ELIZABETH (pseud of Susan Warner). The Wide Wide World. Many editions, very easily obtained, a well-known girls story of the 1880s or thereabout, dealing with Ellen, an orphan of twelve. Much of the first half of the novel is devoted to a very innocent, but exceptionally intense, close relationship between Ellen and her beloved “Miss Alice”, daughter of the local minister. Good of kind, and distinctly relevant on an adolescent level.

WHEELER, HUGH. The Crippled Muse. Rinehart, 1952. A “sparkling comedy” of Capri contains the story of two women who have lived together for ten years; the younger girl is tired of the arrangement, and the older uses her feelings of guilt and shame to hold her captive. In the course of the novel she manages to free herself.

WIMBERLEY, GWYNNE. One Touch of Ecstasy. Frederick Fell, 1959. A lesbian affair gives “one touch of ecstasy” to a woman’s inhibited, unhappy life, allowing her to return to her husband with wakened perceptions.

WILDER, ROBERT. Wait for Tomorrow. Putnam 1950, Bantam 1953. A girl’s unwilling entanglement with a predatory lesbian, in a romance of an imaginary Balkan country, leads to all sorts of violence and cloak-and-dagger stuff. Good.

The Strange Path, Lion 1953, Berkley 1958, 1959. Morgen, rootless and drifting after the death of her artist father, to whom she had been childishly close, is loved by two fine young men, but finds her happiness with a strange young girl, Toni. Major, well known.

We Too Are Drifting. Triangle Books 1938-39; Modern Library 1935. pbr Lion Books 1951, Berkley 1957, 58, 59, 60. Probably the major novel of the thirties to deal with lesbians; perhaps the best of all time. In substance it deals with the boyish, but feminine Jan Morale; her struggle to escape a slightly sordid affair with Madelaine, a married woman, and to find happiness, despite family complications, with a young girl, Victoria. Told with fairness, restraint, and skill—not to mention that this is one of the dozen or so books on this entire list to display not only some, but exceptional literary merit.

WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE. “Something Unspoken” in 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. New Directions, 1953. Also in Best Short Plays of 1955-56, Dodd, Mead, 1956. A play; I marked this for fco, received a protest “Everybody will enjoy this.” Compromise; everybody will enjoy this who likes Tennessee Williams.

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS. The Knife of the Times. Dragon Press, 1932, hcr tct Make Light of It, Random House 1950, (m). The title story is in DWCory, 21 Variations.

WILLIAMS, IDABEL. Hellcat. Greenberg 1934, pbr Dell 1952. Unpleasant girl who uses everyone for her own purposes includes a lesbian among her victims.

WILLINGHAM, CALDER. (pseud). End as a Man. Vanguard 1947, pbr Signot co. 1957, (m).

WILLIS, GEORGE. Little Boy Blues. Dutton, 1947.56 Concerns the machinations of a lesbian to achieve marriage and motherhood as a “front”.

WINSLOE, CHRISTA. The Child Manuela. (Trans. Agnes Scott Farrar, 1933.) Motherless Manuela, sent to a strict boarding-school because of supposed misconduct with a boy (actually she was only fascinated with his mother) falls in love with Elizabeth von Bernberg, one of the teachers. The woman’s behavior is strictly correct, but her warmth of personality attracts all the love-starved, inhibited children; Manuela, exhilarated and slightly drunk at a school party, babbles of her love for the Fraulein, and is punished so severely that she throws herself from a top-floor window.

Girl Alone. (Trans. Agnes Scott). Farrar 1936. A girl in difficulties finds temporary refuge with a lesbian friend.

WINSTON, DAOMA. The Golden Tramp. pbo Beacon Books 1959. Evening waster about a woman writer trying it both ways.

WOLLER, OLGA. Strange Conflict. Pageant, 1955. Purple-passaged and would-be-horrifying story about a Eurasian hermaphrodite—supposedly as she is because of her mother’s intercourse with demons before her birth—who inspires love and brings death to everyone she knows, male or female.

Unmoral. Woodford Press, 1938. Both of these are evening wasters—racy stuff, not bad at all when compared with the current crop of trashy paperbacks. The “lesbian” content, of course, is strictly for fun.

WOOD, CLEMENT. Strange Fires. Woodford Press, 1951. “Shipwreck on Lesbos” in his Desire, Berkeley n. d. 1958 (copyright 1950, perhaps Woodford Press?) Clement Wood is either a pen name for, or a successor to, Jack Woodford, a popular writer of racy, risque, sexy books of little literary merit but relatively innocuous even for teenagers ... the trash of the thirties and forties was a very different thing from the scv of the fifties.

WOOD, CLEMENT, and Gloria Goddard. Fair Game. Woodford Press, 1949, pbr Beacon 1958. Evening waster about girls coming to the wicked big city, and we all know what happens to such girls in this kind of book. One of them falls in with the dangerous women instead of the dangerous men.

Mrs. Dalloway. All of these are classics easily available.57 in small, medium and large libraries, college bookstores, and the like. The lesbian content is vague and subtle, but good; one of the best woman writers.

WOUK, HERMAN. Marjorie Morningstar. Doubleday 1955, pbr 1956. The variant element in this is minor and problematical. In conversation, it occurred to a group of reviewers that the developing relationship between Marjorie and Marsha “resembled a love affair”, that Marsha’s attack of hysterics at her wedding, and her outcry that all she had ever wanted was a friend, and now she’d always be alone, was of distinct significance, BAYOR.

WYLIE, PHILIP. The Disappearance. Rinehart 1951, pbr Pocket Books 1958. Science fiction; for men, all women vanish; for women, all men vanish. The problem of lesbianism arises in the women’s world; Wylie, though technically and superficially approving of homosexuality, has his heroine reject it for herself, saying “I’m not a child.”

Opus 21. Rinehart 1949, pbr Signet 1952, 1960. The hero, rewriting a book in a hotel during a weekend of crisus, runs across many unusual characters; among them a woman, shaken because her husband is having a homosexual affair, is shamed into tolerance by dallying with a lesbian prostitute. Wylie, again superficially approving, has his hero act in a skirt-withdrawing way, refusing such things for himself at the last minute in every book.

WYNDHAM, JOHN. “Consider her Ways” in Sometime, Never, Ballantine 1956-57. Science Fiction; a woman experimenting with strange drugs goes into the future, where all men have perished and society resembles that of the ant. Good.

The Midwich Cuckoos. Ballantine, 1957. Science Fiction. Alien visitation from outer space leaves every nubile female in Midwich—married or single, young or old—pregnant. Hilariously funny situations arise; one of the funniest involves a pair of lesbians. Wonderful fun.

YAFFE, JAMES. Nothing But the Night. Little, Brown & Co, 1957, pbr Bantam 1959, (m). More fake Leopold-Loeb. Good.

YOURCENAR, MARGUERITE. Hadrian’s Memoirs. Farrar, 1954, qpb Anchor 1954, (m).

ZOLA, EMILE. Nana. Literally dozens of hardcover and paperback editions of a shocker about a street girl who, in addition to all her affairs with men, also has an affair with Satin, a streetwalker.

ZUGSMITH, ALBERT. The Beat Generation. Bantam pbo based on screenplay by Richard Mathesen. (m), minor.

The Poetry of Lesbiana

An index of Poems and Poets
of interest to
Collectors of Lesbiana

Compiled by Gene Damon

Erinna—only one fragment left. Available in the Greek Anthology and other miscellaneous collections of that type.

Nossis—Various variant poems and fragments. Greek Anthology, Putnam, 1915-26 (5 vol.). Also in similar collections.

Sappho—The classic poet of lesbianism. Over 50 editions available in hard covers. New translation by Mary Barnard, University of California Press, 1958, qpb $1.25. An attractive edition is also published for $2.50 by the Pater Pauper Press, on display in most bookstores.

Juvenal—Satires. Many editions in hardcover and qpb. (Rolfe Humphries trans. and ed. the Indiana University Press, 1958, $1.50; also number 997 in Everyman’s Library, $1.85.) The Sixth Satire.

Martial—His “Epigrams” contain various references to lesbians. Cambridge University Press, 1924, $2.75.

Labe, Louise—Love Sonnets (trans. by Frederick Prokosch), New Directions, 1947, $2.50, still in print.

Shakespeare, William—The first 27 of the “Sonnets” are generally adjudged to be male-homosexual in emphasis and are therefore of interest to collectors in this field.

Coleridge, Samuel T.—Christabel. Long narrative poem of a curious attachment between a guileless young girl and a female demon; available in virtually every anthology of English literature.

Rossetti, Christina—Goblin Market. Lovely and fantastic poem with distinctly variant overtones. See anthologies of English literature.

Romani, Felice—Norma. Italian libretto for the opera by Vincenzo Bellini, generally adjudged to be subtly lesbian in overtones. Many translations are available in collections of opera libretti, but most English translations edit out the variant content or alter the emphasis.

Baudelaire, Charles—The Flowers of Evil, (trans. from the French of Les Fleurs du Mal by Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon) N. Y. Harper, 1936, also New Directions, pbr, 1958. Many other editions and translations available.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles—Poems and Ballads, 2 vols, London, Chatto & Windus, 1893, 1895. Many of the poems in this series are explicitly or implicitly lesbian. In the interests of space limitation, only the major titles will be listed for those who want to sift through anthologies; Anactoria, Fragoletta, Sapphics, At Eleusis, Sonnet with a copy of Mlle. de Maupin, The Masque of Queen Bersabe, Erotion. The entire series of Poems and Ballads is available in her no. 961, Everyman’s Library, Dutton, 1940, 50, for $1.95.

Louÿs, Pierre—Songs of Bilitis. Many editions available, the most easily located probably being the Liveright “Collected works of Pierre Louys”, $3.50. There is also a paperback edition, Avon Red and Gold Library, no date. The “Songs” have been published singly in numerous privately printed and illustrated editions, some of which are very beautiful collector’s items.

Brontë, Emily—Complete Poems. N. Y. Columbia University Press, 1941 (still in print at $4.00). A scattering of these poems are (or can be interpreted as) vaguely variant.

Mencken, Idah Isaacs—Infelicia. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1875. (Rare, and expensive.)

Field, Michael—(pseud. of two Englishwomen.) Entire work of lesbian interest and a “must” for completists. Most medium to large public libraries have some of their work.

Dickinson, Emily—Bolts of Melody. N. Y. Harper, 1945. Also variant poems are scattered throughout her earlier editions. (Selected Poems, Modern Library, 1948, $1.65.)

Lowell, Amy—No one volume of her work can be singled out; her poems are perhaps the most openly variant of any of the English or American poets. Her “Complete Poetical Works” is still in print; Boston, Houghton & Mifflin Co., 1955; Introduction by Louis Untermeyer, $6.00.

O’Neill, Rose—The Master Mistress. N. Y. Knopf, 1922. The creator of the “Kewpies” also was the writer of these sensitive, occasionally erotic poems. Perhaps a dozen are explicitly lesbian.

Hall, Radclyffe—Poems of the Past and Present, London, Chapman & Hall, 1910. Songs of Three Counties, Chapman & Hall, 1913. The Forgotten Island, London, Chapman & Hall, 1915. Sheaf of Verses, London, Chapman & Hall, 1905. Twixt Earth and Stars, London, Chapman & Hall, 1906.

These poems by the author of “Well of Loneliness” are so overt that it is almost unbelievable that they were printed at all, but they were, and I have the books to prove it ... she managed to get away with it, I guess, because she talks in these poems as if she were a man, writing to a woman.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent—Collected Poems, N. Y. Harper, 1956, $6.00. This is the favored anthology of Millay for this purpose, since it contains everything of hers which is variant in tone. However, there are many single volumes of her poetry available, and also pbrs; Collected Lyrics (Washington Square, 50¢), and Collected Sonnets (Washington Square, 50¢).

Sterling, George—Strange Waters. Privately printed, n.d., also in American Esoterica, N. Y. Macy-Masius, 1927. Lengthy narrative poem of supposed incestuous lesbianism ... shocker.

Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.)—Red Roses for Bronze, London, Lord, Chatto & Windus. Also the Grove Press qpb, Selected Poems of H.D., 1957; this, however, does not contain the best-known of Sappho paraphrases, “Fragment Thirty-six”. Also “Collected Poems”, Liveright, $2.50.

Pitter, Ruth—English poetess, whose work is rather difficult to locate in this country. Many of her early poems are tinged with variance and well worth the effort of locating them in large libraries.

Smith, Alicia Kay—Only in Whispers. Privately printed; Falmouth, Rockport, Maine. This is the hardest book on this list to obtain, and of course, the most overt. Ardently but in good taste, this tells of a lengthy and beautiful lesbian affair. A “must” book for serious collectors who like poetry.

Wright, James—The Green Wall. Yale University Press, 1957, $3.00. Two overt poems in an excellent and sensitive collection.

variant films

compiled by LauraJean Ermayne and Gene Damon

With the exception of a few privately filmed and circulated stag films, which of course do not come within the scope of this study, lesbianism is treated only vaguely and by indirection in motion pictures. Hollywood codes (which regulate distribution even of foreign films in this country) state unequivocally that homosexuality may not be portrayed or suggested. (Italixs mine). Even when the predominantly homosexual novel COMPULSION was filmed, the script—though including a rape scene—was fudged so that the relationship between the two boys was never hinted at—except vaguely in one scene, where Orson Welles as the great lawyer said that the opposition might find “something fishy” in the fact that they had no other friends. Your editor has since been informed that the movie NEVER SO FEW portrayed recognizable homosexuals. Hollywood codes are growing less stringent by the day, with the general relaxation of censorship, and by next year there should be some additions to this list. Thanks are due to Miss Ermayne for allowing us to reprint the material used in her article on The Sapphic Cinema in THE LADDER for March, 1959 ... the Editors.

THE ADVENTURES OF KING PAUSOLE. Filmed in France in 1932, with Emil Jannings. Based on the Pierre Louys novel, this starred 366 models and dancers from the Folies bergeres; among these near-nude and nubile nymphs was one disguised as a male ballet dancer, with whom the King’s daughter Aline had a romance even after discovering that they were of the same sex.

ALL ABOUT EVE took the Academy Award in 1950. There is a very lesbian situation used to introduce the main protagonist into the movie; later events proved the woman only pretending lesbian-type devotion, but the inference, in the beginning, is clear and unmistakable. (GD)

THE BARKER 1928. A short silent picture which was banned in many cities because it featured a scene in which a very butchy type in men’s pajamas got into bed with a fluffy blonde type; caused a lot of critical hoop-la. (GD)

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR, a film based on the Lillian Hellman play reviewed in this Checklist, bears a question mark; will someone who has seen the picture please let us know whether lesbian content was implicit in the movie?

CHILDREN OF LONELINESS, outright anti-homophile propaganda, was mostly male-oriented, but did contain a gay night-club scene, and picture and office butch whose offer of affection and protection drove one girl to a psychiatrist’s couch—where she was counselled against “abnormal love”.

DARK VICTORY. 1939, recently shown on TV, concerns a talented, charming woman (Bette Davis) dying of a brain tumor; her constant companion and secretary is clearly in love with her, and there were numerous beautiful and heartbreaking scenes, some of which would be impossible in a movie not dealing with such a sad situation.

CLUB DES FEMMES (Girl’s Club in English) an admirable French film starring Danielle Darieux, reviewed at length in THE LADDER. The lesbian element is treated explicitly and with taste and charm.

ESCAPE TO YESTERDAY, a French film with one brief sequence in a cabaret, where recognizably lesbian types were portrayed.

MAEDCHEN IN UNIFORM, a classic German film of the thirties, reviewed at length in J H Foster’s book, starring Hertha Thiele as Manusia and Dorothea Wieck as her teacher. The film has recently been re-made but has not yet reached the USA.

THE GODDESS, an art film released about a year ago, starring Kim Stanley, shows the life of an unwanted child who grows up to be a movie queen and ends up living with her secretary, obviously a lesbian; the relationship is portrayed with unusual frankness. This movie is still playing in specialty theatres around the big cities.

NO EXIT, a French film of the play by Jean-Paul Sartre; setting, limbo; one of the characters, a lesbian who fell in love with a married woman and drove her to suicide by spooking her.

OPEN CITY, realistic Italian film of 10 years or so ago, had a recognizable lesbian type-cast in it.

PIT OF LONELINESS, a French film based on the novel OLIVIA and starring Simone Simon. “Something of a disappointment” says LJE.

QUEEN CHRISTINA, 1934. This famous screen classic starred Greta Garbo; the variant bits were minor, but they were there. (GD)

ROSE OF WASHINGTON SQUARE 1939. Now-dated tear-jerker starring Alice Faye; in one long scene the heroine sings standing by a piano, while a clearly seen, very mannish and extremely obvious “type” drools over her. Not imagination; this one was the veddy veddy correct, monocled type. (GD)

SIGN OF THE RAM, a filming circa 1947 of the Margaret Ferguson novel, starred Susan Peters as the wheelchaired heroine; the “crush” between Leah and Christine was treated vaguely but recognizably to anyone who had read the book.

TIME OF DESIRE. “Much has been made of the Uranian aspect of this film but personally I couldn’t see it....” LJE

TORST (“Thirst”) directed by Ingmar Bergman, is supposed to tell the lives of three women strangely in love, including a lesbian. As yet none of your editors or contributors have seen the film.

TURNABOUT, the Thorne Smith sex-farce where a man’s ego is transmuted into a woman’s body.

TITLE UNKNOWN; 1950 or 1951; French with English subtitles; action took place in a girl’s reformatory, much reference to lesbianism and some overt scenes; one where a girl caressed the breast of another and whispered love words to her, another where a tough street type tells a young innocent “See these marks on my thighs, they are each the marks of a lover, the left leg for boys and the right for girls.” I don’t see any other way to interpret that scene. (GD)

THE END, OF COURSE, IS NOT YET.

ONE, INCORPORATED. 232 South Hill Street, Los Angeles 12, California. Non-profit organization, established in 1952, concerned with the problems and interests of homosexual men and women; publishers of;

THE DAUGHTERS OF BILITIS, INC. 165 O’Farrell St, Room 405, San Francisco, Calif. A woman’s organization for promoting the integration of the homosexual into society; membership limited to woman. Emphasis on education of the variant to promote adjustment and self-understanding, and education of the public at large through acceptance of the individual. Publishers of;

THE MATTACHINE SOCIETY, 693 Mission Street, San Francisco, California. Founded 1950, Incorporated 1954; purpose, to conduct projects of education, research and social service in sex problems, particularly those of homosexual adults. Publishers of;

Every year, following the publication of the Checklist, we receive a number of queries. Where, they want to know, can we buy these books? We can only tell you where we buy books; and have therefore assembled the following list of reputable dealers, mail order, who handle these books and many others.

WINSTON BOOK SERVICE, 250 Fulton Avenue; Hempstead, New York. Successor to the famous Cory Book Service which was founded by Donald Webster Cory, author of “The Homosexual in America”. This is perhaps the best American source for current novels in hard covers and non-fiction. They issue catalogs and lists, give a sizable discount for large orders, and will also locate hard-to-find or out-of-print books. Leslie Laird Winston, who is the presiding genius here, is one of the nicest people to deal with that we have ever known. Every month they feature some new or special book in the field, at a special price. Getting on their mailing list is the best thing that can happen to a collector.

DORIAN BOOK SERVICE, 693 Mission Street, San Francisco 5, California. A subsidiary of the Mattachine Review and the Pan-Graphic Press. They publish the Dorian Book Quarterly, dealt with elsewhere, and also a fat, fascinating catalogue listing several hundred titles of current hard-cover and paperback fiction. They can also furnish, or will locate, many out-of-print titles. My experience with them; prompt service, fast shipment, up-to-date information on cheap reprints of rare titles.

VILLAGE BOOKS AND PRESS, 114-116 Christopher Street, New York 14, New York. This is the outfit behind the Noel Garde bibliography of Homosexual Literature, mentioned in the editorial. They can still supply this biblio list for $1.50. They also issue lists at frequent intervals, and will search for hard-to-find and out-of-print titles. Prices seem reasonable considering the scarcity of some of the paperbacks he handles. The proprietor, Howard Frisch, is one of the most co-operative dealers in the business.

ONE Magazine, listed in “Related Publications” has published one volume of short stories, and is soon to do more publishing; they also list several dozen books sold by mail order.

THE LADDER, listed in “Related Publications”, is soon to set up a book service; their first special release will be Jeannette Howard Foster’s “Sex Variant Women in Literature”, so keep your eyes open.

THE TENTH MUSE, bookshop managed by Julia Newman, 326 West 15th St, New York 11, New York, also does some mail order business. Write for a list.

A POINTS NORTHE, unusual bookshop at 15 Robinson Street, in Oklahoma City, managed by James Neill Northe, into which your senior editor virtually stumbled during a rainstorm, specializes in very rare, esoteric and65 scholarly titles, curiosa, etc. He can supply even the most fantastically rare stuff; prices are in line with the rarity of the items wanted. (It was Mr. Northe who, with disinterested kindness, supplied some biblio data on the real rarities on the list; he has our thanks and endorsement.)

BOOKPOST, C. Rogers, Box 3251, San Diego 3, California. This outfit specializes in Americana, but can supply almost anything. The prices here are the most reasonable I’ve ever encountered; if Rogers quotes you a price, there’s no point in shopping around for a lower one.

INTERNATIONAL BOOKFINDERS, P O Box 3003, Beverly Hills, California. These people are the out-of-print bookfinders par excellence. I’ve ordered many books from them; their prices are reasonable, never exorbitant; their service is good, the books they supply are always of high quality. They’re nice to deal with. I’ve never had a complaint in ten years of bookhunting.

RAYMOND TRANFIELD, Antiquarian Book Dealer, 31 Hart Street, Henley-Upon-Thames, Oxon, England, is probably the best source for older books published in England. His prices are reasonable, his service is fast (he quotes by airmail and sends his parcels insured, which is a blessing for anything which has to travel across the ocean).

Paperbacks. We hate them and we love them. The worst rubbish, and the best literature brought within the reach of a slim budget. If you missed it on the news-stands, all is not lost....

AVON Books; Avon Publications, Inc., 575 Madison Ave, N. Y. 22, N. Y. (35¢ & 50¢)

CARDINAL editions, POCKET BOOKS and PERMABOOKS, Pocket Books, Inc, 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N. Y. Free catalogue on request.

NEWSSTAND LIBRARY EDITIONS (Magenta Books, and others), 3143 Diversey Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Free lists sent on request.

POPULAR LIBRARY, Hillman Books and others, do not print their address in the books and evidently don’t want to bother with mail orders. If you miss them on the news-stands, you’ll have to root in second-hand stores. Saber and Fabian Books can be ordered through the Dorian Book Service, and some secondhand book dealers will locate paperbacks, including; Village Books and Press, above.

Compiled by Kerry Dame

Greenberg.—(see Chilton Co., Book Division, 56th & Chestnut St, Philadelphia 39, Penna.—what became of Greenberg; NY?)

CATTO, MAX. The Killing Frost. London, Wm. Heinemann, 1950, (m). Tense relationship between two circus performers motivates an unusual, and excellent mystery novel.

RAY, SANFORD. Satan’s Harvest. Saber Books pbo ca. 1957. Evening waster; a Mexican girl, Lupe, from a broken home, goes—with her older sister—into a brothel, but is “protected” from the advances of the men by the fact that the lesbian madame has taken a fancy to her. Lupe’s older sister burns the place down to free Lupe from this fate.

SAYRE, GORDON. (pseud. of Jack Woodford.) Wife to Trade. N. Y. Godwin, 1936. No reviews available, but probably racy stuff, not too badly written.

WILLINGHAM, CALDER. “The Sum of two Angles”, ss in The Gates OF Hell. N. Y. Vanguard, 1951.

YOUNG, FRANCES BRETT. White Ladies. NY, Harper 1935. A boarding-school tomboy, infatuated with a schoolteacher, finally comes to see her as a vampire, feeding on the emotions of the young.

behind the scenes

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY, Editor and publisher of the Checklist, who attends to such minor chores as editorial format and manhandling the mimeograph, is by profession a writer of science fiction. Her work has appeared in virtually every science fiction magazine on the market. She is thirty years-old, lives in a small town in Texas, and her other interests are Italian opera, acrobatics and mountain climbing.

GENE DAMON, whose competent brain does the bibliographical work for the Checklist, is in her mid-twenties, lives in the midwest, and is a librarian; she previously worked as a book-keeper and on a large city newspaper. Her chief interests are classical music and the collecting of variant literature; her private library contains over 600 titles of lesbiana alone. It was the untiring, perfectionist efforts of Miss Damon which checked every biblio reference in this list; she also supplied a summary or precis for every title which the senior editor had not read. In general, Damon is the brains of the Checklist; MZB merely the brawn.

KERRY DAME, stencil-cutter, artist and printer’s devil, is in her early twenties and lives in New England with her mother and many cats. She is no stranger to the readers of the Ladder, who all know her gay, airy cover drawings.

LAURAJEAN ERMAYNE, contributor to Vice Versa, collector of lesbiana, specialist in films, and tireless hunter of the news-stands, lives in California and, under her own name, is a well-known editor and writer.

69HOUSEKEEPING DEPARTMENT: In a forgotten closet, your editor has just discovered a stack of copies of the ASTRA’S TOWER Checklist #3. We thought they’d all been destroyed. This is the last-year’s list, containing Royal Drummond’s “Digression”, and my account of a hassle with the fascinatin' Miss Apple. I want to get these things out of my broom closet, and my soul revolts at the thought of tossing the things into the trash burner for the edification of the garbage collector. Therefore, we will make the following offer. Mailing these things out by printed-matter, fourth class mail costs 7-1/2 cents. By first class mail, 12 cents postage is required. Envelopes cost something. If anyone wants these (who knows, they might be valuable as examples of prehistoric lesbiana some day) you can have then for a quarter (first class mail) or six for a dollar to pass around among your friends. Hurry up—I’m going to need my broom closet for the mimeograph when I get finished with this year’s Checklist. You’ll find the address on the titlepage.—And this is it—The End—Marion.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHECKLIST ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™ electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™ trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™ License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided that:

• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

Editorial; History and purpose of the Checklist	2
List of symbols and abbreviations	5
The complete cumulative Checklist, indexed by author	7
The poetry of Lesbiana; chronological reference list (compiled by Gene Damon)	58
Variant Films	61
Related Publications; the homosexual Press	63
For Collectors Only; a list of book services	64
Paperback Publishers; addresses	65
Hardcover Publishers; addresses	66
Behind the scenes; meet the editors	68

pbo—	paperbacked original; first published in paperback or first English edition in paperback.
pbr—	paperbacked reprint.
n.d.—	no date listed or date unknown.
ss—	short story.
qpb—	quality paperback book (as, Grove Press or Vintage).
tct—	title changed to (as, Torchlight to Valhalla, pbr tct The Strange Path).
fco—	for completists only; variant content either extremely slight or problematical.
+	before a title indicates a book of considerable value. Occasionally used to call attention to a fine new release or the discovery of an old title overlooked in previous bibliographies. In general, the plus sign has been reserved for books of honest purpose, sincere if not always entirely favorable treatment of the homosexual theme, and some genuine literary merit. In one or two cases, a plus has been given to a book of little intrinsic worth because of some major and exceptional contribution to thought on the variant theme; or to an occasional book for being extremely good entertainment of its kind, even if no masterpiece. We have tried to avoid including only our favorites.
(m)	indicates a novel concerned mostly with male homosexuality. A very large proportion of such novels, however, contain some discussion of female variance, or lesbian characters, as well.
BAYOR—	By at your own risk ... either no accurate data is available or the editors find themselves in hopeless disagreement about its relevance.
Evening	Waster—good solid entertainment and reasonably well-written, though worthless as literature.
scv—	see editorial for complete discussion of this term. This is the literary ghetto, the gutter books, the commercialized sex trash as distinguished from honest erotic realism.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Checklist

Marion Zimmer Bradley

CHECKLIST

table of contents

Edited and Published by: MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
Associate Editor: GENE DAMON
Cover design and layouts by Kerry Dame

Entire contents copyright, May 1960, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Box 158, Rochester, Texas. All rights reserved.

editorial

THE PURPOSE AND HISTORY OF THE CHECKLIST

List of Symbols and Abbreviations

THE COMPLETE, CUMULATIVE CHECKLIST OF LESBIAN FICTION

The Poetry of Lesbiana

An index of Poems and Poets
of interest to
Collectors of Lesbiana

Compiled by Gene Damon

variant films

compiled by LauraJean Ermayne and Gene Damon

THE END, OF COURSE, IS NOT YET.

related publications

Compiled by Kerry Dame

behind the scenes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

	ONE Magazine, monthly. Five dollars per year, fifty cents per copy. Sent first class, sealed. Editor Don Slater; Woman’s editor, Alison Hunter. Editorials, fiction, poetry, articles, book reviews, letters, artwork. Special attention given to the Feminine Viewpoint. Fiction, articles, poetry by and about the lesbian.
	ONE Institute Quarterly; Homophile Studies. Official Organ of One Institute, a university-level facility presenting classes on the history, biology, sociology and psychology of homosexuality. Articles include scholarly evaluation of literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, homosexuality and religion, etc. Five dollars per year, $1.50 single copy. Editor James Kepner, Jr.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Checklist

Marion Zimmer Bradley

CHECKLIST

table of contents

Edited and Published by: MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY Associate Editor: GENE DAMON Cover design and layouts by Kerry Dame

Entire contents copyright, May 1960, by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Box 158, Rochester, Texas. All rights reserved.

editorial

THE PURPOSE AND HISTORY OF THE CHECKLIST

List of Symbols and Abbreviations

THE COMPLETE, CUMULATIVE CHECKLIST OF LESBIAN FICTION

The Poetry of Lesbiana

An index of Poems and Poets of interest to Collectors of Lesbiana

Compiled by Gene Damon

variant films

compiled by LauraJean Ermayne and Gene Damon

THE END, OF COURSE, IS NOT YET.

related publications

Compiled by Kerry Dame

behind the scenes

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

Edited and Published by: MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
Associate Editor: GENE DAMON
Cover design and layouts by Kerry Dame

An index of Poems and Poets
of interest to
Collectors of Lesbiana