LGBTQ+ Pulp Archive of 1960s Books on Lesbian Life, Sexology, and Social Observation

Carlson Wade W D. Sprague Frank Caprio

Collection

Lesbian culture book archive, 1961 to 1967, gathers five mass-market paperbacks that show how lesbian life entered mainstream American print through pulp publishing, sexology, journalism, and case-study literature. The books belong to LGBTQ+ pulp and women’s history, illustrating how lesbian identity was alternately pathologized, sensationalized, catalogued, and reported for a broad reading public during the decade before and after early homophile organizing gained national visibility. The inclusion of Jess Stearn’s The Grapevine gives the archive particular research value, since the book engages the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955 and identified by the Library of Congress as the first lesbian rights group in the United States. The group also captures a transitional print culture in which lesbian readers could encounter hostile or clinical language alongside bibliographies, glossaries, organizational references, and coded routes toward community knowledge.

The archive consists of five softcover pulp and mass-market books published between 1961 and 1967, each measuring approximately 4.25 x 7 inches and ranging from approximately 190 to 330 pages. The collection includes medicalized studies, journalistic reporting, case histories, and popular sexological writing, with cover art and marketing language designed to frame lesbianism as both a social problem and a commercial subject. Together the books document how publishers packaged lesbian culture through lurid taglines, clinical authority, “case history” structures, and cover imagery of women posed in intimate or suggestive relation to one another. Several volumes include documentary features such as interviews, bibliographies, demographic charts, glossaries, conference material, or claims of professional expertise, making the archive useful for studying the overlap between pulp marketing, women’s sexuality, mid-century psychology, and early LGBTQ+ public discourse.

[1] Wade, Carlson. The Troubled Sex. New York: Universal, 1961. First printing paperback. Vintage mass-market paperback in pictorial wrappers, with cover illustration of blonde and brunette women standing in a doorway and the tagline “A frank and penetrating study of habits and practices among Lesbians — their causes, cures, and clinical histories”; sections include “Recognizing the Lesbian,” “Lesbians in Prisons,” “Help for Lesbians,” and “Lesbian Signs and Symbols,” showing how popular sexology presented lesbian life through surveillance, diagnosis, and alleged correction. [2] Caprio, Frank S. Female Homosexuality: A Modern Study of Lesbianism. New York: Grove Press, Evergreen Black Cat Book, 1962. First edition, first printing mass-market paperback pulp edition. Presented as a study based on interviews and information gathered internationally, with interlinked female symbols on the cover, back-cover promotional language calling it “the most complete and authoritative book on the subject,” a glossary of lesbian terms, and an extensive bibliography that could also serve lesbian readers seeking vocabulary and further reading. [3] O’Hara, Ralph C. The Divorcee. Connecticut: Monarch Books, 1962. First edition, with cover statement “First Publication Anywhere.” Vintage cover art shows a man and woman kissing beside the tagline “The Emotional Problems of Women who have shed their husbands via divorce”; the book follows case studies of divorced women, including women who enter lesbian relationships, and reflects mid-century anxieties about marriage, female independence, and sexual nonconformity. [4] Sprague, W.D. The Lesbian in Our Society. New York: Midwood Books, Tower Publications, 1962. First edition softcover mass-market paperback pulp. Cover art shows a woman posed sensually and looking behind her, with the tagline “Detailed case histories of the third sex”; the introduction states that its case histories are taken from the files of the Psychoanalytical Assistance Foundation, and the book includes a female population demographic chart at the back, combining pulp packaging with claimed social-scientific authority. [5] Stearn, Jess. The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian. New York: Macfadden Books, 1967. First edition paperback, second printing. Stearn, a journalist associated with the New York Daily News, presents interviews, descriptions of lesbian bars and beaches, and an account of the Daughters of Bilitis convention, including recreated program material from “Potentials: The Lesbian in Society”; the book is listed in Barbara Grier’s bibliographic tradition of lesbian literature, a field represented in the searchable edition of The Lesbian in Literature, 600 B.C.–1981 hosted by OutHistory. Light handling wear to wrappers, minor rubbing and reading creases consistent with mass-market paperbacks; pages intact and covers present; overall very good. Cohesive 1960s LGBTQ+ pulp and women’s history archive documenting the contested public emergence of lesbian identity through popular print, medical authority, and early lesbian civil-rights visibility.

Item #19985

Price: $475.00