THE COVERS ARE what draw you in first, just as they were designed to do. They promise sex but, more strikingly, they promise shock — the jolt of the taboo, the sinful. They’re illustrations of women, usually two, sometimes more, often half-dressed or undressing, in slips and brasbest casino slots, a strap provocatively sliding down the curve of a shoulder. A knee is raised as a nylon stocking is tugged off. They generally seem to show dusky rooms; if a window is visible, it’s curtained because what has been happening inside is not for decent eyes to witness.

The women might be lounging on a couch or, more daringly, on a bed with disarranged sheets. In those poses, they have much in common with their counterparts on the covers of any cheap paperback — a mystery, a thriller, a Southern saga — of the 1950s or early ’60s. Up to a point, that is. Because these women aren’t looking longingly at a man, or teasingly out toward a male reader. Their interest is only in one another. Often their expressions are hard, cool, ungiving or, if not, then lost, downcast, imprisoned in a secret sorrow. The dynamic playing out among them is almost unsustainably charged. And if the art doesn’t sell it, the cover slogan will: “The novel of a love society forbids”; “Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world. …”; “She Fought — She Struggled — She Even Married a Man! But in the End Ann Surrendered to Tortured Women Like Herself … !” As advertising, the covers couldn’t have been more effective. Seventy years ago, women saw them and bought those books by the millions. So did men.

In some ways, we’ve reached a moment in which those disreputable old novels, and the lonely, yearning culture that spawned them, are ripe for rediscovery. (Or more accurately, re-rediscovery: Some of the small lesbian and feminist publishers like Naiad Press, which first dusted off and reissued these books decades ago, are now themselves gone and in need of reclamation missions.) After being all but obliterated by the internet, queer-owned and -themed brick-and-mortar bookstores are starting to re-emerge, now accompanied by online versions. Bookstores bind us to literary history — at least, good ones do — and it feels like an apt time to revisit a not-so-distant past in which it was an act of risk and daring (not to mention of sheer hunger) for a woman who loved women to walk into a shop and purchase a story meant to speak to her or about her. And in a yesterday’s trash is today’s treasure arc that speaks to how many elements of gay pop culture history evolve from degraded discards to camp objets to worthy subjects of academic study (see also: “The Golden Girls”; Tom of Finland), collections of the novels have now found their way into various gay and lesbian archives and even into the Smithsonian Institution.

But exploring the lesbian pulp genre requires suspending any sentimental preconceptions about one’s ancestors. It arrived on the scene before gay pride, whether with a capital “P” or a lowercase one, was a notion; before the existence of “L.G.B.T.,” or of the unity of purpose that those jammed-together letters now purport to represent; before anything like a national gay rights movement had started to take shape. Whenever a piece of antique queer pop culture is unearthed, especially if it’s from the pre-Stonewall era, we tend to try to fit it into one of two categories. Either it’s problematic, a relic replete with attitudes and stereotypes of which we disapprove that can only be understood as regrettable elements of a less enlightened time, or it’s pioneering, a daring, prescient and hitherto unappreciated leap toward a future that nobody back then could have predicted was on the near horizon. Yet the phenomenon of the lesbian pulp paperback — and it was a phenomenon, both culturally and financially — resists any such attempts at pigeonholing. It was both problematic and pioneering, although neither word adequately describes something that was at once a cynical business proposition and a burgeoning art form, a reinforcer of negative stereotypes and an act of breathtaking liberatory outreach, one that connected with countless women who had nowhere else to go, either in art or in life, if they longed to discover stories about people even remotely like themselves. Was lesbian pulp good for the gays or bad for the gays? The only accurate answer is yes.

It was also, even within the then-rarefied context of queer pop culture, an exception to the rule: In a history that has so often marginalized or minimized lesbian tastes, interests and contributions, here was a vibrant category of popular art centered entirely on female desire. In the very limited public discourse about homosexuality in the early 1950s (and for a long time after that), it was gay men who were in the spotlight, reviled as a menace, a grotesquerie, a threat to national security, to the safety of parks and neighborhoods and schools and children. Lesbians, in that discussion, were often an afterthought … if they were thought of at all. Though the threat to their safety and employment during the so-called Lavender Scare of the early 1950s was very real, they weren’t so much the target of male revulsion as of disappointment, indifference and unspoken erotic curiosity; women who preferred women were viewed less as public threats than as damaged goods, scarcely worth considering.

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