It was originally published in 1959 by Gold Medal Books, again in 1983 by Naiad Press, and again in 2002 by Cleis Press. It is the second in a series of pulp fiction novels that eventually came to be known as The Beebo Brinker Chronicles. READ MORE about members of the Postmodernist Generation (1924-33).I Am a Woman is a lesbian pulp fiction novel written in 1959 by Ann Bannon (pseudonym of Ann Weldy). Also born this date: Jean Renoir, Roy Acuff, Nipsey Russell. On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. “All the angels are queer, you know.” Is that hopeful or despairing? Subversive or morbid? Both? “Someday we’ll die and go to heaven,” says Jack. Bannon wants her characters to live truthfully and happily, but she taxes them dearly for their outsiderhood, and it’s often hard to tell if she’s exposing or endorsing their deluded rationalizations and emotional cannibalisms. The attempt, while grimly fascinating and in gay-lit terms historic, is raw, painful, sometimes stupefying. That’s partly pulp, but mostly it’s Bannon trying to balance wish against conditioning, eros against ethos.

The novels describe a timespan far broader than five years (the narrative chronology is as inconsistent as the characters), and their sexual politics are, well, confused, featuring intimacies both loving and sadistic, tender and floridly pathological. This is no pre-Stonewall wonderland of prescient P.C. Beebo’s ongoing travails substantiate the closer, 1962’s Beebo Brinker. Hausfrau Beth returns in Journey to a Woman (1960) for an affair with a consumptive lesbian from a family of Gothic weirdos. Women in the Shadows (1959) has Laura and Jack shacking up as mutual beards, and Beebo scheming to win her back - to the extent of fabricating a gang rape and butchering a pet dog. In I Am a Woman (1959), Laura moves to New York, befriends Jack, a gay man, and submits to Beebo, transplanted farmgirl and dominant butch. Odd Girl Out opens on Beth, a popular senior at a Midwestern university by the end, the focus is on her adoring roommate, Laura, a self-injurer with father issues. In fact, the sequence has no true central character. ANN BANNON (born 1932) would publish four more lesbian pulps over the next five years - a pentalogy dubbed “the Beebo Brinker chronicles” when reprinted by the feminist Naiad Press in the early Eighties. Bannon,” became a bestseller for Gold Medal Books. Ann Weldy was a Philadelphia housewife in 1957 when her first novel, a lesbian romance credited to “A.

I Am a Woman by Ann Bannon