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In 1950, Fawcett founded the Gold Medal imprint, inaugurating the era of lesbian pulp fiction. These were the books that small town lesbians and prurient men bought by the millions—cheap, easy to find in drugstores, and immediately recognizable by their lurid covers. For lesbians, here was the confirmation that they were not alone and that darkly glamorous, “gay” places like Greenwich Village existed. In the over-heated prose typical of the genre, these books document the emergence of a lesbian subculture in postwar America.
Three Women
March Hastings
MILLS & BOON
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Table of Contents
He lurched at her from the doorway. Flakes of snow glistened on his straggled eyebrows. She smelled the stench of whiskey in his clothes.
“Go on, mister. Keep moving.” Paula jostled him away with her free hand and hurried along First Avenue. The freezing streets were slippery beneath her boots but she plunged forward, splashing into lakes of snow and ice gathered at the curb. She hated these winter nights worse than the steaming nights of summer. The wind tore savagely at her face. It seeped in past the woolen scarf and settled bitterly around her neck beneath the chestnut hair. As far as she could see the Avenue was black and lonely. But she knew that men huddled in corners, some asleep and not feeling the cold, others alerted by wild visions more fantastic than the freezing, howling night around her.
With the container of milk hugged close, she hurried into the entrance of the tenement and through the narrow hall strewn with garbage the kids had pulled out of cans. She clomped up the three flights lighted by weak bulbs and let herself into the apartment. This wasn’t home to her. It was the place where Ma and Pa and Mike and she happened to live because it was cheaper for everyone to live together there.
She set the package on the small table in the foyer and hung up her coat and scarf on the hook beside Mike’s leather jacket.
“That you, Paula?” Her mother called from where she stood at the stove, moving a big wooden spoon in a pot of rice.
You could see the kitchen from the foyer. You could see the bedroom beyond the kitchen where Mike sat cross-legged, reading an airplane magazine like he was in his own private library on Fifth Avenue.
“I just made it,” Paula said, breathing on the tips of her fingers to get out the sting. “He was just about closing when I got there.” She brought in the paper bag and pulled out the container of milk.
Why did her Pa always have to get his attacks late at night? Why didn’t he stop drinking so he could eat meals like a normal person? She wanted to respect him but it was hard not to get angry at a man who insisted on killing himself, eating away his stomach with poison that didn’t even give him pleasure anymore. She poured milk into a saucepan and set it on the stove beside the rice.
“I
