How much time did you spend in the bars?

A fair amount. But you have to picture this, I was actually living in Philadelphia. I was married in ‘54 and in ‘55 I had a draft of a manuscript. I went up to New York as frequently as I could without getting my husband on my case. I was shown around Greenwich Village by none other than, the first women to get published with an original lesbian pulp paperback and her pen name was Vin Packer.

She had written Spring Fire which really inspired me to complete Odd Girl Out. Well, anyway, I had been corresponding with her. She very kindly said if you’ve got a manuscript, why don’t you bring it up to New York and I’ll tell my editor about it and maybe he’ll read it for you. It’s kind of miraculous that that happened. There wasn’t a great ground swell at the time, but there was interest. People were buying Tereska Torres book Women’s Barracks.

Pulp Fiction Genres

Dick Carrol (Gold Medal Editor) looked at my manuscript. He read it while I was first visiting and getting my first view of Greenwich Village. He read it and called me and he said, "Well you know, it’s not a very good book, but you can write." He didn’t say, it’s not a very good book and go home to your mother, dear, which I had been braced for... He said, you have a very sweet story here and it’s the story of the two young women in the sorority house. It’s not all that stuff about Spring carnival and slogging through the snow to class, and all the other baggage of a college novel.

That should be the background and the two girls should be the center of the story. That sort of took me aback because I wanted desperately to write about Beth and Laura, but I was afraid to. It was such a very delicate and dangerous area of literature back then. I put them away in a shadowy corner, thinking maybe my mother won’t notice this is going on in this book.
Well, I went home to the dining room table and the old Remington and I went back over that manuscript and tore it apart and put it back together. I think it took me a couple of months, and in the meantime, of course, I was back and forth in Greenwich Village. Anyway, I took it up to Dick Carrol. I think within days I heard from him. And they were going to take it just as it was, they weren’t going to change a word.

Really, it needed some editing. When you’re young you tend to over write. Nobody ever stepped in and said "Oh Ann, for Heaven’s sakes. You don’t need that many adjectives." Still, I was very thrilled.

By the time I finished the book, I had learned quite a bit. I had made my way around Greenwich Village a number of times and a number of the bars, I had met people on my own. I just yearned to be there, but I couldn’t. At least that was my belief at the time and that is what I followed.

Odd Girl Out

By that time my husband had moved us to Southern California to pursue a job offer. When the book actually came out in print in April of 1957, I was pregnant with the first of my two children. I always called Odd Girl Out my first child. (laughs). It was just a tremendous hit. I think it really launched the serious fascination with lesbian pulp paperbacks.
We all benefited from two things. No critic paid any attention to us. They didn’t care. We were writing trash as far as they were concerned. We never showed up in the New York Times or anything like that. We benefited there because if we had been paid attention to, that would have gotten the Feds on our case. Our books were distributed through the mail and the post office would have refused to send them. So we were offered benign neglect, which we very much resented at the time, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The other great thing was our books were not distributed in bookstores, they were distributed like magazines: in newsstands, drug stores, at the train station, the bus stop, in the airports. You could just get them anywhere.

They were so accessible universally. Coast to coast. North to south, you could pick them up anywhere. And I think without that they never would have been as successful as they were.

I’m curious about what the attraction was at the time. When you wrote the books, who was your intended audience in your head?

Well, I think nothing was so important for me first except finding an outlet. Because I had known from childhood that I wasn’t … how to say it… I wore the same little dresses, I wore the same little braids, the same little mary janes that all the other little girls wore, but I always felt like a spy. What am I doing? This isn’t me. I felt sort of guilty. I didn’t know what it was when I was a little kid. I grew up and I dated. Many aspects of my life were normal. But I had this fire burning in me about telling stories and if I could just get close enough to the real Ann I could give them some power and some appeal maybe beyond myself.
I certainly wasn't a very sophisticated girl, but I did have a college education, I knew that there were homosexuals in the world. I knew they were reviled. That made me very sad. I’d always been fascinated by it.

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