lesbian pulp and the lavender universe: November 2012

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Queer Pulp in the Barracks

Available at LavenderPulp.com

Women's Barracks, a quasi-autobiographical work by Tereska Torres was the first genuine paperback best-seller that proved that there was a market for lesbian fiction during the 1950s selling over four million copies! Women's Barracks is attributed as the beginning of lesbian pulp fiction.

Based on her WW II experiences with the Free French Forces, this is the story of "what happens when scores of young girls live intimately together in a military barracks". 

In 1952 the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials cited the book as causing moral degeneracy. However, the following year there was a successful legal battle in which a Minnesota Court decided the book did NOT have a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt. 

In Women's Barracks, a teenager and her family must flee Paris for Spain during WWII. Later she joins the French Free Forces to avenge her father and save her country from the Nazis. This thoughtfully written novel tells the story of life in the women's barracks and the various love stories between the women who live there. 


This forerunner of the Golden Era of Lesbian Pulp is a must-have for any book collector. This rare collectible paperback novel is available in limited quantities at LavenderPulp. These are ORIGINAL vintage queer 1950s and 1960s paperbacks (NOT reproductions) at www.LavenderPulp.com

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