Taylor, Valerie (Velma Young) (pulp fiction writer)

 

(1913-1997) Also wrote as: Francine Davenport, Velma Tate

Taylor could be considered the most significant female contributor to the extraordinary era of pulp lesbian fiction, a subgenre that found mainstream marketability in the sensational age of American paperbacks in the 1950s. Taylor’s importance in a field that included contributions by Vin packer, Ann bannon and Patricia Highsmith, is a result of her various contributions to the “gay liberation” movement from the 1960s onward. While other writers remained nominally closeted or led quiet lives away from the public eye, Taylor was a groundbreaking lesbian activist and spokeswoman. Among her accomplishments was the establishment in 1974 of the first Lesbian Writers Conference at which she gave the first keynote speech.

Born Velma Young in Aurora, Illinois, she married in 1939 and gave birth to three sons. She threw her relatively conventional life to the winds as she neared middle age. She divorced her husband in 1953 and that same year she published her first novel, Hired Girl. By the time of her second topic, Velma’s change of lifestyle was well under way. Her first lesbian novel was published in 1957 by Crest topics, a division of Fawcett, the premier developer of lesbian literature, home to the trail-blazing works of Tereska torres, Vin Packer, and Ann Aldrich (the latter two names both pseudonyms of Marijane Meaker). Whisper Their Love (“Theirs was the kind of love they dared not show the world . . .”) was concerned in large part with a teenage girl’s sexual affair with a worldly woman twice her age; in the final three pages, the young heroine repents her sordid relationship and suddenly decides to marry a man and live happily ever after, the sort of last-minute switcheroo undoubtedly imposed by the developer (so they could not be accused of endorsing “perversion”).

Fawcett published Taylor’s next two topics, Girls in 3-B (1959) and in 1960 Stranger on Lesbos (“The searching novel of a lonely young wife faced with the temptation of unnatural love . . .”). In 1963 she switched to Midwood, a lower-rung paperback line that specialized in softcore erotica. At Midwood, Taylor published A World Without Men (1963), Unlike Others (1963), and Journey to Fulfillment (1964).

The era of lesbian pulp fiction was coming to a close, just as an era of lesbian liberation was beginning and Taylor, living openly in the gay section of Chicago in a relationship with a feminist attorney, moved on to other things. But Taylor’s novels would not be forgotten. For many readers those topics, despite their exploitation packaging and prurient appeal to men, were an important introduction to ideas and experiences otherwise unavailable to young women in postwar America.

Works

  • Girls in 3-B (1959);
  • Hired Girl (1953);
  • Journey to Fulfillment (1964);
  • Stranger on Lesbos (1960);
  • Unlike Others (1963);
  • Whisper Their Love (1957);
  • World Without Men, A (1963)
  • As Francine Davenport:
  • Secret of the Bayou (1967)

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