Bannon, Ann (Ann Weldy) (pulp fiction writer)

 

(1932-)

Known as the Queen of Lesbian Pulp, Ann Ban-non wrote paperbacks in the 1950s and 1960s about female homosexuals that were originally marketed as sensationalism and later reclaimed as an important literary record from a time when few other cultural manifestations of lesbianism were permitted in the American mainstream. Born Ann Weldy in Joliet, Illinois, she went to college, then married and had two children while still in her early twenties. The content of her first novel, Odd Girl Out (1957), she claimed, was based on other girls she had heard about at school. Her husband refused to let her publish it under her own name, and the Ann Bannon nom de plume was assumed. The marriage soon collapsed. Bannon returned to an academic life and continued writing novels. Fawcett published each of her subsequent five novels between 1959 and 1962.

In topics with titles like I Am a Woman (1959) and Women in the Shadows (1959), Bannon wrote of young lesbians coping with love, sex, and society’s disapproval and disgust. In The Marriage, she described the dramatic upheavals in the life of a sometime lesbian who weds a man and tries to live as a heterosexual. Bannon’s most famous character was Beebo Brinker, a butch teenager who abandons a repressive Midwest for the unrepressed Greenwich Village of beatniks and gay bars. Fawcett at first sold the topics as provocative trash with beautiful, feminine cover girls offering come-hither looks, but by the time of Beebo Brinker’s publication in 1962 the company had gone tasteful, abandoning the prurient covers and offering instead a moody oil painting.

Bannon abandoned writing as she pursued her career in academia. She would later become a dean at California State University at Sacramento. The topics went out of print but were well remembered by a generation of lesbians who looked back at Bannon’s corpus with both nostalgia and pride. Feminist and lesbian publishing houses, among them Cleis Press, later returned those legendary paperbacks to print and made Bannon and her characters cult figures for a new and less circumspect generation of readers.

Works

  • Beebo Brinker (1962);
  • I Am a Woman (1959);
  • Journey to a Woman (1960);
  • Marriage, The (1960);
  • Odd Girl Out (1957);
  • Women in the Shadows (1959)

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