The 1950's and '60s was a golden age of mass-marketed, cheap and accessible gay and lesbian pulp fiction. Prurient, heart-felt, stereotypical and subversive, these low culture productions played an important part in queer identity formation in the Cold War Era. As one reader recalls of a lesbian pulp, "it opened the door to my soul and told me who I was."
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The Cruising Class
Pulps like this served to both titillate readers and to suggest romantic possibilities for gay men in semi-private places like parks. This association…
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Atomic Anxiety
Cold War anxieties created a conservative milieu after WWII that sought to contain communism gobally and women locally. A heteronormative...
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"Rally to Protest Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces"
A San Francisco rally in 1966
"The Draft Dodges Homosexuals-Homosexuals Don't Dodge the Draft"
"How the Reds Blackmail Homosexuals into Spying for Them!"
This 1961 article describes the defection to the USSR of two NSA analysts. Though their defection was politically motivated, news accounts focused on…