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Episode 103 [PATREON EXCLUSIVE] -- Lesbian Pulp (Patreon)

Published:
2025-10-30 05:52:41
Edited:
2025-10-30 05:53:04
Imported:
2026-09

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Content

In this Patreon-exclusive, Moira talks Adrian through the history (and the recent revival) of the Lesbian pulp genre. From classics like Women's Prison via The Price of Salt to Drive Away Dolls and Honey Don't, your intrepid hosts go on a far ranging (and highly cancellable) journey through lesbian history. Ultimately, your hosts suggest, the return of the Lesbian Pulp genre is about way more than nostalgia, and has everything to do with anti-feminist backlash and gender politics in the 2020s.

Comments

Laura

Re the amazing “I Prefer Girls” cover, there was a quite delightful fandom trend recently to redraw it with everyone’s preferred lesbian characters

jacq

ibwtr patreon is the gift that keeps on giving. esp for us lit crit dykes!

Heidi Vee

Are you familiar with @nicoleolive on instagram? She has an amazing series of skits spoofing the tropes of lesbian period dramas, coming-of-age movies, etc.

Kira Hamilton

I have a lesbian pulp novel collage side table in my apartment I bought at a local craft fair! I’ve got a pic if there’s a way to share that with the other patrons

Kira Hamilton

It currently has a glue gun, small bong, and cat treats on it because I’m nothing if not a lesbian stereotype lol

Betti Steam

Thank you I've been scrolling through them on tumblr

William Knight

Literally just watched Portrait of a Lady On Fire with my spouse. Its relationship to history and the idea of a period drama is…interesting. It feels fairly abstracted compared to like, Wolf Hall. Like it is out of time once the sailor disappears and until the male servant/courier appears at the end.

William Knight

(I loved it TBH but I love movies about early modern woman artists who sit around smoking pipes - Miss Hokusai is also great though she is a bit more of a fuckup. I dunno, I find these protagonists so easy to identify with and root for).

William Knight

RE Stan culture so much of the dynamic seems to come from fear of fan backlash against ‘problematic’ pairings.

Melanie Schlosser

But...BUT...you didn't talk about Love Lies Bleeding! 😭

Ruth Robertson

Wait. Was i not paying attention and they did a Deadloch episode?? If so, which is it?

Sarah B

You don’t have to be my mommy or my therapist but I’m so glad you’re my teacher!

Moira Donegan

I know!!! 😭 which is tragic because that movie is NUTS

Geneva Samuelson

Would love to know what you guys thought about Bottoms

Moira Donegan

We did it for Adrian’s (excellent) other podcast, The Feminist Present!

Ruth Robertson

Thank you so much! Im definitely going to check it out and am currently dying for Deadloch season 2!!

The Smutty Guy

If ever there was a good time for a Filmsuck-In Bed crossover episode this would be it. The hosts are film profs/critics who love the Tricia Cooke films. I'd love to be a fly on the wall while the four of them hash it all out.

pixlaw

I didn't hear any shout-outs to Monica Nolan who for a while had a lesbian pulp web site running (altho it looks as though she hasn't updated it since the pandemic). She published a series of neo-pulp parodies in the 2010s with titles like "Bobby Blanchard: Lesbian Gym Teacher" which are actually kind of amusing riffs on the original lesbian pulp, with fabulous covers.

Alice Kron

The episode I've been waiting for all along 🤩 Also I just finished "Perfume and Pain" so this feels especially relevant.

Geoffrey Murry

An interesting little overlap between this episode and your horror double header is the extent to which horror movies feel all too comfortable portraying lesbian relationships or sexual encounters between two women while almost completely avoiding gay male relationships or all-male sexual encounters. The former show up all the time and the latter is nary to be found. Of course, this tracks entirely with the penchant for seeing women in distress or worse in horror movies as the market for them consists in large measure of horny straight guys (this listener, a huge horror buff, notwithstanding).

Cool Bag

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is 2 hrs 1 min long tho

James Hultgren

I had to skip through cause I thought I somehow missed it?!? Such a wild movie.

D

Thesis: the Jennifer Lopez/Constance Wu movie _Hustlers_ is a classic lesbian pulp.

Jacqueline

I loved this episode! I watched Honey Don’t when it came out and couldn’t figure out what about it I disliked, so this gave me some very helpful context! ❤️❤️❤️

Maxwell

Please tell me you’re including it in the piece you said you were working at the beginning of the ep!

CassieWasRight

Do we think I Care a Lot fits this genre?

J Phoebus

Nothing like rolling around in my red rural state blasting my speakers with talk about lesbianism for all to hear

Jenny Egg

I think they were mixing it up with the Handmaiden, which is ~3 hours!

Jenny Egg

Fun recommended reading if folks are interested is a new book from the Feminist Press called “the new lesbian pulp” - it’s a collected edition of queer writers reviving and updating the genre

kathleen

Queer romance writer Cat Sebastian has two great novels set in late 1950s NYC that tangentially address the Only Miserable Endings For Gays censorship workaround. It's a nice thread to follow while the heroes pursue their HEAs. You Should Be So Lucky and We Could Be So Good are great escapist reads.

Rhysograph

I don’t know if it counts as Lesbian Pulp, but one of my faves is the French horror/thriller Knife+Heart. It’s about a lesbian director of gay male pornos (with a complicated relationship with her editor/ex) who investigates the murders of gay men around Paris when one of her actors is killed. It’s very stylish and gruesome. Love Lies Bleeding kinda reminded me of it, especially with its surrealism at the end.

Beck Buechel

Moira thank you for saying lesbians need to be meaner I completely agree

Jessica

This is not pulp, but it is a story centering a loveable but dislikeable lesbian character, but I really enjoyed Pluribus. It's created by a man, which is odd to me, and interviewers love bringing up that when the show was an unwritten idea the main character was a man. On one hand, I feel repulsed by the idea that lesbian lead characters have to start as straight men in order for a story/world to be populated around them as a protagonist, on the other I really love the outcome and the fact that prestige TV money and artistry are telling this story with a lesbian lead. MORE pulpy, and featuring Kate Box (and others) from Deadloch was the Australian TV show Wentworth, which did and still does have a massive lesbian following. The politics of that show are all over the place (they definitely deploy the lesbian predator trope, multiple times, but they also have so many lesbian characters), but it is actually good, in my opinion. Mostly.

testosteronefemme

two thoughts: 1. we need to discuss the lesbian fujo more often. theres an episode of cracked ivory that discussed it and i do think their analysis is right - having both proximity to gayness but distance from womanhood can be a draw i think for lesbiangender reasons but the tendency of lesbians to write abt gay men, and this being such a long tradition is endlessly fascinating to me. 2. re: the flat cardboard cutout Gay Characters of the late 2010s/early 2020s - this is why those in my cohort (tumblr users between like probably 25 and 35) have often had real nostalgia for the golden age of queerbait. mostly because between 26 episode seasons and multiple seasons (eg supernatural) you get a complex & layered reading in the subtext (on top of the infinite sandbox qualities of the show) that just straight up doesn't exist in the queerslop you're referencing. instead, the literal only character trait they have is that theyre queer, and you only have 5 episodes and that's supposed to be compelling representation. just wanted to affirm adrian's POV & say that many of us on the younger end ALSO hate that shit!

Enname

I run a rare book collection and we have a lot of pulps, including lesbian pulp. I can tell you it is extraordinarily competitive to get lesbian pulp written by women especially some of the lesser known authors.

生きてるだけで、りん

late to the party, but can't help replying: the well is not a lesbian book! of course it's been read that way for a hundred years, but revisited from modern perspective—and in context of other writings, e.g. ogilvy, and an author who went by john—it is an obvious narrative of trans masculinity. further, its categorisation as lesbian has been cemented by a long line of academics engaging in trans erasure to assuage their own discomfort and leads directly to modern terf-ism. got a little essay here expounding: https://airen-no-jikken.icu/projects/files/pdf/no-modernism-without-lesbians-allowed.pdf