Previously in this series.
You are living intimately with another young girl in a French military barracks.
You become curiously fascinated with your fiancé’s aunt.
You keep a woman’s portrait in a cigarette box on your dressing table and brush away all inquiries about her identity.
You meet a woman with her hair tumbled like a young boy’s.
You seduce a young girl in your sorority, and when you are caught, you try to have her institutionalized.
Sex with your boyfriend is the most miserable and disgusting thing that’s ever happened to you.
You open the front door to greet a total stranger and inform her you are in love with her.
You are an artist, and you draw your models nude or not at all.
The faint odour of pomade lingers wherever you go.
You are ageless.
Your boyfriend is glad to learn you’re not running around with other fellows.
You go to the nurse because you think you might be a lesbian. You seduce her, just to make sure.
You feel sorry for men by virtue of them just being men. They can never know what you know.
You want to move in with a woman you have known less than a week.
When you say the word “Lesbian” in your head, you capitalize it.
You make your girlfriend go on a date with a boy, because you couldn’t live with yourself if she didn’t at least try to hide who she is.
Your appetite is gone.
You dress very carefully.
You live with a couple, a husband and wife, who take turns each night to knock on your door. You hate them both.
A man calls you hysterical.
A man calls you stark, raving mad.
A woman calls you.
You become suddenly aware that someone’s tongue is in your ear.
You describe lesbian sex as an all-encompassing ecstatic storm.
All of your Scotch bottles are half empty.
Your ex may or may not be insane.
You may or may not be insane.
Your girlfriend and her ex confront each other in a blaze of gunfire and scandal. Four weeks later, you move to Florida.
Tags: books, carolyn yates, how to tell what novel you’re in, humor, lgbt
Wonderful. I bought a copy of the complete B Brinker Chronicles at a bookstore recently for only $5 and this is making me want to fake illness and go home and read it.
“You feel sorry for men by virtue of them just being men. They can never know what you know.”
All Toasties are in lesbian pulp fiction. Including me.
Was going to say let us rename this how to tell you are a Toast fan.
Love all of you so much!!
Dang. Being a pulp fiction lesbian sounds…pretty rad.
Dang. Being a pulp fiction lesbian sounds…pretty rad.
Some of these are oddly applicable to my life right now. I’m going to call that a good thing and just go with it.
The garbanzo beans on that Demon Dyke are defying several laws of physics and at least one ethics code. Mmmm….
I dunno who the woman in orange on the front of “I Prefer Girls” is, but I hope she and Audrey Horne are very happy together.
Also these are great. Autostraddle’s been talking about lesbian pulp fiction lately too. Maybe I should check some out.
So, this is all of us, right? I haven't checked so many boxes on a How to Tell article since the Barbara Pym one that doesn't actually exist.
A Barbara Pym one would be great!
I have read _all of those_, and, straight-up brag, I have a copy of a pulp lesbian novel where NOBODY IS DEAD OR OTHERWISE PUNISHED HORRIBLY at the end.
It makes up for that by being extremely boring, but you know. I always forget whether it’s Anybody’s Girl or 69 Barrow St. Utterly unmemorable other than the lack of sexpunishmentitis.
You Walk in the Shadows of a Twilight World.
You are able to whip out your Zippo lighter and gallantly light your femme’s cigarette without a hitch, even though both of you are so drunk you’re seeing triple.
The last one also appears to be the Travelling Wilburys ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’
This is much funnier when I realize it’s about lesbian pulp fiction and not lesbian Pulp Fiction.